Connective Tissue
Factory Accidents and Reconstructive Plastic Surgery in South India
An ethnography of factory accidents and their attendant reconstructive plastic surgeries in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, Connective Tissue explores notions of risk, work and labor practices, and the way meaning is made from experiences of trauma, care, and recovery. The book charts a chronology of the accident and its future impacts.
The Negotiation of Urgency
Economies of Attention in an Italian Emergency Room
The Negotiation of Urgency ethnographically explores the everyday life of an Italian ER, where aging, economic precarity, draconian migration policies, hospital overcrowding, life and death, intersect daily. The analysis of the different, shifting ways in which triage operates and attention circulates in the ER illuminates the practical effects of the changing nature of welfare state in Italy, as elsewhere.
The Politics of Potential
Global Health and Gendered Futures in South Africa
In The Politics of Potential, physician-anthropologist Michelle Pentecost investigates The First 1000 Days, an early life intervention project that seeks to end child malnutrition in South Africa, the ways in which this program has been adopted, and how it impacts child-bearing women in South Africa in powerfully gendered and racialized ways.