Showing 1-27 of 27 items.

Connective Tissue

Factory Accidents and Reconstructive Plastic Surgery in South India

Rutgers University Press

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.

More info

The Negotiation of Urgency

Economies of Attention in an Italian Emergency Room

Rutgers University Press

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.

More info

The Politics of Potential

Global Health and Gendered Futures in South Africa

Rutgers University Press

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.

More info

The Best Place

Addiction, Intervention, and Living and Dying Young in Vancouver

Rutgers University Press

The Best Place examines how overlapping housing, mental-health-and-addictions, and overdose crises, alongside their accompanying public health interventions, and the frenetic pace of urban renewal have shaped forms of life and death among young people who use drugs in the city of Vancouver, Canada.

More info

Forgotten Bodies

Imperialism, Chuukese Migration, and Stratified Reproduction in Guam

Rutgers University Press

Women from Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia move to Guam, U.S. for several reasons, including access to better healthcare. Yet, they suffer disproportionately poor reproductive health outcomes in Guam. Forgotten Bodies illuminates how benign neglect, imperial citizenship, transnational migration, and gender inequities intersect, cohere, and compound to stratify Chuukese women’s reproductive health.
 

More info

Calling Family

Digital Technologies and the Making of Transnational Care Collectives

Rutgers University Press

How do digital technologies shape how people care for each other and, through that, who they are? Calling Family explores how digital devices shape elder care at a distance and how it should be done in order to be considered good. Through Tanja Ahlin's ethnographic fieldwork among families of migrating nurses from Kerala, India, this book aspires to uncover the subtle workings of digital technologies beyond seeing them as tools of communication.

More info

Making Uncertainty

Tuberculosis, Substance Use, and Pathways to Health in South Africa

Rutgers University Press

Making Uncertainty: Tuberculosis, Substance Use, and Pathways to Health explores what happens when tuberculosis and substance use intersect in healthcare facilities in Cape Town, South Africa. Through a close look at life and care, this fine-grained hospital ethnography provides new perspectives on how sickness and health are made.

More info

Viral Frictions

Global Health and the Persistence of HIV Stigma in Kenya

Rutgers University Press

Viral Frictions explores how and why HIV-related stigma persists in the age of treatment. Based on a decade of fieldwork in a highway trading center in Kenya, Pfeiffer offers compelling stories of stigma as a lens for understanding broader social processes, the complexities of globalization and health, intersectionality, and their profound impact on the everyday social lives and relationships of people living through the ongoing HIV epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa.

More info

The Cancer Within

Reproduction, Cultural Transformation, and Health Care in Romania

Rutgers University Press

The Cancer Within examines cervical cancer in Romania as a point of entry into an anthropological reflection on contemporary health care. Fashioned by patriarchal relations, lived religion, and the historical trauma of pronatalism, Romanian women’s responses to reproductive medicine and cervical cancer prevention are complicated by neoliberal reforms to medical care.

More info

Near Human

Border Zones of Species, Life, and Belonging

Rutgers University Press

Near Human is an ethnography of research piglets in biomedical experiments and premature human infants in clinical care in Denmark. Drawing on fieldwork carried out on farms, in animal-based science labs, and in hospitals, Mette N. Svendsen redirects the question of "what it means" to be human to "what it takes" to be human and to forge a nation.

More info

Becoming Gods

Medical Training in Mexican Hospitals

Rutgers University Press

Becoming Gods is a vivid ethnography of how a cohort of doctors-in-training in the Mexican city of Puebla learn to become doctors. It illustrates the messy, complex, and nuanced nature of medical training, where trainees not only have to acquire a monumental number of skills but do so against a backdrop of strict hospital hierarchy and a crumbling national medical system that deeply shape who they are.

More info

At Ansha's

Life in the Spirit Mosque of a Healer in Mozambique

Rutgers University Press

At Ansha's takes the reader inside the spirit mosque of a female healer in Nampula, northern Mozambique. It is here that Ansha, a Makonde spirit healer, cures the resisting ailments of her patients, discloses pieces of her story of affliction and healing, and engages the borders of her world.
 

More info

Dying to Count

Post-Abortion Care and Global Reproductive Health Politics in Senegal

Rutgers University Press

Dying to Count explores how national and global population politics collide in Senegalese hospitals as health workers treat and document women who present with complications of abortion. Siri Suh’s ethnography illustrates political, economic, professional, and technological factors that jeopardize quality of and access to obstetric care in public hospitals despite national and global commitments to reproductive health.
 

More info

The Devil's Fruit

Farmworkers, Health, and Environmental Justice

Rutgers University Press

The Devil’s Fruit uses anthropology’s tool kit to examine farmworkers’ embodiment of toxic pesticides and social and workplace relationships in California’s agricultural industry. Rather than stopping at description and critique, Saxton explores how activist ethnographic methods and ethics align, conflict, and support ongoing struggles for farmworker health and environmental justice.

More info

Cultural Anxieties

Managing Migrant Suffering in France

Rutgers University Press

Cultural Anxieties is a compelling ethnography about Centre Minkowska, a transcultural psychiatry clinic in Paris, France. From her unique position as both observer and staff member, Stéphanie Larchanché explores the challenges of providing non-stigmatizing mental healthcare to migrants, and she identifies practical routes for improving caregiving practices.

More info

Chronic Failures

Kidneys, Regimes of Care, and the Mexican State

Rutgers University Press

Chronic Failures: Kidneys, Regimes of Care and the Mexican State is about Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) and the relentless search for care within a context of poverty, inequality and uneven welfare arrangements. Documenting the routes taken to access care, the practices of patients without entitlement offer critical perspectives on state-market-healthcare relations.

More info

Pathogenic Policing

Immigration Enforcement and Health in the U.S. South

Rutgers University Press

In Pathogenic Policing, Nolan Kline focuses on the hidden, health-related impacts of immigrant policing to examine the role of policy in shaping health inequality in the U.S., and responds to fundamental questions regarding biopolitics, especially the ways in which policy can reinforce ‘race’ as a vehicle of social division.

More info

Infected Kin

Orphan Care and AIDS in Lesotho

Rutgers University Press

AIDS has devastated communities across southern Africa. In Lesotho, a quarter of adults are infected. In Infected Kin, Block and McGrath argue that AIDS is fundamentally a kinship disease, examining the ways it transcends infected individuals and seeps into kin relations and networks of care.

More info

Sugar and Tension

Diabetes and Gender in Modern India

Rutgers University Press

In Sugar and Tension, Lesley Jo Weaver uses women’s experiences with diabetes in New Delhi as a lens to explore how gendered roles and expectations are taking shape in contemporary India. Weaver describes how women negotiate the many responsibilities in their lives when chronic disease is at stake. 

More info

International Surrogacy as Disruptive Industry in Southeast Asia

Rutgers University Press

Andrea Whittaker traces the development of international surrogacy industry and its movement across Southeast Asia following a sequence of governmental bans in India, Nepal, Thailand, and Cambodia. The book offers a nuanced and sympathetic examination of the industry from the perspectives of the people involved in it. 

More info

Legitimating Life

Adoption in the Age of Globalization and Biotechnology

Rutgers University Press

Sonja van Wichelen boldly describes how contemporary justifications of cross-border adoption navigate between child welfare, humanitarianism, family making, capitalism, science, and health. Focusing on contemporary institutional practices of adoption in the United States and the Netherlands, she traces how professionals, bureaucrats, lawyers, politicians, social workers, and experts legitimate a practice that became progressively controversial.

More info

Psychiatric Encounters

Madness and Modernity in Yucatan, Mexico

Rutgers University Press

Psychiatric Encounters presents an intimate portrait of a public inpatient psychiatric facility in the Southeastern state of Yucatan, Mexico. The book explores the experiences of patients and psychiatrists as they navigate the challenges of public psychiatric care in Mexico.

More info

Faith and the Pursuit of Health

Cardiometabolic Disorders in Samoa

Rutgers University Press

Faith and the Pursuit of Health explores how Pentecostal Christians manage chronic illness in ways that sheds light on health disparities and social suffering in Samoa, a place where rates of obesity and related cardiometabolic disorders have reached population-wide levels. 

More info

Fistula Politics

Birthing Injuries and the Quest for Continence in Niger

Rutgers University Press

In Western humanitarian and media narratives, obstetric fistula is presented as deeply stigmatizing, resulting in divorce, abandonment by kin, exile from communities, depression and suicide. Heller illustrates the inaccuracy of these popular narratives and shows how they serve the interests not of the women so affected, but of humanitarian organizations, the media, and local clinics.

More info

Landscapes of Activism

Civil Society, HIV and AIDS Care in Northern Mozambique

Rutgers University Press

AIDS activists are often romanticized as extremely noble and selfless. However, the relationships among HIV support group members highlighted in Landscapes of Activism are hardly utopian or ideal. Reed shows that in Africa, superimposing a Western idea of what activism should look like actually hampers the success of these groups.

More info

Fault Lines of Care

Gender, HIV, and Global Health in Bolivia

Rutgers University Press

Heckert provides a detailed examination of the effects of global health and governmental policy decisions on the everyday lives of people living with HIV in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. She focuses on the gendered dynamics that play a role in the development and implementation of HIV care programs and shows how decisions made from above impact what happens on the ground.  

More info

Fault Lines of Care

Gender, HIV, and Global Health in Bolivia

Rutgers University Press

Heckert provides a detailed examination of the effects of global health and governmental policy decisions on the everyday lives of people living with HIV in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. She focuses on the gendered dynamics that play a role in the development and implementation of HIV care programs and shows how decisions made from above impact what happens on the ground.  

More info
Find what you’re looking for...
Stay Informed

Receive the latest UBC Press news, including events, catalogues, and announcements.


Read past newsletters

Publishers Represented
UBC Press is the Canadian agent for several international publishers. Visit our Publishers Represented page to learn more.