Open access books: Viral Loads and Managing Chronicity in Unequal States

UCL Press is delighted to notify subscribers of an open access book that may be of interest to list subscribers:

 

Viral Loads, edited by Lenore Manderson, Nancy J. Burke, and Ayo Wahlberg.   Download it free: https://bit.ly/3nHg8ZH

 

and 

 

Managing Chronicity in Unequal States: Ethnographic perspectives on caring, edited by Laura Montesi and Melania Calestani. Download it free: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/176699

 

 

 

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Edited by Lenore Manderson, Nancy J. Burke, and Ayo Wahlberg.

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Drawing upon the empirical scholarship and research expertise of contributors from all settled continents and from diverse life settings and economies, Viral Loads illustrates how the COVID-19 pandemic, and responses to it, lay bare and load onto people’s lived realities in countries around the world.

 

A crosscutting theme pertains to how social unevenness and gross economic disparities are shaping global and local responses to the pandemic, and illustrate the effects of both the virus and efforts to contain it in ways that amplify these inequalities. At the same time, the contributions highlight the nature of contemporary social life, including virtual communication, the nature of communities, neoliberalism and contemporary political economies, and the shifting nature of nation states and the role of government. Over half of the world’s population has been affected by restrictions of movement, with physical distancing requirements and self-isolation recommendations impacting profoundly on everyday life but also on the economy, resulting also, in turn, with dramatic shifts in the economy and in mass unemployment.

 

By reflecting on how the pandemic has interrupted daily lives, state infrastructures and healthcare systems, the contributing authors in this volume mobilise anthropological theories and concepts to locate the pandemic in a highly connected and exceedingly unequal world. The book is ambitious in its scope – spanning the entire globe – and daring in its insistence that medical anthropology must be a part of the growing calls to build a new world. 

 

 

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Managing Chronicity in Unequal States
Ethnographic perspectives on caring 

Edited by Laura Montesi and Melania Calestani. 

Free download: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/176699

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By portraying the circumstances of people living with chronic conditions in radically different contexts, from Alzheimer’s patients in the UK to homeless people with psychiatric disorders in India, ‘Managing Chronicity in Unequal States’ offers glimpses of what dealing with medically complex conditions in stratified societies means. While in some places the state regulates and intrudes on the most intimate aspects of chronic living, in others it is utterly and criminally absent. Either way, it is a present/absent actor that deeply conditions people’s opportunities and strategies of care. This book explores how individuals, groups and communities navigate uncertain and unequal healthcare systems, in which inherent moral judgements on human worth have long-lasting effects on people’s wellbeing. This is key reading for anyone wishing to deconstruct the issues at stake when analysing how care and chronicity are entangled with multiple institutional, economic, and other circumstantial factors. How people access the available informal and formal resources as well as how they react to official diagnoses and decisions are important facets of the management of chronicity. In the arena of care, people with chronic conditions find themselves negotiating restrictions and handling issues of power and (inter)dependency in relationships of inequality and proximity. This is particularly relevant in current times, when care has given in to the lure of the market, and the possibility of living a long and fulfilling life has been drastically reduced, transformed into a ‘reward’ for the few who have been deemed worthy of it.