Meticulously researched and beautifully written,Fit to Be Citizens?demonstrates how both science and public health shaped the meaning of race in the early twentieth century. Through a careful ...examination of the experiences of Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, Natalia Molina illustrates the many ways local health officials used complexly constructed concerns about public health to demean, diminish, discipline, and ultimately define racial groups. She shows how the racialization of Mexican Americans was not simply a matter of legal exclusion or labor exploitation, but rather that scientific discourses and public health practices played a key role in assigning negative racial characteristics to the group. The book skillfully moves beyond the binary oppositions that usually structure works in ethnic studies by deploying comparative and relational approaches that reveal the racialization of Mexican Americans as intimately associated with the relative historical and social positions of Asian Americans, African Americans, and whites. Its rich archival grounding provides a valuable history of public health in Los Angeles, living conditions among Mexican immigrants, and the ways in which regional racial categories influence national laws and practices. Molina's compelling study advances our understanding of the complexity of racial politics, attesting that racism is not static and that different groups can occupy different places in the racial order at different times.
Pesticides, a short-term aid for farmers, can often be harmful, undermining the long-term health of agriculture, ecosystems, and people. The United States and other industrialized countries import ...food from Costa Rica and other regions. To safeguard the public health, importers now regulate the level and types of pesticides used in the exporters' food production, which creates "regulatory risk" for the export farmers. Although farmers respond to export regulations by trying to avoid illegal pesticide residues, the food produced for their domestic market lacks similar regulation, creating a double standard of pesticide use.Food Systems in an Unequal Worldexamines the agrochemical-dependent agriculture of Costa Rica and how its uneven regulation in export versus domestic markets affects Costa Rican vegetable farmers. Examining pesticide-dependent vegetable production within two food systems, the author shows that pesticide use is shaped by three main forces: agrarian capitalism, the governance of food systems throughout the commodity chain, and ecological dynamics driving local food production. Those processes produce unequal outcomes that disadvantage less powerful producers who have more limited choices than larger farmers, who usually have access to better growing environments and thereby can reduce pesticide use and production costs.
Despite the rise of alternative food networks, Galt says, persistent problems remain in the conventional food system, including widespread and intensive pesticide use. Facing domestic price squeezes, vegetable farmers in Costa Rica are more likely to supply the national market with produce containing residues of highly toxic pesticides, while using less toxic pesticides on exported vegetables. In seeking solutions, Galt argues for improved governance and research into alternative pest control but emphasizes the process must be rooted in farmers' economic well-being.
As the United States rushed toward industrial and technological modernization in the late nineteenth century, people worried that the workplace had become too competitive, the economy too turbulent, ...domestic chores too taxing, while new machines had created a fast-paced environment that sickened the nation. Physicians testified that, without a doubt, modern civilization was causing a host of ills-everything from irritability to insomnia, lethargy to weight loss, anxiety to lack of ambition, and indigestion to impotence. They called this conditionneurasthenia.
Neurasthenic Nationinvestigates how the concept of neurasthenia helped doctors and patients, men and women, and advertisers and consumers negotiate changes commonly associated with "modernity." Combining a survey of medical and popular literature on neurasthenia with original research into rare archives of personal letters, patient records, and corporate files, David Schuster charts the emergence of a "neurasthenic nation"-a place where people saw their personal health as inextricably tied to the pitfalls and possibilities of a changing world.
As the coronavirus ravages the globe, its aftermaths have brought gender inequalities to the forefront of many conversations. Countries in the Middle East and North Africa have been slow to prepare ...for, adapt to, and mitigate the COVID-19 health crisis and its impacts on governance, economics, security, and rights. Women’s physical well-being, social safety nets, and economic participation have been disproportionately affected, and with widespread shutdowns and capricious social welfare programs, women are exiting the workplace and the classroom, carrying the caregiving burden.With feminist foregrounding, Rita Stephan's collection COVID and Gender in the Middle East gathers an impressive group of local scholars, activists, and policy experts. The book examines a range of national and localized responses to gender-specific issues around COVID’s health impact and the economic fallout and resulting social vulnerabilities, including the magnified marginalization of Syrian refugees; the inequitable treatment of migrant workers in Bahrain; and the inadequate implementation of gender-based violence legislation in Morocco. An essential global resource, this book is the first to provide empirical evidence of COVID’s gendered effects.
As early as Aristotle's Problem XXX, intellectual superiority has been linked to melancholy. The association between sickness and genius continued to be a topic for discussion in the work of early ...modern writers, most recognizably in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. But it was not until the eighteenth century that the phenomenon known as the "suffering scholar" reached its apotheosis, a phenomenon illustrated by the popularity of works such as Samuel-Auguste Tissot's De la santé des gens de lettres, first published in 1768. Though hardly limited to French-speaking Europe, the link between mental endeavor and physical disorder was embraced with particular vigor there, as was the tendency to imbue intellectuals with an aura of otherness and detachment from the world. Intellectuals and artists were portrayed as peculiarly susceptible to altered states of health as well as psyche—the combination of mental intensity and somatic frailty proved both the privileges and the perils of knowledge-seeking and creative endeavor.In Suffering Scholars, Anne C. Vila focuses on the medical and literary dimensions of the cult of celebrity that developed around great intellectuals during the French Enlightenment. Beginning with Tissot's work, which launched a subgenre of health advice aimed specifically at scholars, she demonstrates how writers like Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mme de Staël, responded to the "suffering scholar" syndrome and helped to shape it. She traces the ways in which this syndrome influenced the cultural perceptions of iconic personae such as the philosophe, the solitary genius, and the learned lady. By showing how crucial the so-called suffering scholar was to debates about the mind-body relation as well as to sex and sensibility, Vila sheds light on the consequences book-learning was thought to have on both the individual body and the body politic, not only in the eighteenth century but also into the decades following the Revolution.
Kaja Finkler explores the relationship between patterns of social interaction, cultural expectations, and gender ideologies. InWomen in Pain, she examines the nature of sickness and its interaction ...with issues about gender and gender relations from both a historical and contemporary perspective.
Most people of European background are not aware that they see the world through the lens of the Western tradition, but for Indigenous people, it can seem like a foreign language.
Indigenous ways of ...thinking and working are grounded in many thousands of years of oral tradition, and continue among Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people today. Lorraine Muller shows that understanding traditional holistic approaches to social and emotional wellbeing is essential for practitioners working with Indigenous clients across the human services.
She explores core principles of traditional Indigenous knowledge in Australia, including relatedness, Country, circular learning, stories, and spirituality. She then shows how these principles represent a theory for Indigenous practice.
A Theory for Indigenous Australian Health and Human Service Work offers a deep insight into Indigenous Australian ways of working with people, in the context of a decolonisation framework. It is an invaluable resource for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous practitioners and researchers in health, social work, community work, education and related fields.
Migration and Health Castaneda, Heide
2023, 20220727, 2019, 2022-07-27, Volume:
1
eBook
Migration and Health: Critical Perspectives offers a radical rethinking of the field by unsettling conventional ideas of mobility and borders to highlight the ways in which they produce health ...inequalities. Covering a wide range of topics, the text provides insight through a critical lens and proposes areas for intervention along with future research needs to address the health inequities that affect migrants. It illustrates how a critical perspective can deepen our understanding of the relationship between migration and health, which remains a defining global issue of our century.
The text employs a critical approach to examine the structural conditions of inequality and larger historical and political processes, recognizing that exclusionary bordering practices increasingly occur away from physical points of entry. It posits the concept of migration as complex, tangled, and multi-directional and underscores how migrant vulnerability can shape the lives of people in broader communities. Furthermore, it acknowledges diverse and intersectional standpoints, as well as shifting spatial and temporal influences. Chapters include coverage of health in transit; health care access and utilization; clinical encounters; communicable disease; labor and occupational health; gender and sexuality; immigration enforcement, detention, deportation; and the effects of forced displacement on refugee and asylum seeker health.
The text is useful for students and scholars of migration or health disparities seeking to understand how the two issues can be approached in a more holistic and critical way. It is further aimed at practitioners and policymakers who are interested in gaining familiarity with the structural conditions of inequality along with the larger historical and political processes that influence contemporary migration patterns.
Winner of the 2021 BPS Book Award: Academic Text category, this groundbreaking book employs a transdisciplinary and poststructuralist methodology to develop the concept of ‘postfeminist healthism,’ a ...twenty-first-century understanding of women’s physical and mental health formed at the intersections of postfeminist sensibilities, neoliberal constructs of citizenship and the notion of health as an individual responsibility managed through consumption. Postfeminist healthism is used in this book to explore seven topics where postfeminist sensibility has the most impact on women’s health: self-help, weight, surgical technologies, sex, pregnancy, responsibilities for others’ health and pro-anorexia communities. The book explores the ways in which the desire to be normal and live a good life is tied to expectations of ‘normal-perfection’ circulated across interpersonal interactions, media representations and expert discourses. It diagnoses postfeminist healthism as unhealthy for both those women who participate in it and those whom it excludes and considers how more positive directions may emerge. By exploring the under-researched intersection of postfeminism and health studies, this book will be invaluable to researchers and students in psychology, gender and women’s studies, health research, media studies and sociology.
Concepts in Male HealthConcepts in Male Health: Perspectives Across the Lifespan offers a practical approach to understanding the health of males of all races, ethnicities, socioeconomic status, ...cultures, ages, and orientations. Each chapter of this book comprehensively reviews an important dimension of male health and examines the contributing historical, epidemiological,??psychosocial, cultural-ethical, legal, political, and economic influences. The diverse range of topics allows for complete coverage ranging from body structures??and sexuality to aggression and occupational health. ??The book contains the most recent research and evidence-based science and addresses issues in male health throughout the lifespan in an easy-to-understand format. ??Learning objectives are presented in an accessible format and reflect real life situations. Review questions provided at the end of each chapter address health-specific content included in the chapter and span both the scope and the breadth of the information. This book is ideal for programs in health education, public health, community health nursing, gender studies, and other health sciences.
