How and why the idea of wellness holds such rhetorical—and harmful—power.In Why Wellness Sells, Colleen Derkatch examines why the concept of wellness holds such rhetorical power in contemporary ...culture. Public interest in wellness is driven by two opposing philosophies of health that cycle into and amplify each other: restoration, where people use natural health products to restore themselves to prior states of wellness; and enhancement, where people strive for maximum wellness by optimizing their body's systems and functions. Why Wellness Sells tracks the tension between these two ideas of wellness across a variety of sources, including interviews, popular and social media, advertising, and online activism. Derkatch examines how wellness manifests across multiple domains, where being well means different things, ranging from a state of pre-illness to an empowered act of good consumer-citizenship, from physical or moral purification to sustenance and care, and from harm reduction to optimization. Along the way, Derkatch demonstrates that the idea of wellness may promise access to the good life, but it serves primarily as a strategy for coping with a devastating and overwhelming present.Drawing on scholarship in the rhetoric of health and medicine, the health and medical humanities, and related fields, Derkatch offers a nuanced account of how language, belief, behavior, experience, and persuasion collide to produce and promote wellness, one of the most compelling—and harmful—concepts that govern contemporary Western life. She explains that wellness has become so pervasive in the United States and Canada because it is an ever-moving, and thus unachievable, goal. The concept of wellness entrenches an individualist model of health as a personal responsibility, when collectivist approaches would more readily serve the health and well-being of whole populations.
Growing political radicalization and polarization in American government has created a scarcity of civilian leadership, knowledge, expertise, and power. Political rivals and adversaries, too busy ...combating each other, have abandoned the helm of the ship of state, setting reason, compromise, intellectual curiosity, and effective governing adrift. A faction of exceptionally capable and influential guardians—America’s military elites—increasingly fill roles in civil society and government intended for competent, democratically elected or political appointed civilian leadership accountable to the American electorate.
Todd Schmidt demonstrates that US military elites play an exceptionally powerful role due to their extraordinary powerful role due to their extraordinary influence over policy process, outcome, and implementation. Through personal interviews with high-ranking national security experts across six presidential administrations, Schmidt concludes that nuanced relationships between military elites, the president, and Congress; decision-making in national security and foreign policy; and the balance of power in civil-military relations suggest a potential trend of praetorian behavior among military elites. A silent coup of the guardians has occurred, and professionals and citizens need to ask what should be done rebalance US civil-military relations.
A historical look at how activists influenced the adoption of more positive, inclusive, and sociopolitical views of disability.Disability activism has fundamentally changed American society for the ...better—and along with it, the views and practices of many clinical professionals. After 1945, disability self-advocates and family advocates pushed for the inclusion of more positive, inclusive, and sociopolitical perspectives on disability in clinical research, training, and practice. In Disability Dialogues, Andrew J. Hogan highlights the contributions of disabled people—along with their family members and other allies—in changing clinical understandings and approaches to disability.Hogan examines the evolving medical, social, and political engagement of three postwar professions—clinical psychology, pediatrics, and genetic counseling—with disability and disability-related advocacy. Professionals in these fields historically resisted adopting a more inclusive and accepting perspective on people with disabilities primarily due to concerns about professional role, identity, and prestige. In response to the work of disability activists, however, these attitudes gradually began to change. Disability Dialogues provides an important contribution to historical, sociological, and bioethical accounts of disability and clinical professionalization. Moving beyond advocacy alone, Hogan makes the case for why present-day clinical professional fields need to better recruit and support disabled practitioners. Disabled clinicians are uniquely positioned to combine biomedical expertise with their lived experiences of disability and encourage greater tolerance for disabilities among their colleagues, students, and institutions.
The formation of new states was an essential feature of US expansion throughout the long nineteenth century, and debates over statehood and states' rights were waged not only in legislative ...assemblies but also in newspapers, maps, land surveys, and other forms of print and visual culture. Assessing these texts and archives, Kathryn Walkiewicz theorizes the logics of federalism and states' rights in the production of US empire, revealing how they were used to imagine states into existence while clashing with relational forms of territoriality asserted by Indigenous and Black people. Walkiewicz centers her analysis on statehood movements to create the places now called Georgia, Florida, Kansas, Cuba, and Oklahoma. In each case she shows that Indigenous dispossession and anti-Blackness scaffolded the settler-colonial project of establishing states' rights. But dissent and contestation by Indigenous and Black people imagined alternative paths, even as their exclusion and removal reshaped and renamed territory. By recovering this tension, Walkiewicz argues we more fully understand the role of state-centered discourse as an expression of settler colonialism. We also come to see the possibilities for a territorial ethic that insists on thinking beyond the boundaries of the state.
This history reveals how radical threats to the United
States empire became seditious threats to national security and
exposes the antiradical and colonial origins of anti-Asian
racism. Menace to ...Empire transforms familiar
themes in American history. This profoundly ambitious history of
race and empire traces both the colonial violence and the
anticolonial rage that the United States spread across the Pacific
between the Philippine-American War and World War II. Moon-Ho Jung
argues that the US national security state as we know it was born
out of attempts to repress and silence anticolonial subjects, from
the Philippines and Hawaiʻi to California and beyond. Jung examines
how various revolutionary movements spanning the Pacific confronted
the US empire. In response, the US state closely monitored and
brutally suppressed those movements, exaggerating fears of
pan-Asian solidarities and sowing anti-Asian racism. Radicalized by
their opposition to the US empire and racialized as threats to US
security, peoples in and from Asia pursued a revolutionary politics
that engendered and haunted the national security state-the heart
and soul of the US empire ever since.
This social and cultural history of Civil War medicine and science sheds important light on the question of why and how anti-Black racism survived the destruction of slavery. During the war, white ...Northerners promoted ideas about Black inferiority under the guise of medical and scientific authority. In particular, the Sanitary Commission and Army medical personnel conducted wartime research aimed at proving Black medical and biological inferiority. They not only subjected Black soldiers and refugees from slavery to substandard health care but also scrutinized them as objects of study. This mistreatment of Black soldiers and civilians extended after life to include dissection, dismemberment, and disposal of the Black war dead in unmarked or mass graves and medical waste pits. Simultaneously, white medical and scientific investigators enhanced their professional standing by establishing their authority on the science of racial difference and hierarchy. Drawing on archives of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, recollections of Civil War soldiers and medical workers, and testimonies from Black Americans, Leslie A. Schwalm exposes the racist ideas and practices that shaped wartime medicine and science. Painstakingly researched and accessibly written, this book helps readers understand the persistence of anti-Black racism and health disparities during and after the war.
The discovery of radium by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898
eventually led to a craze for radium products in the 1920s until
their widespread use proved lethal for consumers, patients, and
medical ...practitioners alike. Radium infiltrated American culture,
Maria Rentetzi reveals, not only because of its potential to treat
cancer but because it was transformed from a scientific object into
a familiar, desirable commodity. She explores how Standard Chemical
Company in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania-the first successful commercial
producer of radium in the United States-aggressively promoted the
benefits of radium therapy and its curative properties as part of a
lucrative business strategy. Over-the-counter products, from
fertilizers to paints and cosmetics to tonics and suppositories,
inspired the same level of trust in consumers as a revolutionary
pharmaceutical. The radium industry in the United States marketed
commodities like Liquid Sunshine and Elixir of Youth at a time when
using this new chemical element in the laboratory, in the hospital,
in private clinics, and in commercial settings remained largely
free of regulation. Rentetzi shows us how marketing campaigns
targeted individually to men and women affected not only how they
consumed these products of science but also how that science was
understood and how it contributed to the formation of ideas about
gender. Seduced by Radium ultimately reveals how
innovative advertising techniques and seductive, state-of-the-art
packaging made radium a routine part of American life, shaping
scientific knowledge about it and the identities of those who
consumed it.
Shaping the New World Nellis, Eric
Shaping the New World,
2013, 20130715, 2013, 2013-07-15, Letnik:
3, 3.
eBook
Between 1500 and the middle of the nineteenth century, some 12.5 million slaves were sent as bonded labour from Africa to the European settlements in the Americas. Shaping the New World introduces ...students to the origins, growth, and consolidation of African slavery in the Americas and race-based slavery's impact on the economic, social, and cultural development of the New World. While the book explores the idea of the African slave as a tool in the formation of new American societies, it also acknowledges the culture, humanity, and importance of the slave as a person and highlights the role of women in slave societies. Serving as the third book in the UTP/CHA International Themes and Issues Series, Shaping the New World introduces readers to the topic of African slavery in the New World from a comparative perspective, specifically focusing on the English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch slave systems.
First-Generation Faculty of Color: Reflections on Research, Teaching, and Service is the first book to examine the experiences of racially minoritized faculty who were also the first in their ...families to graduate college in the United States. From contingent to tenured faculty who teach at community colleges, comprehensive, and research institutions, the book is a collection of critical narratives that collectively show the diversity of faculty of color, attentive to and beyond race. The book is organized into three major parts comprised of chapters in which faculty of color depict how first-generation college student identities continue to inform how minoritized people navigate academe well into their professional careers, and encourage them to reconceptualize research, teaching, and service responsibilities to better consider the families and communities that shaped their lives well before college.
The Picky Eagle explains why the United States stopped annexing territory by focusing on annexation's domestic consequences, both political and normative. It describes how the U.S. rejection of ...further annexations, despite its rising power, set the stage for twentieth-century efforts to outlaw conquest. In contrast to conventional accounts of a nineteenth-century shift from territorial expansion to commercial expansion, Richard W. Maass argues that U.S. ambitions were selective from the start. By presenting twenty-three case studies, Maass examines the decision-making of U.S. leaders facing opportunities to pursue annexation between 1775 and 1898. U.S. presidents, secretaries, and congressmen consistently worried about how absorbing new territories would affect their domestic political influence and their goals for their country.These leaders were particularly sensitive to annexation's domestic costs where xenophobia interacted with their commitment to democracy: rather than grant political representation to a large alien population or subject it to a long-term imperial regime, they regularly avoided both of these perceived bad options by rejecting annexation. As a result, U.S. leaders often declined even profitable opportunities for territorial expansion, and they renounced the practice entirely once no desirable targets remained. In addition to offering an updated history of the foundations of U.S. territorial expansion, The Picky Eagle adds important nuance to previous theories of great-power expansion, with implications for our understanding of U.S. foreign policy and international relations.
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