Guerrilla Auditors

Guerrilla Auditors

Author: Kregg Hetherington

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2011-09-14

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 082235036X

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An ethnography exploring disagreements among Paraguayan peasants, government bureaucrats, and development experts about how state bureaucracy should function, what archival documents are for, and who gets to narrate the past.


Vital Relations

Vital Relations

Author: Jean Dennison

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2024-04-10

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 1469676982

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Relationality is a core principle of Indigenous studies, yet there is relatively little work that assesses what building relations looks like in practice, especially in the messy context of Native nations' governance. Focusing on the unique history and context of Osage nation building efforts, this insightful ethnography provides a deeper vision of the struggles Native nation leaders are currently facing. Exploring the Osage philosophy of moving to a new country as a framework for relational governance, Jean Dennison shows that for the Osage, nation building is an ongoing process of reworking colonial constraints to serve the nation's own ends. As Dennison argues, Osage officials have undertaken deliberate changes to strengthen Osage relations to their language, self-governance, health, and land—core needs for a people to thrive now and into the future. Scholars and future Indigenous leaders can learn from the Osage Nation's past challenges, strategies, and ongoing commitments to better enact the difficult work of Indigenous nation building.


The Government of Beans

The Government of Beans

Author: Kregg Hetherington

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2020-05-15

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1478007486

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The Government of Beans is about the rough edges of environmental regulation, where tenuous state power and blunt governmental instruments encounter ecological destruction and social injustice. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Paraguay was undergoing dramatic economic, political, and environmental change due to a boom in the global demand for soybeans. Although the country's massive new soy monocrop brought wealth, it also brought deforestation, biodiversity loss, rising inequality, and violence. Kregg Hetherington traces well-meaning attempts by bureaucrats and activists to regulate the destructive force of monocrops that resulted in the discovery that the tools of modern government are at best inadequate to deal with the complex harms of modern agriculture and at worst exacerbate them. The book simultaneously tells a local story of people, plants, and government; a regional story of the rise and fall of Latin America's new left; and a story of the Anthropocene writ large, about the long-term, paradoxical consequences of destroying ecosystems in the name of human welfare.


Archives

Archives

Author: Andrew Prescott

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-03-14

Total Pages: 545

ISBN-13: 0198829329

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Archives have never been more complex, expansive, or ubiquitous. Archives: Power, Truth, and Fiction is an indispensable research and reference book: a hugely helpful guide to archives in the twenty-first century. Material discussed ranges from medieval manuscripts to born-digital archival content, and art objects to state papers.


After Utopia

After Utopia

Author: Larisa Kurtović

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-28

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 1000485552

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This collection examines how the loss of state socialism as a world-making project and the subsequent failures of postsocialist "civil society building" have impacted new generations of progressive, antinationalist, anarchist, and social-justice oriented activists. How do the histories of state socialism come to shape activist thinking and practice in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus? What kinds of political work can and does emerge out of this 30-year-long experience of political, social, and economic transformation? Understanding postsocialism as an intersectional experience and a geopolitically sensitive form of knowledge, this collection of essays seeks to render visible the forms of political activism in the region that are not tied to, or fully determined by, specific moments of street protest and public interruption. Instead, the contributors examine forms of activist effort that endure in the aftermath of protest movements and in the course of lingering crises, in order to capture how our interlocutors seek to enact their desired futures under the conditions of intensifying and shape-shifting pressures of neoliberal governance. The ethnographies that span from Armenia to Ukraine, to Bosnia-Herzegovina to the newly emerging transnational Balkan route that refugees and migrants have created, illuminate how local activists engage with and/or disengage from their socialist inheritance of political imaginaries differently and imagine different futures. Our collection argues for a need for a careful, theoretically nuanced and context-specific analysis across the uneven political landscapes of the former socialist world. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of History and Anthropology.


Sustainable Birth in Disruptive Times

Sustainable Birth in Disruptive Times

Author: Kim Gutschow

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-03-22

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 3030547752

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This contributed volume explores flexible, adaptable, and sustainable solutions to the shockingly high costs of birth across the globe. It presents innovative and collaborative maternity care practices and policies that are intersectional, human rights-based, transdisciplinary, science-driven, and community-based. Each chapter describes participatory and midwifery-oriented care that helps improve maternal and newborn outcomes within minoritized populations. The featured case studies respond to resource constraints and inequities of access by transforming relations between providers and families or by creating more egalitarian relations among diverse providers such as midwives, obstetricians, and nurses that minimize inefficient hierarchies within maternity care. The authors build on a growing awareness that quality and respectful midwifery care has lower costs and improved outcomes for child bearers, newborns, and providers. Topics include: Sustainable collaborations including transfers of care among midwives and obstetricians in India, The Netherlands, Germany, United Kingdom, and Denmark Midwifery-oriented, femifocal, indigenous, and inclusive models of care that counter obstetric violence and gender stereotypes in Mexico, Chile, Guatemala, Argentina, and India Doula care and midwifery care for women of color, previously incarcerated women, indigenous women, and other minoritized groups in the global north and south Practices and metrics for improving quality of newborn and maternal care as well as maternal and newborn outcomes in disruptive times and disaster settings Sustainable Birth in Disruptive Times is an essential and timely resource for providers, policy makers, students, and activists with interests in maternity care, midwifery, medical anthropology, maternal health, newborn health, obstetrics, childbirth, medicine, and global health in disruptive times.


digitalSTS

digitalSTS

Author: Janet Vertesi

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2019-05-07

Total Pages: 568

ISBN-13: 0691187088

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New perspectives on digital scholarship that speak to today's computational realities Scholars across the humanities, social sciences, and information sciences are grappling with how best to study virtual environments, use computational tools in their research, and engage audiences with their results. Classic work in science and technology studies (STS) has played a central role in how these fields analyze digital technologies, but many of its key examples do not speak to today’s computational realities. This groundbreaking collection brings together a world-class group of contributors to refresh the canon for contemporary digital scholarship. In twenty-five pioneering and incisive essays, this unique digital field guide offers innovative new approaches to digital scholarship, the design of digital tools and objects, and the deployment of critically grounded technologies for analysis and discovery. Contributors cover a broad range of topics, including software development, hackathons, digitized objects, diversity in the tech sector, and distributed scientific collaborations. They discuss methodological considerations of social networks and data analysis, design projects that can translate STS concepts into durable scientific work, and much more. Featuring a concise introduction by Janet Vertesi and David Ribes and accompanied by an interactive microsite, this book provides new perspectives on digital scholarship that will shape the agenda for tomorrow’s generation of STS researchers and practitioners.


Documenting Death

Documenting Death

Author: Adrienne E. Strong

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2020-11-03

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0520973917

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A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Documenting Death is a gripping ethnographic account of the deaths of pregnant women in a hospital in a low-resource setting in Tanzania. Through an exploration of everyday ethics and care practices on a local maternity ward, anthropologist Adrienne E. Strong untangles the reasons Tanzania has achieved so little sustainable success in reducing maternal mortality rates, despite global development support. Growing administrative pressures to document good care serve to preclude good care in practice while placing frontline healthcare workers in moral and ethical peril. Maternal health emergencies expose the precarity of hospital social relations and accountability systems, which, together, continue to lead to the deaths of pregnant women.