Stanford University Press Blog

Timely Reads Part 2

Recommended reading for right now

Free shipping on all online orders » with the discount code TIMETOREAD-FM until April 30

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting social distancing we have composed a recommended reading list focused around books helpful for this moment.

 

 

Crisis! When Political Parties Lose the Consent to Rule »

By CEDRIC DE LEON

Crisis! by Cedric de Leon is a timely analysis of the power and limits of political parties—and the lessons of the Civil War and the New Deal in the Age of Trump. Crisis! takes us beyond the common explanations of social determinants to illuminate how political parties actively shape national stability and breakdown.

 

 

 

 

Broke and Patriotic: Why Poor Americans Love Their Country »

By FRANCESCO DUINA

The award-winning Broke and Patriotic by Francesco Duina asks “why are poor Americans so patriotic?” Duina conducted over sixty revealing interviews in which his participants explain how they view themselves and their country. This book offers a stirring portrait of the people left behind by their country and left out of the national conversation.

 

 

 

 

After the Rise and Stall of American Feminism: Taking Back a Revolution »

By LYNN S. CHANCER

Are you reflecting on the challenges balancing childcare and work? In After the Rise and Stall of American Feminism Lynn S. Chancer articulates the need for universally affordable and high-quality daycare in order to achieve gender parity in the workplace.

 

 

Timely Reads Part 1

Recommended reading for right now

Free shipping on all online orders » with the discount code TIMETOREAD-FM until April 30

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting social distancing we have composed a recommended reading list focused around books helpful for this moment.

 

 

Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health After an Epidemic »

By KATHERINE A. MASON

Are you curious about how a crisis like COVID-19 can change healthcare systems?  In her award-winning  book Infectious Change Katherine A. Mason investigates local Chinese public health institutions in Southeastern China, examining how the outbreak of SARS re-imagined public health as a professionalized, biomedicalized, and technological machine. If this captures your attention then don’t miss Katherine Mason’s blog entry which includes an epilogue addressing the Coronavirus pandemic.

 

 

 

SARS in China: Prelude to Pandemic? »

Edited By ARTHUR KLEINMAN AND JAMES L. WATSON

Continuing the theme of learning from the SARS pandemic, SARS in China focuses on specific aspects of the SARS outbreak—epidemiological, political, economic, social, cultural, and moral. They analyze SARS as a form of social suffering and raise questions about the relevance of national sovereignty in the face of such global threats.

 

 

 

Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders »

By JENNIFER GARVEY BERGER and KEITH JOHNSTON

Are you working from home and leading a team? Simple Habits for Complex Times by Jennifer Garvey Berger and Keith Johnston provides three integral practices that enable leaders to navigate the unknown.

"This is mandatory reading if you want a shot at navigating complexity with grace. Jennifer and Keith render complexity visible, accessible, and workable. We all know about the pressures of uncertainty and the rapid pace of change, but 'the how' of being a leader has been unfathomable—until now. "

—Gayle Karen K. Young, Chief Talent and Culture Officer, Wikimedia Foundation

Zika and the Common Good

Who precisely is the “common good” that the public health sector purports to serve?

KATHERINE A. MASON

The Zika-carrying Aedes Aegypti mosquito. Photo by James Gathany of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Public domain.

In light of current events we present Katherine A. Mason’s 2016 blog post for Infectious Change » with a new epilogue that takes into account the COVID-19 pandemic.

It has been barely a year since the Ebola outbreak in West Africa released its grip on the frightened imaginations of the Global North, and already global health officials are in the midst of another viral panic. After spreading across the Pacific to Brazil and Puerto Rico, the mosquito-born Zika virus this summer is expected to continue its march to the mainland United States, where it will make landfall on the Gulf Coast. The message from global and American health authorities is the same as it was in 2003 with the appearance of SARS, in 2006 with H5N1 avian flu, and in 2014 with Ebola: Be very afraid.

“This could be a catastrophe to rival Hurricane Katrina or other recent miseries that disproportionately affect the poor,” writes Peter J. Hotez, Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in a recent New York Times Op-Ed. “If I were a pregnant woman … in an impoverished neighborhood in a city like Houston, New Orleans, Miami, Biloxi, Miss., or Mobile, Ala., I would be nervous right now.” Of course, Hotez is none of the above. So are those women nervous? Will controlling Zika end up helping them? And would Hotez listen if the affected women thought it wouldn’t? As we enter another round of emergency epidemic control, these questions are critical to ask.

Public health professionals felt it was their duty to manage this threat carefully in order to serve the “common good.” But who made up the “common”?

What I have found from my own research is that even when a global disease response appears to be effective, unintended consequences can emerge that threaten to undermine, rather than support, the long-term health and well-being of vulnerable communities most affected by the disease in question. In the urban Chinese settings I studied during and after the SARS outbreak, China’s enormous population of rural-to-urban migrant workers was seen as a public health menace capable of spreading the same dangerous diseases that threatened it. In the wake of the 2003 outbreak, Chinese public health professionals felt it was their duty to manage this menace carefully in order to serve the “common good.” But who made up the “common”?

Archaeological Landscapes and 3D Technologies

Elaine A. Sullivan on the making of her new Stanford Digital Project Constructing the Sacred

ELAINE A. SULLIVAN

3D model render of a Dynasty 1 mastaba tomb (3506), with elaborate exterior niching on façade; render in Vue Infinite

Source: Render by the author

 

We're pleased to present an adapted excerpt from the Introduction of Constructing the Sacred:Visibility and Ritual Landscape at the Egyptian Necropolis of Saqqara» by Elaine A. Sullivan.

In more than a century of considering archaeological landscapes, scholars have adopted a variety of theoretical viewpoints, imagining the changing relationship between humans and their environment as determined by geographical, ecological, climatic, or demographic forces. The past twenty years have seen dramatic changes in these frameworks, with the social production of space moving to the fore, as the definition of ‘landscape’ has transitioned from an independent space within which humans act (influenced by outside forces) to one constructed and made meaningful through human perception.[1] These shifting intellectual grounds have provided important opportunities for reconsidering the interaction between humans, culture, and the natural and built environments. In parallel to this movement (and as part of the increasing digital turn in the field in general), archaeologists have applied new (or newly enhanced) technologies to recording, interrogating, and representing archaeological landscapes. This includes the use of tools that move beyond two-dimensional capabilities, such as airborne and satellite imagery for the creation of 2.5D digital terrain models, as well as photogrammetric capture and representation of modern terrains and landscape spaces as fully 3D digital meshes.[2] These two strands of change may initially have seemed irreconcilable, as many of the technological advances mentioned were incorporated into Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-based studies, and deemed environmentally determinist and functionalist by their detractors. Indeed, practitioners in archaeology have vigorously debated the use of GIS for the study of past places, with some criticizing GIS as positivistic and lacking engagement with cognition, symbolism, and culture. Yet many scholars reject such binaries as unnecessary and regressive.[3] As a discipline charged with documenting humanity’s historical record (and one that often destroys the very context of our research), many of us archaeologists have committed to improving documentation practices with technologies like GIS. But digital tools can also be used fruitfully in considering the social means with which humans construct and make sense of their world, especially when explicitly grounded in an ancient group’s cultural and historical realities.[4] I argue that the 3D plus GIS offers another means to expand the scope of landscape studies, blending technological innovation with the close examination of human cultural change.

Revealing an Asian and Latinx America

The 2020 census will show how the future minority-majority U.S. will depend on Latinxs and Asian Americans.

LONG LE-KHAC

Question from the 2010 census.

Photo by Spot Us. Via Flickr. No changes were made. CC BY-SA 2.0.

 

The 2020 census is upon us. The massive, once-a-decade operation to count the population of the U.S. will engulf American households in the coming weeks. As always the stakes of the census are much greater than numbers, but this year they are amplified by the proximity to the presidential election. The census is our nation’s mechanism for registering the transformations in the social landscape and constituencies of America. Over the next ten years, tough debates on how the nation should respond to its changes will build on the demographic story the census reveals. Distributions of political power and billions of dollars in resources are at stake.

With operations gearing up and no numbers ready to crunch yet, one outcome is already certain: the census will show the increasing centrality of Latinxs and Asian Americans to the U.S. Alongside those who identify as multiracial, they are the fastest growing racial/ethnic groups. The Asian American population increased 72% from 2000-2015 while the Latinx population grew 60% in the same period. Together, they account for over 2/3 of the population growth in the U.S. since 2000. From only 4% of the nation’s population in the 1960s to 24% today, they are projected to top 40% in the coming decades.

Asian Americans and Latinxs are the central players in the turbulent national drama sweeping the U.S. towards the minority-majority threshold, a historic tipping point over which much ink will surely be spilled this census year. But whether Americans welcome this dramatic transformation or view it with apprehension, they, regardless of political affiliation, have not fully understood this forthcoming change.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Abortion in Brazil

Cassia Roth

A protest on November 13, 2017 in Rio de Janeiro. The green sign in the center translates to “Free & safe legal abortion.”

Photo by Bernardo G. Via Flickr. No changes were made. CC BY 2.0.

 

In December 2019, the freshly-appointed director of Brazil’s National Arts Foundation (Funarte), Dante Mantovani, posted a video on his Youtube page condemning rock-and-roll music. “Rock music leads to drugs, which leads to sex, which leads to abortions,” Mantovani stated. “At the same time,” he continued, “the abortion industry feeds into something much more serious, which is Satanism.” Mantovani’s disapproval of unsanctioned sex and its consequences, not to mention his linkage of abortion and satanic worship, is part of a long tradition in the west of blaming cultural and moral decay on pop culture. Despite the recursive, strawman nature of this blame, his words are actually somewhat indicative of public opinion toward abortion in Brazil today. A 2018 poll found that 80 percent of Brazilians oppose legalizing abortion (which is currently only legal in the cases of rape, a threat to the mother’s life, or fetal anencephaly), up 2 percent from a similar 2010 poll.

This repressive backlash toward women’s reproductive rights at home and abroad requires us to rethink dominant narratives of liberal progress in relation to women’s bodily integrity – and human rights.

Brazil’s growing evangelical bloc is probably one of the reasons behind this uptick, as Mantovani’s comments on religion suggest. The tragic story of twenty-seven-year-old Jandira Magdalena dos Santos Cruz is further indicative of this trend. In 2014, Cruz died during an illegal abortion procedure in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The abortion providers burned and dismembered her body to avoid identification and then dumped her body. Cruz’s family is evangelical, and her sister opposes decriminalizing the procedure. As she told the press: “Many people have been criticizing her [Cruz] and saying she deserved to die. I’m against abortion too, but she paid the price. Now those who did this to her have to pay too.”

It’s perhaps not a surprise to readers in the U.S. that opposition to legal (and thus safe) abortion is growing in current-day Brazil. After all, with states like Alabama and Georgia passing highly restrictive bans on the procedure, it seems that our own country is moving in the same direction. This repressive backlash toward women’s reproductive rights at home and abroad requires us to rethink dominant narratives of liberal progress in relation to women’s bodily integrity – and human rights. Scholars now argue for a more nuanced history of abortion, one where progress zigs and zags, in which strong progress toward women’s bodily autonomy clashes with patriarchal law, religious dogma, and medical technologies.

My book, A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil », examines this long and contested history. It explores how women negotiated their reproductive lives, including abortion, during moments of political upheaval and consolidation in Brazil, providing an embodied history of childbirth and abortion.