Format: Book

When People Come First

When People Come First critically assesses the expanding field of global health. It brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars to address the medical, social, political, and economic dimensions of the global health enterprise through vivid case studies and bold conceptual work. The book demonstrates the crucial role of ethnography as an empirical lantern in global health, arguing for a more comprehensive, people-centered approach.

Topics include the limits of technological quick fixes in disease control, the moral economy of global health science, the unexpected effects of massive treatment rollouts in resource-poor contexts, and how right-to-health activism coalesces with the increased influence of the pharmaceutical industry on health care. The contributors explore the altered landscapes left behind after programs scale up, break down, or move on. We learn that disease is really never just one thing, technology delivery does not equate with care, and biology and technology interact in ways we cannot always predict. The most effective solutions may well be found in people themselves, who consistently exceed the projections of experts and the medical-scientific, political, and humanitarian frameworks in which they are cast.

When People Come First sets a new research agenda in global health and social theory and challenges us to rethink the relationships between care, rights, health, and economic futures.

Risk Society

This panoramic analysis of the condition of Western societies has been hailed as a classic. This first English edition has taken its place as a core text of contemporary sociology alongside earlier typifications of society as postindustrial and current debates about the social dimensions of the postmodern.

Underpinning the analysis is the notion of the ‘risk society’. The changing nature of society’s relation to production and distribution is related to the environmental impact as a totalizing, globalizing economy based on scientific and technical knowledge becomes more central to social organization and social conflict.

Metrics

This volume’s contributors evaluate the accomplishments, limits, and consequences of using quantitative metrics in global health. Whether analyzing maternal mortality rates, the relationships between political goals and metrics data, or the links between health outcomes and a program’s fiscal support, the contributors question the ability of metrics to solve global health problems. They capture a moment when global health scholars and practitioners must evaluate the potential effectiveness and pitfalls of different metrics—even as they remain elusive and problematic.

The Social Lives of Medicines

Medicines are typically thought of as chemical structures with biological effects on the ill. But medicines are also material things with cultural and symbolic meaning. In this ground breaking work, the authors propose that we think about ‘the social lives of medicines’. Consider, for example, the social life of a commercialised pharmaceutical: These are highly sought after commodities that circulate the globe, entering pharmacies, drug shops, people’s homes and their bodies.

From labs in London, to drug trials in India, to markets around the world, medicines are exemplars of globalisation. They swiftly move into local societies, transforming both health systems and lives. At the same time, medicines are intimate and personal things. As the authors write, medicines are “swallowed, inserted into bodies, rubbed on by anxious mothers, used to express care and intimately empower the uncertain individual” (3). Simply put, medicines are “social and cultural phenomena” with more than just biological effects on an individual body. By looking at medicines as if they lead social lives, we get a new way to understand how their value is cultural, economic, political, and personal.

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