Series: California Series in Public Anthropology

Scripting Death offers a comprehensive account of post-compulsory education and training policy in the UK since 1944. It challenges the reader and policymakers to think differently about how to design and implement more successful skills policies in the future.

2020 L.A. Times Book Prize Finalist, History A provocative examination of how the U.S. military has shaped our entire world, from today’s costly, endless wars to the prominence of violence in everyday American life. The United States has been fighting wars constantly since invading Afghanistan in 2001. This nonstop warfare is far less exceptional than it might seem: the United...

The United States has been fighting wars constantly since invading Afghanistan in 2001. This nonstop warfare is far less exceptional than it might seem: the United States has been at war or has invaded other countries almost every year since independence. In The United States of War, David Vine traces this pattern of bloody conflict from Columbus’s 1494 arrival in...

Investigating the unsolved murder of a female law student and the pervasive violence against Guatemalan women that drives migration. Part memoir and part forensic investigation, Textures of Terror is a gripping first-person story of women, violence, and migration out of Guatemala—and how the United States is implicated. Accompanying Jorge Velásquez in a years-long search for answers after the brutal murder...

The consequences of U.S. border policies through the experiences of Honduran migrants. Hondurans have been at the heart of some of the most visible migration phenomena in the last few years, as well as the direct target of anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy. In Leave If You Can, Amelia Frank-Vitale offers a detailed portrait of the Honduran exodus and what it...

In this gripping and provocative “ethnography of death,” anthropologist and MacArthur "Genius" Fellow Jason De León sheds light on one of the most pressing political issues of our time—the human consequences of US immigration and border policy. The Land of Open Graves reveals the suffering and deaths that occur daily in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona as thousands of undocumented...

"There is a nuclear ghost in Minamisōma." This is how one resident describes a mysterious experience following the 2011 nuclear fallout in coastal Fukushima. Investigating the nuclear ghost among the graying population, Ryo Morimoto encounters radiation's shapeshifting effects. What happens if state authorities, scientific experts, and the public disagree about the extent and nature of the harm caused by the...

An intimate examination of the everyday lives and suffering of Mexican migrants and indigenous people in our contemporary food system. An anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, Seth Holmes shows how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and healthcare. Holmes’s material is visceral and powerful. He trekked with his companions illegally through...

Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience working in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world's poor is the most important human rights struggle of our time. In Pathologies of Power, Farmer uses harrowing stories of life—and death—in extreme situations to link the lived experiences of individual victims...

The stories of fathers caring for non-verbal children and how these experiences alter their understandings of care, masculinity, and living a full life. Vulnerable narratives of fatherhood are few and far between; rarer still is an ethnography that delves into the practical and emotional realities of intensive caregiving. Grounded in the intimate everyday lives of men caring for children with...

Doctor and social activist Paul Farmer shares a collection of charismatic short speeches that aims to inspire the next generation. One of the most passionate and influential voices for global health equity and social justice, Farmer encourages young people to tackle the greatest challenges of our times. Engaging, often humorous, and always inspiring, these speeches bring to light the brilliance...

All I Eat Is Medicine charts the lives of individuals and institutions in the thick of the Mozambican AIDS epidemic during the global scale-up of treatment for HIV/AIDS in Mozambique at the turn of the twenty-first century. Even as the AIDS treatment scale-up saved lives, it perpetuated the exploitation and exclusion that was implicated in the propagation of the epidemic...

Bringing together the experience, perspective and expertise of Paul Farmer, Jim Yong Kim, and Arthur Kleinman, Reimagining Global Health provides an original, compelling introduction to the field of global health. Drawn from a Harvard course developed by their student Matthew Basilico, this work provides an accessible and engaging framework for the study of global health. Insisting on an approach that...

A powerful and challenging look at what “success” and belonging mean in America, through the eyes of Latino high schoolers striving toward community- and care-focused futures. This book challenges dominant representations of the so-called American Dream, those “patriotic” narratives that focus on personal achievement as the way to become an American. This narrative misaligns with the lived experience of many...

Turns the familiar story of trafficking across the US-Mexico border on its head, looking at firearms smuggled south from the United States to Mexico and their ricochet effects. American guns have entangled the lives of people on both sides of the US-Mexico border in a vicious circle of violence. After treating wounded migrants and refugees seeking safety in the United...

A galvanising story of how everyday people built a powerful anti-eviction movement in gentrified San Francisco. In the early 2010s, San Francisco experienced a tech boom that created both great wealth and great inequality. The city became known for runaway gentrification, a major housing crisis, and an "eviction epidemic" of long-term tenants. Yet these changes also drove an inspiring housing...

This powerful work of gonzo journalism, predating the widespread acknowledgement of the opioid epidemic as such, immerses the reader in the world of homelessness and drug and alcohol abuse in the contemporary United States. For over a decade, Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg followed a social network of two dozen heroin injectors and crack smokers in the San Francisco drug...