Synopses & Reviews
"It is a challenging task to provide a novel and comprehensive view of global health -a dynamic arena for action and an increasingly attractive academic field. Reimagining Global Health does this with scholarly rigor and political courage. This book will become essential reading for all those working in clinical, public health, and policy roles to address the daunting health disparities of our times."and#151;Julio Frenk, Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, T and G Angelopoulos Professor of Public Health and International Development, Former Minister of Health of Mexico (2000-2006)
"The past decade has seen an unprecedented explosion of interest in the health and welfare of marginalized communities around the world. Reimagining Global Health offers a critical approach to the contemporary global health landscape, while also tracing its historical antecedents and suggesting a way forward. This seminal work by leading figures in the field is a crucial next step for those interested in grappling with the modern reality of global health inequity. Without question, Reimagining Global Health is a salient volume that will shape global health research, practice, and knowledge for many years to come."and#151;Ambassador Mark Dybul, Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS
and#147;Inspired by practicing physicians like two of the authors of this book, Paul Farmer and Jim Kim, who won't take no for an answer when it comes to the universal right to health, many undergraduates, medical students and professional have turned to global health as their specialty and their calling. Until now, this nascent field did not have a unifying conceptual approach, let alone a text. This book, based on decades of practice and years of successfully teaching global health at Harvard, masterfully fills this gap. It presents a strong vision of health as a biological and social phenomenon, and illustrates how academics from different disciplines, and practitioners, must work together to understand not only what works, but how it can be sustainably delivered. Avoiding both cynicism or blind optimism, this book, like the authors in their work, is hopeful, practical, and demanding. It will become an unavoidable reference in the field.and#8221; and#150;Esther Duflo, Department of Economics, MIT and author of Poor Economics
"With its unwavering commitment to social justice and refreshingly lucid sense of possibility, Reimagining Global Health is an essential antidote to the deadly and inexcusable health disparities of our times. Combining deep social analysis and visceral human and institutional engagements, the authors of this momentous book re-socialize and politicize disease and health and, in the process, create a distinct and innovative grammar that will surely inspire and shape the work of generations of global health scholars and practitioners."and#151;Joand#227;o Biehl, Princeton University
"From the interstices of medical knowledge and practices and the social sciences a new academic field of "global health" is emerging. While economists worship their methodology, and political scientists their great thinkers, global health has outflanked them all in the quest for real explanations and real solutions to the most pressing problem of the world's poor people. With this book, written by some of the field's pioneers, you can take the first step in orienting yourself in this fluid and inter-disciplinary endeavor. Iconoclastic and passionate in equal measure."and#151;James Robinson, David Florence Professor of Government at Harvard University
"Lucky Harvard students! Having these teachers. And lucky students elsewhere when they have the chance to read this important book. I was familiar in one way or another with most of the material covered by this book and I could not put it down."and#151;Michael Marmot, University College, London, Institute of Healthy Equity
and#147;When I first invited Paul Farmer and Jim Kim to Rwanda ten years ago, it was not for business as usual. The partnership they committed to was working to break the cycle of poverty and disease in some of Rwandaand#8217;s poorest districts. Together, through the leadership of the Rwandan public sector and the steadfast accompaniment of global visionaries including many co-authors of chapters in this book, we are redefining what is possible in health care delivery. Reimagining Global Health asks how the hard-won lessons learned along the way might be shared most widely and usefully. In these pages, students and practitioners across disciplines and contexts will find crucial questions for all those who would advance the human right to health. Rich case studies and incisive biosocial analysis throw the central importance of humility, constancy, and imagination into bold relief.and#8221;and#151;Dr. Agnes Binagwaho, Minister of Health of Rwanda; Senior Lecturer, Harvard Medical School; Clinical Professor of Pediatrics, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth
"This inspiring book transforms the field of global health into a revolutionary global movement for human rights to combat the useless suffering imposed by North/South social inequality.and#160; The authors' historical, practice-based and theoretical arguments wrench the field out of its colonial-missionary roots and attack the contemporary greedy behemoths of Bio-Tech, Big Pharma, for-profit healthcare, and cost-benefit neoliberal triage logics to make "Health for All" a real possibility--as well as a universal human right to be enforced by political will, funding and democratic access to technology."and#151;Philippe Bourgois author of Righteous Dopefiend and of In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio.
"Reimagining Global Health is a well written text based on extensive research, teaching and practical experience. The fact that it is based on three years of teaching a course implies that it has been finely honed by responses from students. It is superbly researched and written and provides many new angles and fresh perspectives."and#151;Solly Benatar, Professor, Dalla School of Public Health and Joint Centre for Bioethics, University of Toronto
Review
"Reimagining Global Health will surely prove useful as an introductory textbook for undergraduate and graduate students in public health, human biology and anthropology, and various other disciplines."
Review
"This well-written and accessible introduction to problems of global health will shape the developing discipline's future and bring attention to the pressing need for global health equity."
Review
"A must read for students and faculty in public health, medicine, and anthropology."
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"Valuable."
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"An excellent, well-structured introduction to thoughtful global health practices . . . Reimagining Global Health provides a wealth of insights that would benefit seasoned professionals, scholars, and activists."
Synopsis
Global Africa is a striking, original volume that disrupts dominant narratives that continue to frame our discussion of Africa, complicating conventional views of the region as a place of violence, despair, and victimhood. The volume documents the significant global connections, circulations, and contributions that African people, ideas, and goods have made throughout the world, from the United States, South Asia, Latin America, Europe, and elsewhere. Through succinct and engaging pieces by scholars, policy makers, activists, and journalists, the essays provide a wholly original view of a continent at the center of global historical processes rather than on its periphery. Global Africa offers fresh, complex, and insightful visions of a continent in flux.
Synopsis
Bringing together the experience, perspective and expertise of Paul Farmer, Jim Yong Kim, and Arthur Kleinman,
Reimagining Global Health provides an original, compelling introduction to the field of global health. Drawn from a Harvard course developed by their student Matthew Basilico, this work provides an accessible and engaging framework for the study of global health. Insisting on an approach that is historically deep and geographically broad, the authors underline the importance of a transdisciplinary approach, and offer a highly readable distillation of several historical and ethnographic perspectives of contemporary global health problems.
The case studies presented throughout Reimagining Global Health bring together ethnographic, theoretical, and historical perspectives into a wholly new and exciting investigation of global health. The interdisciplinary approach outlined in this text should prove useful not only in schools of public health, nursing, and medicine, but also in undergraduate and graduate classes in anthropology, sociology, political economy, and history, among others.
Synopsis
A laboratory for competing visions of modernity, the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) continues to haunt the imagination of the twentieth century. Its political and cultural lessons retain uncanny relevance for all who seek to understand the tensions and possibilities of our age.
The Weimar Republic Sourcebook represents the most comprehensive documentation of Weimar culture, history, and politics assembled in any language. It invites a wide community of readers to discover the richness and complexity of the turbulent years in Germany before Hitler's rise to power.
Drawing from such primary sources as magazines, newspapers, manifestoes, and official documents (many unknown even to specialists and most never before available in English), this book challenges the traditional boundaries between politics, culture, and social life. Its thirty chapters explore Germany's complex relationship to democracy, ideologies of "reactionary modernism," the rise of the "New Woman," Bauhaus architecture, the impact of mass media, the literary life, the tradition of cabaret and urban entertainment, and the situation of Jews, intellectuals, and workers before and during the emergence of fascism.
While devoting much attention to the Republic's varied artistic and intellectual achievements (the Frankfurt School, political theater, twelve-tone music, cultural criticism, photomontage, and urban planning), the book is unique for its inclusion of many lesser-known materials on popular culture, consumerism, body culture, drugs, criminality, and sexuality; it also contains a timetable of major political events, an extensive bibliography, and capsule biographies. This will be a major resource and reference work for students and scholars in history; art; architecture; literature; social and political thought; and cultural, film, German, and women's studies.
Synopsis
"The Weimar Republic Sourcebook is an invaluable resource for understanding one of the most important and resonant eras of the twentieth century. Since the Weimar debate has continued to repeat itself, albeit with less intellectual brilliance, this book is as much about the present as about the past. Here is the Weimar era in all its many-voiced and eloquent complexity: most of these texts, even those by the most famous names of the period, appear for the first time in English. This is an indispensable, enthralling, properly ambitious book."Susan Sontag
Synopsis
Once lauded as the wave of the African future, Zambia's economic boom in the 1960s and early 1970s was fueled by the export of copper and other primary materials. Since the mid-1970s, however, the urban economy has rapidly deteriorated, leaving workers scrambling to get by.
Expectations of Modernity explores the social and cultural responses to this prolonged period of sharp economic decline. Focusing on the experiences of mineworkers in the Copperbelt region, James Ferguson traces the failure of standard narratives of urbanization and social change to make sense of the Copperbelt's recent history. He instead develops alternative analytic tools appropriate for an "ethnography of decline."
Ferguson shows how the Zambian copper workers understand their own experience of social, cultural, and economic "advance" and "decline." Ferguson's ethnographic study transports us into their livesand#151;the dynamics of their relations with family and friends, as well as copper companies and government agencies.
Theoretically sophisticated and vividly written, Expectations of Modernity will appeal not only to those interested in Africa today, but to anyone contemplating the illusory successes of today's globalizing economy.
Synopsis
"With
Expectations of Modernity James Ferguson has once more made an important contribution to the reconstruction of anthropology. His own vivid ethnography of urban lives in the late twentieth century offers new understandings of culture and cosmopolitanism, while his sense of the wider picture helps us see Africa, in a difficult period, as the continent which contemporary globalization rhetoric conveniently forgets. This is contemporary anthropology of the most relevant, responsible and intellectually sophisticated kind." and#151;Ulf Hannerz, Stockholm University
"A deeply thoughtful book, written with enormous sensitivity. I much admired Ferguson's very original take on African 'modernity.' His engagement with cultural studies is always informed by a deep historical understanding and an appreciation of economic realities. He connects critically but sympathetically with both his informants and with earlier generations of urban anthropologists. The book is often moving--the hardships of life in this 'abject' postmodern setting are too evident, but the amazing creativity of urban 'citemene' culture is wonderfully described. And Ferguson's account of the fraught, conflictual and sometimes violent nature of gender relations is extremely important. Certainly one of the best books on Africa I have read in recent years, this will be required reading for anthropologists and historians." and#151;Megan Vaughan, Oxford University
About the Author
Paul Farmer is co-founder of Partners In Health and Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has authored numerous books, including
Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and
The New War on the Poor.
Jim Yong Kim is co-founder of Partners In Health and the current President of the World Bank Group.
Arthur Kleinman is Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University and Professor of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is the author of numerous influential works including The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, And The Human Condition.
Matthew Basilico is a medical student at Harvard Medical School and a PhD candidate in economics at Harvard University. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Malawi, where he has lived and worked with his wife Marguerite.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations and Tables
Preface by Paul Farmer
1. Introduction: A Biosocial Approach
Paul Farmer, Jim Yong Kim, Arthur Kleinman, Matthew Basilico
2. Unpacking Global Health: Theory and Critique
Bridget Hanna, Arthur Kleinman
3. Colonial Medicine and Its Legacies
Jeremy Greene, Marguerite Thorp Basilico, Heidi Kim, Paul Farmer
4. Health for All? Competing Theories and Geopolitics
Matthew Basilico, Jonathan Weigel, Anjali Motgi, Jacob Bor, Salmaan Keshavjee
5. Redefining the Possible: The Global AIDS Response
Luke Messac, Krishna Prabhu
6. Building an Effective Rural Health Delivery Model in Haiti and Rwanda
Peter Drobac, Matthew Basilico, Luke Messac, David Walton, Paul Farmer
7. Scaling Up Effective Delivery Models Worldwide
Jim Yong Kim, Michael Porter, Joseph Rhatigan, Rebecca Weintraub, Matthew Basilico, Paul Farmer
8. The Unique Challenges of Mental Health and MDRTB: Critical Perspectives on Metrics of Disease Burden
Anne Becker, Anjali Motgi, Jonathan Weigel, Giuseppe Raviola, Salmaan Keshavjee, Arthur Kleinman
9. Values and Global Health
Arjun Suri, Jonathan Weigel, Luke Messac, Marguerite Thorp Basilico, Matthew Basilico, Bridget Hanna, Salmaan Keshavjee, Arthur Kleinman
10. Taking Stock of Foreign Aid
Paul Farmer, Jonathan Weigel, Matthew Basilico
11. Global Health Priorities for the Early Twenty-First Century
Jonathan Weigel, Matthew Basilico, Vanessa Kerry, Madeleine Ballard, Anne Becker, Gene Bukhman, Ophelia Dahl, Andy Ellner, Louise Ivers, David Jones, John Meara, Joia Mukherjee, Amy Sievers, Alyssa Yamamoto, Paul Farmer
12. A Movement for Global Health Equity?
Matthew Basilico, Vanessa Kerry, Luke Messac, Arjun Suri, Jonathan Weigel, Marguerite Thorp Basilico, Joia Mukherjee, Paul Farmer
Appendix: Declaration of Alma-Ata
Notes
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Index