Here are 100 books that How to Have Theory in an Epidemic fans have personally recommended if you like
How to Have Theory in an Epidemic.
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I’ve been interested in medicine and how stories influence the decisions that people make for as long as I can remember. Watching family and friends make choices about their own healthcare was always fascinated to me and I was always curious as to why some narratives had more staying power than others. After getting my BA in history, I was lucky enough to talk to someone who suggested that I study folklore. I ended up with both a MA and PhD in folklore and became a professor who studies the intersection of folklore and how it affects the medical decisions we all make in our own lives and the lives of others.
This is an amazing book if you want to understand that disease isn’t just medical, it’s also cultural.
Contagiousreally describes how culture influences how we understand illness and how that affects treatment and care of individuals, including who we blame and how we understand risk.
People like to think of medicine and science as being detached and objective, but this book shows that simply isn’t true.
How should we understand the fear and fascination elicited by the accounts of communicable disease outbreaks that proliferated, following the emergence of HIV, in scientific publications and the mainstream media? The repetition of particular characters, images, and story lines-of Patients Zero and superspreaders, hot zones and tenacious microbes-produced a formulaic narrative as they circulated through the media and were amplified in popular fiction and film. The "outbreak narrative" begins with the identification of an emerging infection, follows it through the global networks of contact and contagion, and ends with the epidemiological work that contains it. Priscilla Wald argues that we…
I’ve been interested in medicine and how stories influence the decisions that people make for as long as I can remember. Watching family and friends make choices about their own healthcare was always fascinated to me and I was always curious as to why some narratives had more staying power than others. After getting my BA in history, I was lucky enough to talk to someone who suggested that I study folklore. I ended up with both a MA and PhD in folklore and became a professor who studies the intersection of folklore and how it affects the medical decisions we all make in our own lives and the lives of others.
I may be a bit biased on this one since Dr. Goldstein is one of my mentors, but this book really shows the power that narrative has when it comes to understanding illness and assessing risk.
Once Upon a Virus very clearly helps us understand why looking at disease and illness from the standpoint of the community is so important. If we want to promote any type of health behavior or change, we must adapt to the specific community instead of expecting the community to change.
Listening to these stories is crucial for public health and I really wish more people would read this book and understand that!
Once Upon a Virus explores how contemporary, or "urban," legends are indicators of culturally complex attitudes toward health and illness. Tracing the rich tradition of AIDS legends in relation to current scholarship on belief, Diane Goldstein shows how such stories not only articulate widespread perceptions of risk, health care, and health policy, they also influence official and scientific approaches to the disease and its management. Notions that appear in narratives of who gets AIDS, how and why, are indicators of broad issues involving health beliefs, concerns, and needs.
I’ve been interested in medicine and how stories influence the decisions that people make for as long as I can remember. Watching family and friends make choices about their own healthcare was always fascinated to me and I was always curious as to why some narratives had more staying power than others. After getting my BA in history, I was lucky enough to talk to someone who suggested that I study folklore. I ended up with both a MA and PhD in folklore and became a professor who studies the intersection of folklore and how it affects the medical decisions we all make in our own lives and the lives of others.
Emily Martin’s work was some of the first things I read when I wanted to understand how we understand medicine.
There’s such a gap between the health information we’re given and what we actually believe and Martin really covers how Americans have understood the concept of immunity and how we’re influenced by popular culture and the media.
This book is absolutely crucial for understanding both how we look at immunity and understanding how doctors are not free of bias.
Argues that changing attitudes towards sickness and immunity are reflected in other views, such as the trend towards temporary employees who can be let go when no longer needed
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
I’ve been interested in medicine and how stories influence the decisions that people make for as long as I can remember. Watching family and friends make choices about their own healthcare was always fascinated to me and I was always curious as to why some narratives had more staying power than others. After getting my BA in history, I was lucky enough to talk to someone who suggested that I study folklore. I ended up with both a MA and PhD in folklore and became a professor who studies the intersection of folklore and how it affects the medical decisions we all make in our own lives and the lives of others.
Women’s voices are often trivialized in healthcare and I’m willing to bet that most women have experienced some form of medicalized sexism while receiving healthcare (I know I have).
Anika Wilson does an amazing job of listening to women’s voices and their experiences in this book, highlighting how important rumors, legend, and gossip are to healthcare.
Informal folk narrative genres such as gossip, advice, rumor, and urban legends provide a unique lens through which to discern popular formations of gender conflict and AIDS beliefs. This is the first book on AIDS and gender in Africa to draw primarily on such narratives. By exploring tales of love medicine, gossip about romantic rivalries, rumors of mysterious new diseases, marital advice, and stories of rape, among others, it provides rich, personally grounded insights into the everyday struggles of people living in an era marked by social upheaval.
I am committed to creative work. All of my adult life has been shaped by that commitment. And while I don’t directly recommend it (unconventional routes are unpaved, and, of course, there be dragons), I know it is the route to beauty and making the most out of the world as we live it. We’re lucky to make music, show love, and hand it down to our kids, but we need to tell stories, and we must have stories to tell. All of this arises from your creative power. I know a lot more than I can say with words, but the languages of sharing emerge from venturing into the unknown.
Know your audience? I’m kidding—never condescend; there’s nothing to be gained. Leave the smug cleverness to the Gladwells and Pinkers; we’re seeking higher ground here. What is culture? Don’t act like you don’t want to talk about it – or the stakes. This is THE TALK we actually need to have.
We have an affinity for our own habits, and Bourdieu walks us through them using the socially innocent language of likes and dislikes. His is a very straightforward discussion of experiences and social conditions that you didn’t know you needed. How do tastes vary, and why? Hmmmm.
No judgment of taste is innocent. In a word, we are all snobs. Pierre Bourdieu brilliantly illuminates this situation of the middle class in the modern world. France's leading sociologist focuses here on the French bourgeoisie, its tastes and preferences. Distinction is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind.
In the course of everyday life people constantly choose between what they find aesthetically pleasing and what they consider tacky, merely trendy, or ugly. Bourdieu bases his study on surveys that took into account the multitude of social factors that play a part…
I’ve long been interested in what different traditions have to say about how to live our best lives. While a graduate student, I naturally drifted towards studying both Stoicism and Buddhism and wrote my MA dissertation on a comparison of both (which ultimately, much later, became the basis for my book). During my time as a Ph.D. student, I was actively involved in the Modern Stoicism project. As well as running the blog for the project, I was also involved, along with a team of academics and psychotherapists, in creating adaptations of that ancient philosophy for the modern world. I also draw on both philosophies in coping with chronic illness.
I think this is probably one of the most interesting, albeit lesser-known, books about the modern Stoic revival. Modern Stoicism is a dynamic movement that comprises many different voices and potential applications of the philosophy.
I love how this varied collection of essays, under the skillful editorial eyes of Greg Sadler and Leah Goldrick, has us thinking one minute about how Stoicism and mindfulness can intertwine and the next about what a Stoic would make of Jordan Peterson, all the while never losing sight of the power of the philosophy for personal transformation.
I highly recommend this book, a comprehensive ‘snapshot’ of all the different ways Stoicism can enrich our personal and collective lives.
A fresh take on the difference between trauma and hardship in order to help accurately spot the difference and avoid over-generalizations.
The book integrates the latest findings in brain science, child development, psycho-social context, theory, and clinical experiences to make the case that trauma is much more than a cluster…
Conformism, religiosity, and tribalism pose an increasingly serious threat to democracy, equality, liberty, and the world order. Many public intellectuals, therefore, argue that we should try to tamp down or eliminate these tendencies. I argue the opposite. Based on decades of collaborative research with psychologists, evolutionary scientists, historians, and archaeologists, I show that the human propensities to copy, believe, and belong are here to stay, and our best hope for the future is to draw on our rich inheritance of biological and cultural evolution to harness and manage these core features of human nature more sustainably, peacefully, and consensually.
Some people are sticklers for following norms and conventions, while others take a more relaxed approach. The same goes for entire cultures, which vary on a continuum from very tight (think Singapore or the military) to very loose (think Amsterdam or hippy communes). This book brings together a wealth of experimental data showing that societal norms tighten or loosen in response to perceptions of threat.
Even though the specific nature of those threats inevitably varies and the cultural systems of the scores of societies in which Gelfand has gathered data are diverse, the same underlying patterns are discernible everywhere. Gelfand’s work explores the profound ramifications of this discovery both for our understanding of history and of the world we live in today.
'A groundbreaking analysis of what used to be an impenetrable mystery: how and why do cultures differ? ... Anyone interested in our cultural divides will find tremendous insight in Rule Makers, Rule Breakers' - Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of Enlightenment Now
Why are clocks in Germany always correct, while those in Brazil are frequently wrong? Why are Singaporeans jailed for selling gum? Why do women in New Zealand have three times the sex of females worldwide? Why was the Daimler-Chrysler merger ill-fated from the start? And why does each generation of Americans give their…
I first became interested in the history of the British Empire as an undergraduate. Understanding this history helped me relate my parents’ experiences growing up in a postcolonial nation with the history of the United States, where I grew up. As an academic historian, my research and teaching emphasize connections—between disparate places, between the past and present, and between our personal experiences and those of people born in distant times and places. My first children’s book allowed me to translate my scholarly work for a young audience. I hope this list of books that inspire my approach to history encourages your own investigations of imperialism and its pasts!
My parents were born in India and migrated to the US. Postcolonial thinkers have helped me understand how imperial history continues to shape contemporary identities, not only in Britain but for those of us located all over the world whose family histories are intertwined with it.
More than anyone else, Stuart Hall has made the relationship between the imperial past and the present visible. In this collection of essays, Hall examines identity, showing how our understandings of ourselves are not absolute and intrinsic but shaped by history and politics.
Hall gives us the tools to locate ourselves in history, rethink our identity and relation to community, and contest dominant structures of race and power.
From his arrival in Britain in the 1950s and involvement in the New Left, to founding the field of cultural studies and examining race and identity in the 1990s and early 2000s, Stuart Hall has been central to shaping many of the cultural and political debates of our time. Essential Essays-a landmark two-volume set-brings together Stuart Hall's most influential and foundational works. Spanning the whole of his career, these volumes reflect the breadth and depth of his intellectual and political projects while demonstrating their continued vitality and importance.
Volume 2: Identity and Diaspora draws from Hall's later essays, in which…
As Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Lucas put it, "Once you start thinking about economic growth, it's hard to think about anything else." That's why I am eager to share the best books on economic development with you! I am a Senior Economist at the World Bank, the world's premier development institution. Over the years, I have developed a deep interest in what makes countries prosper, have published extensively on the topic in academic journals, and earned a PhD in Economics along the way. As a development practitioner, I have been supporting sustainable growth across the globe, with working experience in the Caribbean, Africa, and the Pacific.
In a captivating journey from the dawn of human existence to the present, Oded Galor offers a fascinating tale of why some nations have developed while others haven't.
The book explains how technology, family size, and adaptation led to a profound change in human history, with the Industrial Revolution as the turning point. The fundamental forces driving the explosion of per capita prosperity (in some nations) can be traced back to sound political institutions, conducive cultural traits, and an 'optimal' ethnic diversity that followed from the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa some 70,000 years ago.
I was struck by how the author brought together a wide variety of research on growth and development in a coherent framework.
This breakthrough scientific masterwork - and INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER - reveals the underlying forces that have shaped human history and will secure our future...
'Masterful. Galor answers the ultimate mystery' Lewis Dartnell
The stunning advances that have transformed human experience in recent centuries are no accident of history - they are the result of universal and timeless forces, operating since the dawn of our species. Drawing on a lifetime's scientific investigation, Oded Galor's ground-breaking new vision overturns a host of long-held assumptions to reveal the deeper causes that have shaped the journey of humanity:
Education rather than industrialisation Family size and…
I'm intrigued by boundaries and the relationships between different ideologies, or isms. In 1992, I joined the European Project at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. This was a fascinating group of people from Israel, Palestine, and Germany who studied the connections between Europe and the Middle East. Then I opened a new field of studies that continues to engage me: multiculturalism. In my books and articles (most recent:The Republic, Secularism and Security: France versus the Burqa and the Niqab), I examine the extent to which democracy may interfere in the cultural affairs of minorities within democracy, how to find a balance between individual rights and group rights, and whether liberalism and multiculturalism are reconcilable.
Drawing on contemporary cultural politics from Western Europe, Canada, and the United States, Benhabib understands cultures as continually creating, re-creating, and renegotiating the imagined boundaries between "us" and "them." She defends the creation and expansion of deliberative discursive multicultural spaces in liberal democracies, arguing that a legal pluralist model can be a good complement to deliberative and discursive democratic multiculturalism. In her insightful study, Benhabib contends that the Rawlsian model of public reason and the deliberative model of democracy share certain fundamental premises. Both view the legitimation of political power in the examination of the justice of institutions to be a public process, open to all citizens. The idea that justice should be in the public eye, open to scrutiny, examination, and reflection is fundamental.
How can liberal democracy best be realized in a world fraught with conflicting new forms of identity politics and intensifying conflicts over culture? This book brings unparalleled clarity to the contemporary debate over this question. Maintaining that cultures are themselves torn by conflicts about their own boundaries, Seyla Benhabib challenges the assumption shared by many theorists and activists that cultures are clearly defined wholes. She argues that much debate - including that of "strong" multiculturalism, which sees cultures as distinct pieces of a mosaic - is dominated by this faulty belief, one with grave consequences for how we think injustices…
