Viral Frictions

Viral Frictions takes the reader along a trail of intersecting narratives to uncover how and why it is that HIV-related stigma persists in the age of treatment. Pfeiffer convincingly argues that stigma is a socially constructed process co-produced at the nexus of local, national, and global relationships and storytelling about and practices associated with HIV. Based on a decade of fieldwork in one highway trading center in Kenya, Viral Frictions offers compelling stories of stigma and discrimination as a lens for understanding broader social processes, the complexities of globalization and health, and their profound impact on the everyday social lives and relationships of people living through the ongoing HIV epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. This highly engaging book is ideal reading for those interested in teaching and learning about intersectionality, as Pfeiffer meticulously demonstrates how HIV stigma interacts with issues of treatment, race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, social change, and international aid systems.

The first one thousand days of human life, or the period between conception and age two, is one of the most pivotal periods of human development. Optimizing nutrition during this time not only prevents childhood malnutrition but also determines future health and potential. The Politics of Potential examines early life interventions in the first one thousand days of life in South Africa, drawing on fieldwork from international conferences, government offices, health-care facilities, and the everyday lives of fifteen women and their families in Cape Town. Michelle Pentecost explores various aspects of a politics of potential, a term that underlines the first one thousand days concept and its effects on clinical care and the lives of childbearing women in South Africa. Why was the First One Thousand Days project so readily adopted by South Africa and many other countries? Pentecost not only explores this question but also discusses the science of intergenerational transmissions of health, disease, and human capital and how this constitutes new forms of intergenerational responsibility. The women who are the target of first one thousdand days interventions are cast as both vulnerable and responsible for the health of future generations, such that, despite its history, intergenerational responsibility in South Africa remains entrenched in powerfully gendered and racialized ways.

How do digital technologies shape both how people care for each other and, through that, who they are? With technological innovation is on the rise and increasing migration introducing vast distances between family members--a situation additionally complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the requirements of physical distancing, especially for the most vulnerable – older adults--this is a pertinent question. Through ethnographic fieldwork among families of migrating nurses from Kerala, India, Tanja Ahlin explores how digital technologies shape elder care when adult children and their aging parents live far apart. Coming from a country in which appropriate elder care is closely associated with co-residence, these families tinker with smartphones and social media to establish how care at a distance can and should be done to be considered good. Through the notion of transnational care collectives, Calling Family uncovers the subtle workings of digital technologies on care across countries and continents when being physically together is not feasible. Calling Family provides a better understanding of technological relationality that can only be expected to further intensify in the future.

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.

Women from Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia, who migrate to Guam, a U.S. territory, suffer disproportionately poor reproductive health outcomes. Though their access to the United States is unusually easy, through a unique migration agreement, it keeps them in a perpetual liminal state as nonimmigrants, who never fully belong as part of the United States Chuukese women move to Guam, sometimes with their families but sometimes alone, in search of a better life: for jobs, for the education system, or to access safe health care. Yet, the imperial system they encounter creates underlying conditions that greatly and disproportionately impact their ability to succeed and thrive, negatively impacting their reproductive health. Through clinical and community ethnography, Sarah A. Smith illuminates the way this system stratifies women’s reproduction at structural, social, and individual levels. Readers can visualize how U.S. imperialist policies of benign neglect control the body politic, change the social body, and render individual bodies vulnerable in the twenty-first century but also how people resist.

In Cape Town, South Africa, many people with tuberculosis also use substances. This sets up a seemingly impossible problem: People who use substances are at increased risk of tuberculosis disease; and substance use seems to result in erratic behavior that makes successful treatment of people affected by tuberculosis extremely difficult. People affected don’t get healthy, healthcare providers are frustrated, and families seek to balance love and care for those who are ill with self-protection. How are we to understand this? Where does the responsibility for poor health and healing lie? What are the possibilities for an effective healthcare response? Through a close look at lives and care, Making Uncertainty: Tuberculosis, Substance Use, and Pathways to Health shows how patterns of substance use, tuberculosis disease, and their interaction are shaped by history, social context, and political economy. This, in turn, generates new perspectives on what makes poor health, and what good care might look like.

A thumb print left at the scene of a grisly murder. Fingerprints taken from a getaway car used in a bank robbery. A palm print recovered from the shattered glass door of a burglarized home. Indeed, where crimes are committed, careless perpetrators will invariably leave behind the critical pieces of evidence—most likely in the form of fingerprints—needed to catch and convict them. But the science of fingerprint identification isn’t always as cut and dry as detective novels and movies make it out to be. Quantitative-Qualitative Friction Ridge Analysis, a new book in the ongoing Practical Aspects of Criminal and Forensic Investigations series, examines the latest methods and techniques in the science of friction ridge identification, or ridgeology. David R. Ashbaugh examines every facet of the discipline, from the history of friction ridge identification and its earliest pioneers and researchers, to the scientific basis and the various steps of the identification process. The structure and growth of friction skin and how it can leave latent or visible prints are examined, as well as advanced identification methods in ridgeology, including Poroscopy, Edgeoscopy, Pressure Distortion and Complex or Problem Print Analysis. The book, which features several detailed illustrations and photographs, also includes a new method for Palmar Flexion Crease Identification (palm lines) designed by the author and which has helped solve several criminal cases where fingerprints were not available. For crime scene technicians, forensic identification specialists, or anyone else pursuing a career in forensic science, this book is arguably the definitive source in the science of friction ridge identification.