Sociological Theory and the Environment is a comprehensive survey and assessment of sociological theories of the relations between societies and their 'natural' biophysical environment. This book touches on and addresses virtually all of the major perspectives, focal points, and debates in environmental sociology today-classical and twentieth century social theories, macro-micro linkage issues, globalization and development, reflexive modernization, ecological modernization vs. 'limits' vi...

Patient organizations and social health movements offer one of the most important and illuminating examples of civil society engagement and participation in scientific research and research politics. Influencing the research agenda, and initiating, funding and accelerating the development of diagnostic tools, effective therapies and appropriate health-care for their area of interest, they may champion alternative, sometimes controversial, programs or critique dominant medical paradigms. So...

"No doubt if everyone were to read" this personal and social history of mental illness in America "the world would change" ( New York Times Book Review ).From the centuries of torture of "lunatiks" at Bedlam Asylum to the infamous eugenics era to the follies of the anti-psychiatry movement to the current landscape in which too many families struggle alone to manage afflicted loved ones, Pulitzer Prize–winning and New Y...

Save the coffee planet! How? Why? We live in a world with an estimated population of 6 billion people from which 0, 6 billion, an impressive 10% of the world's population, is dependent on the coffee agriculture and industry for their living. All over the world, more than 1.0 billion people drink coffee on a daily basis, being USA the major consumer, followed by Brazil. Coffee is second after oil in the worldwide business of natural products. The Coffee Paradox is far more important than th...

The AIDS Pandemic explores the ways in which HIV/AIDS has, and continues to transform the wide range of related disciplines it touches. Novel perspectives are provided by a unique panel of internationally recognised experts who cover the unprecedented impact onf AIDS on culture, demographics and politics around the world, including how it affected the worlds' economy, health sciences, epidemiology and public health. This important far- reaching analysis uses the lessons learned from a wide...

Winner of the British Sociological Association Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize, 2012. This book traces the changes in healthcare implicated in telecare technologies: information and communication technologies that enable care at a distance. What happens when healthcare moves from physical to virtual encounters between healthcare professionals and patients? What are the consequences for patients when they are expected to do things that used to be done by health...

This book ultimately aims to answer the questions students have about research in a no nonsense style and can be used as a guide to the main methodologies and tools used in the field.

Claiming 1.5 million lives in 2015, tuberculosis is the world’s most deadly infectious disease. Because of the population it overwhelmingly affects, however, pharmaceutical companies are uninterested in developing better drugs for the disease. Compound Solutions examines Product Development Partnerships (PDPs), which arose early in the twenty-first century to develop new drugs and vaccines for infectious diseases in low-income countries. Here, for the first time, is a sustained ex...

Regenerative medicine, encompassing stem cells and tissue engineering, has attracted huge interest within commercial, clinical and government circles, and promises to change medicine itself. This book provides the first detailed examination and critical assessment of the field to be made by social science.

Thousands of people from more than eighty countries have traveled to China since 2001 to undergo fetal cell transplantation. Galvanized by the potential of stem and fetal cells to regenerate damaged neurons and restore lost bodily functions, people grappling with paralysis and neurodegenerative disorders have ignored the warnings of doctors and scientists back home in order to stake their futures on a Chinese experiment. Biomedical Odysseys looks at why and how these individuals h...

Recent research has focused attention on the importance of intrinsic antiviral immunity, i.e. immunity mediated by factors that are constitutively expressed in many cells. In this volume, leading experts provide a comprehensive overview of this relatively new and rapidly evolving field. They cover intrinsic proteinaceous antiviral immune effectors, such as the APOBEC3 and TRIM protein families as well as Tetherin and SAMHD1, which were initially discovered by researchers studying HIV-1. Fu...

Human service professionals deal with a wide range of problems, from child abuse, parenting issues, and elderly care, to addictions, mental illness, sexual assault, unemployment, and criminality. These must be constructed as problems for professionals to appropriately respond to them. Human service provision starts from there. But in the everyday experience of service providers and users alike, there is a parallel world of ordinary troubles that remains professionally und...