Dope Double Agent is a war on drugs story, one that starts in the 60s and only ends with the last lines of the book. More than this, it is the story of a young Berkeley student--and occasional drug user--who turns into an insider expert in the drug war with a personal agenda to subvert and correct it. He checks in as a heroin patient, works the streets of New York, dips into worlds of PCP and LSD, and seeks the sources of crack, heroin and ecstasy. The delusions of the experts, the public and the politicians amaze him and make him think the double agent job will be easy. Instead it is impossible. He fails, spectacularly so on such hallowed ground as the National Academy of Sciences and the National Institutes of Health. Come behind the scenes and watch the drug policy emperor march along for decades thinking he wears a new suit of clothes.
Singer offers a fresh set of ideas for understanding how the global socioeconomic system insures that massive quantities of psychotropic drugs reach the poorest sectors of American society. Drugging the Poor provides a unified theoretical framework to assess how all drugs, including tobacco, heroin, alcohol, cocaine, and diverted pharmaceuticals contribute to maintaining social inequality among the wealthier and poorer social classes in American society. Singers analysis rejects conventional approaches that see tobacco or alcohol manufacturers and distributors, on the one hand, and drug cartels and mafias, on the other, as completely different entities. Instead, he shows how legal and illegal drug corporations share key features and follow the same economic principles. He also emphasizes that mixing legal and illegal drugs to self-medicate against social discrimination, poverty, and structural violence offers short-term relief, but in the long run, it functions to maintain an unjust and oppressive system. Drugging the Poor actively challenges the assumption that how things are is how they always have been or how they need to be.
"This volume investigates the significant role qualitative research plays in expanding and refining our understandings of crime and justice. It features seventeen original essays that discuss the relationship between methodology and theory. The result is a theoretically engaged volume that explores the approaches of qualitative scholars in the collection and treatment of data in criminological scholarship.Among the key issues addressed in the volume are methodological rigor in qualitative research; movement between method, theory building, theoretical refinement and expansion; diversity of qualitative methodologies, from classic field research to contemporary innovations; and considerations of the future of qualitative criminological research.Qualitative research use has expanded rapidly in the last twenty years. This latest volume of Advances in Criminological Theory presents a cogent appraisal of qualitative criminology and the ways in which rigorous qualitative research contributes to theorizing about crime and justice."
The Lively Science is Michael Agar's accessible, idiosyncratic, often humorous, and sometimes controversial explication of his own polestar truth: "Research on humans in their social world by other humans is not a traditional science like the one created by Galileo and Newton." However, if the social world is not a lab, neither is it a collection of random events. The book lays out a clear, straightforward path to carrying out the basic scientific tasks of forming questions and answering them to explore and account for that non-randomness. The author deploys myriad engaging examples drawn from a lifetime of applied and basic research to demonstrate how human science researchers can produce discoveries that are scientifically defensible and useful in the real world. Agar grounds his how-to guide in an approachable discussion of epistemology and draws on thinkers whose writings may be unfamiliar to many social scientists. He blends that work with new intellectual tools, such as complexity theory, disasters research, and conversational analysis. The result is an innovative and practical methodology that is true to the realities and surprises of research by and about humans, yet preserves scientific standards of falsifiability, empiricism, logic, and systematic presentation of results. This book represents the best of Michael Agar's visionary work. With a new foreword by Michael Brown celebrating Agar's enormous contribution to social science methodology, The Lively Science is for all researchers who seek to explore the full potential of a human social science.
Culture: How to Make It Work in a World of Hybrids offers a compelling and original way to think about promoting connections across human differences in our global society. This book provides a fresh vision for the core anthropological concept of “culture,” one attuned to our contemporary global society where people receive hybrid cultural influences from many places in many ways. Providing a stimulating look at one of the most basic topics in social science, it is written without academic jargon, is rich in humor, and is replete with provocative examples, making it accessible to undergraduate students in anthropology and other social sciences as well as to scholars and non-academic readers in fields where the fostering of intercultural (or, as this book argues, inter-hybrid) communications is vital. Michael Agar explores two meanings of culture: culture as a label for the beliefs and practices of a specific group, and culture as marking the boundary between modern humans and our ancestors together with the rest of the animal kingdom (although this book acknowledges that that boundary has changed to a slippery slope). By looking back at the emergence of language and culture, through a broad range of the social and natural sciences, those human universals that make connections across human differences possible—as well as those that constrain that ability—are identified. This book concludes with a discussion of social perspective taking as a promising approach toward the development of a shared “languaculture” by any group of diverse—hybrid—humans who need to work together to accomplish whatever task is at hand.
This volume provides researchers and scholars with a broad overview of the contributions of social psychologists and sociologists to the study of sexual relationships and sexual expression across the life course. These contributions include analyses of the dynamics of several types of contemporary sexual relationships – e.g., short-term, long-term non-exclusive, and committed. Chapters analyze the influence of major social institutions – e.g., religion, family and economy - on them. The content and scope of this volume have been carefully chosen to balance coverage of traditional emphases – dating, marriage, commercial sex work, sex education - with new and cutting edge materials – embodiment, Trans*, asexualities. Sections review major theoretical perspectives and the principal research methods. Coverage of sexual orientation is integrated throughout. This volume provides excellent resources for anyone interested in research on sexualities.
The third edition of Introducing Medical Anthropology: A Discipline in Action, provides students with a first exposure to the growing field of medical and health anthropology. The narrative is guided by unifying themes. First, health-oriented anthropologists are very involved in the process of helping, to varying degrees, to change the world around them through their work in applied projects, policy initiatives, and advocacy. Second, the authors present the fundamental importance of culture and social relationships in health and illness by demonstrating that illness and disease involve complex biosocial processes and that resolving them requires attention to a range of factors beyond biology. Third, through an examination of the issue of health inequality, this book underlines the need for an analysis that moves beyond cultural or even ecological models of health toward a comprehensive biosocial approach. Such an approach integrates biological, cultural, and social factors in building unified theoretical understandings of the origin of ill health, while contributing to the building of effective and equitable national health-care systems. NEW TO THIS EDITION All chapters have been updated or expanded. NEW: Chapter 8, “The Biopolitics of Life: Biotechnology, Biocapital, and Bioethics.”•Revised text style for crisper language and livelier phrasing. Added a brief signposting of chapter content at the beginning of each chapter and reviewquestions about the key issues and concepts at the end of each chapter. Expanded discussion of Zika, Ebola, gender and health, PTSD and psychological anthropol-ogy, geriatric health, the contemporary vaccine controversy, the internet and health, and thehealth impacts of fracking and nuclear energy development. Concluding chapter examines anthropologically informed strategies and visions for a health-ier world.
