Living With Hiv In Post Crisis Times

Over the past decade, effective prevention and treatment policies have resulted in global health organizations claiming that the end of the HIV/AIDS crisis is near and that HIV/AIDS is now a chronic but manageable disease. These proclamations have been accompanied by stagnant or decreasing public interest in and financial support for people living with HIV and the organizations that support them, minimizing significant global disparities in the management and control of the HIV pandemic. The contributors to this edited collection explore how diverse communities of people living with HIV (PLHIV) and organizations that support them are navigating physical, social, political, and economic challenges during these so-called “post-crisis” times.

From health tracking to diet apps to biohacking, technology is changing how we relate to our material, embodied selves. Drawing from a range of disciplines and case studies, this volume looks at what makes these health and genetic technologies unique and explores the representation, communication and internalization of health knowledge. Showcasing how power and inequality are reflected and reproduced by these technologies, discourses and practices, this book will be a go-to resource for scholars in science and technology studies as well as those who study the intersection of race, gender, socio-economic status, sexuality and health.

In both local and international imaginations, Vancouver, Canada, is often celebrated as one of the world’s most beautiful, cosmopolitan, and livable cities. Simultaneously, the city continues to be ground zero for successive waves of public health emergency and intervention, including a recent and unprecedented drug overdose crisis driven by the proliferation of illicitly manufactured fentanyl and related analogs in the local drug supply. In The Best Place: Addiction, Intervention, and Living and Dying Young in Vancouver, Danya Fast explores these politics of place from the perspectives of young people who use drugs. Those who are the subject of this book were in many ways relegated to the social, spatial, and economic margins of the city. Yet, they were also often at the very center of city life and state projects, including the project of protecting life in the context of the current overdose crisis.

Clinical Anthropology 2.0 presents a new approach to applied medical anthropology that engages with clinical spaces, healthcare systems, care delivery and patient experience, public health, as well as the education and training of physicians. In this book, Jason W. Wilson and Roberta D. Baer highlight the key role that medical anthropologists can play on interdisciplinary care teams by improving patient experience and medical education. Included throughout are real life examples of this approach, such as the training of medical and anthropology students, creation of clinical pathways, improvement of patient experiences and communication, and design patient-informed interventions. This book includes contributions by Heather Henderson, Emily Holbrook, Kilian Kelly, Carlos Osorno-Cruz, and Seiichi Villalona.

Drug Use, Recovery, and Maternal Instinct Bias: A Biocultural and Social-Ecological Approach draws upon theoretical perspectives in anthropology and public health to provide insight into the barriers women experience when seeking treatment for substance use disorders. In both theoretical perspectives in biological anthropology and social discourse within the United States, there is an emphasis on explaining why women avoid (or should avoid) using psychoactive substances during their reproductive years, especially during pregnancy. Theories of women's drug avoidance during the childbearing years rely on statistics to show that women are less likely to use all types of illicit drugs than their male counterparts. This gender gap, however, is closing in high-income countries (HICs), calling for more research on the biocultural and social-ecological factors contributing to women's drug use and the barriers to their recovery. The book uses qualitative data from participants in Indiana to illustrate women's struggles along the pathway to recovery. The overarching conclusion is that internalized models of “maternal instinct,” a topic inherent in theoretical and public discourse, can often impede efforts for women seeking treatment, and recovery is only possible when proper social and structural supports are in place.

Drawing on ethnographic studies of the lived experiences of people with rare diseases, this volume critically examines rare, chronic diseases in the context of care, kinship, and technologies, providing in-depth analyses of local worlds that usually remain at the peripheries of medical anthropological inquiry.

In The Moral Evaluation of Emergency Department Patients: An Ethnography of Triage Work in Romania, Marius Wamsiedel examines the social categorization of patients and its consequences at two emergency departments in Romania. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this work argues that moral evaluation is an attempt on the part of triage nurses and clerks to keep the emergency service afloat in the context of high-care demand, insufficient resources, and uneven access to primary care. At the same time, Wamsiedel argues that moral evaluation is an effort to align the provision of emergency services with socially dominant values, norms, and representations. As such, the moral evaluation of patients becomes a Procrustean bed that reduces some inequities in access to health care while generating or amplifying others. By adopting an interactionist lens, Wamsiedel unravels the underlying social logic of moral evaluation, the criteria and assumptions that inform it, and attempts by triage workers and patient to negotiate access to emergency care. The Moral Evaluation of Emergency Department Patients offers new ways of understanding the work of street-level bureaucracies and informal barriers to care.