Winner, 2026 Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize, given by the British Sociological AssociationA chronicle of ableism and disability activism in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemicHow to Be Disabled in a Pandemic documents the pivotal experiences of disabled people living in an early epicenter of COVID-19: New York City. Among those hardest hit by the pandemic, disability communities across...

In Disability Worlds, Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp chronicle and theorize two decades of immersion in New York City’s wide-ranging disability worlds as parents, activists, anthropologists, and disability studies scholars. They situate their disabled children’s lives among the experiences of advocates, families, experts, activists, and artists in larger struggles for recognition and rights. Disability consciousness, they show, emerges in everyday politics, practices, and frictions....

Rich with the voices and stories of participants, these touching, firsthand accounts examine how women of diverse racial, ethnic, class and religious backgrounds perceive prenatal testing, the most prevalent and routinized of the new reproducing technologies. Based on the author's decade of research and her own personal experiences with amniocentesis, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus explores the "geneticization" of family life in all its complexity and diversity.

Feminist anthropology emerged in the 1970s as a much-needed corrective to the discipline’s androcentric biases. Far from being a marginalized subfield, it has been at the forefront of developments that have revolutionized not only anthropology, but also a host of other disciplines. This landmark collection of essays provides a contemporary overview of feminist anthropology’s historical and theoretical origins, the transformations it has undergone, and the vital contributions it continues t...

Reproduction, Globalization, and the State conceptualizes and puts into practice a global anthropology of reproduction and reproductive health. Leading anthropologists offer new perspectives on how transnational migration and global flows of communications, commodities, and biotechnologies affect the reproductive lives of women and men in diverse societies throughout the world. Based on research in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Western Europe, their fascinating ethnographies pro...

In Seizing the Means of Reproduction, M. Murphy's initial focus on the alternative health practices developed by radical feminists in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s opens into a sophisticated analysis of the transnational entanglements of American empire, population control, neoliberalism, and late-twentieth-century feminisms. Murphy concentrates on the technoscientific means—the technologies, practices, protocols, and processes—developed by feminist health activists...

In this important collection, prominent scholars who helped to establish medical anthropology as an area of study reflect on the field's past, present, and future. In doing so, they demonstrate that medical anthropology has developed dynamically, through its intersections with activism, with other subfields in anthropology, and with disciplines as varied as public health, the biosciences, and studies of race and ethnicity. Each of the contributors addresses one or more of these intersectio...

Written by a social worker, popular educator, and member of the transgender community, this well-rounded resource combines an accessible portrait of transgenderism with a rich history of transgender life and its unique experiences of discrimination. Chapters introduce transgenderism and its psychological, physical, and social processes. They describe the coming out process and its effect on family and friends, the relationship between sexual orientation, and gender and the differences betw...

Jurgen Habermas is one of the most influential thinkers of our time. This detailed, article length guide examines his theory of deliberative democracy and covers many of the central concepts such as communicative reason, communicative power, and the ideal speech community.

The Women, Gender and Development Reader is the definitive volume of literature dedicated to women in the development process. Now in a fully revised second edition, the editors expertly present the impacts of social, political and economic change by reviewing such topical issues as migration, persistent structural discrimination, the global recession, and climate change. Approached from a multidisciplinary perspective, the theoretical debates are vividly illustrated by an array o...

A rethinking of American democracy that puts caring responsibilities at the centerAmericans now face a caring deficit: there are simply too many demands on people’s time for us to care adequately for our children, elderly people, and ourselves.At the same time, political involvement in the United States is at an all-time low, and although political life should help us to care better, people see caring as unsupported by public life ...

What does diversity do? What are we doing when we use the language of diversity? Sara Ahmed offers an account of the diversity world based on interviews with diversity practitioners in higher education, as well as her own experience of doing diversity work. Diversity is an ordinary, even unremarkable, feature of institutional life. Yet diversity practitioners often experience institutions as resistant to their work, as captured through their use of the metaphor of the "brick wall." On ...