Virtual Library

Existing research has focused on the extent to which transnational interventions compel recalcitrant governments to reduce levels of domestic repression, but few have considered how such interventions might also provoke new forms of repression. Using a longitudinal study of repression against AIDS activism in China between 1989 and 2013, the author proposes that transnational institutions’ provision of material resources and reshaping of organizational rules can transform a domestic repressive apparatus in specific policy areas. The intervention of transnational AIDS institutions not only constrained traditional violent coercion but also generated new forms of “diplomatic repression” through (1) changing repressive motives by moving AIDS from the margin to the center of mainstream politics and (2) supplying resources, networks, and models of action that enabled government organizations to reformulate health social organizations as new repressive actors with innovative repertoires of strategies inside and outside China’s territory.

"Since the first cases of a then-unidentified pneumonia were reported in late December, hoaxes, half-truths and flat-out lies have proliferated, mostly through social media."

What a Texas town can teach us about health care.

This article addresses AIDS as a pandemic of changing social conditions. It reviews the form and consequences of several persistent responses to AIDS (denial, marginalization and urgency) both from within the context of the epidemic in North America and globally. Sociologists are called on to see AIDS as a rich environment for the application and testing of theories, with sociology seen as a discipline whose presence is required for understanding and potentially resolving social challenges produced by AIDS.

Most cases are not life-threatening, which is also what makes the virus a historic challenge to contain.

The field of global health has roots in the AIDS pandemic of the late 20th century, when the installation of health care systems supplanted older, low-cost prevention programs to help stem the spread of HIV in low- and middle-income Africa. Today's global health is rooted the belief that healthcare is a human right, and that by promoting health we can cultivate equity and social justice in places where such values aren't always found.

An Introduction to Global Health Delivery is a short but immersive introduction to global health's origins, actors, interventions, and challenges. Informed by physician Joia Mukherjee's quarter-century of experience fighting disease and poverty in more than a dozen countries, it delivers a clear-eyed overview of the movement underway to reduce global health disparities and establish sustainable access to care, including details of what has worked so far -- and what hasn't.

Grounded in the historical and social factors that propagate health disparities and enriched with case studies and exercises that encourage readers to think critically about the subject matter, this text is the essential starting point for readers of any background seeking a practical grounding in global health's promise and progress. 

Many of us have concerns about the effects of climate change on Earth, but we often overlook the essential issue of human health. This book addresses that oversight and enlightens readers about the most important aspect of one of the greatest challenges of our time.

The global environment is under massive stress from centuries of human industrialization. The projections regarding climate change for the next century and beyond are grim. The impact this will have on human health is tremendous, and we are only just now discovering what the long-term outcomes may be.

By weighing in from a physician’s perspective, Jay Lemery and Paul Auerbach clarify the science, dispel the myths, and help readers understand the threats of climate change to human health. No better argument exists for persuading people to care about climate change than a close look at its impacts on our physical and emotional well-being.

The need has never been greater for a grounded, informative, and accessible discussion about this topic. In this groundbreaking book, the authors not only sound the alarm but address the health issues likely to arise in the coming years.

Testimony of Dr. Renslow Sherer, Cook County Hospital, and Phil Wilson, AIDS Project LA, at the First White House Conference on AIDS.

In Life Beside Itself, Lisa Stevenson takes us on a haunting ethnographic journey through two historical moments when life for the Canadian Inuit has hung in the balance: the tuberculosis epidemic (1940s to the early 1960s) and the subsequent suicide epidemic (1980s to the present). Along the way, Stevenson troubles our commonsense understanding of what life is and what it means to care for the life of another. Through close attention to the images in which we think and dream and through which we understand the world, Stevenson describes a world in which life is beside itself: the name-soul of a teenager who dies in a crash lives again in his friend’s newborn baby, a young girl shares a last smoke with a dead friend in a dream, and the possessed hands of a clock spin uncontrollably over its face. In these contexts, humanitarian policies make little sense because they attempt to save lives by merely keeping a body alive. For the Inuit, and perhaps for all of us, life is “somewhere else,” and the task is to articulate forms of care for others that are adequate to that truth.