Reaffirm your political and spiritual commitment to helping the poor and oppressed! How can teachers and social workers reach the endangered kids who seldom come to school? By going to the streets, where the children live, work, fight, steal, get sick, sell their bodies, and all too often die. Working with Children on the Streets of Brazil is an in-depth study of Brazil's homeless children and the street youthworkers who offer them food, clothing, beds, hope, medical attention, education, and simple respect. The street children of Brazil live in unimaginable poverty and squalor, stealing jewelry or selling their bodies to survive, wandering homeless and untaught, pursued by death squads who clean up the streets by washing them with blood. Yet the street youthworkers interviewed in this moving, powerful book--some inspired by the Catholic Church's Liberation Theology movement, some employed by the government or private agencies--continue their efforts to help and heal these children, often with remarkable success. Their work is widely respected, and their unique viewpoint on serving throwaway children can offer creative solutions for social service workers around the globe. Many of the issues discussed in Working with Children on the Streets of Brazil will be painfully familiar to social service workers everywhere, including: the problems of how to identify, classify, and count the children of the streets the reasons children leave or lose their homes the implications of policy decisions and socioeconomic forces on the children's lives the clash between law-and-order advocates and social service professionals the negative effects of deinstitutionalization and overcrowded youth homes the tragic societal consequences of the widening gap between rich and poor the problems of youth crime and violence the difficulties in delivering education, health care, and basic services for homeless children This impressive book offers a detailed history of the development of street social education; a study of the aims, methods, and experiences of youthworkers; and solid advice on using the principles and practices of street social education to reach the at-risk youth of any country, including the United States. Working with Children on the Streets of Brazil is both a scholarly work on the phenomenon of homeless children and a rousing call to action that will remind you of the reasons you chose to work in social services.

In Bahia, Brazil, the decades following emancipation saw the rise of reformers who sought to reshape the citizenry by educating Bahian women in methods for raising “better babies.” The idealized Brazilian would be better equipped to contribute to the labor and organizational needs of a modern nation. Backed by many physicians, politicians, and intellectuals, the resulting welfare programs for mothers and children mirrored complex debates about Brazilian nationality. Examining the local and national contours of this movement, Progressive Mothers, Better Babies investigates families, medical institutions, state-building, and social stratification to trace the resulting policies, which gathered momentum in the aftermath of abolition (1888) and the declaration of the First Republic (1889), culminating during the administration of President Getúlio Vargas (1930–1945). Exploring the cultural discourses on race, gender, and poverty that permeated medical knowledge and the public health system for almost a century, Okezi T. Otovo draws on extensive archival research to reconstruct the implications for Bahia, where family patronage politics governed poor women’s labor as the mothers who were the focus of medical interventions were often the nannies and nursemaids of society’s wealthier families. The book reveals key transition points as the state of Bahia transformed from being a place where poor families could expect few social services to becoming the home of numerous programs targeting the poorest mothers and their children. Negotiating crucial questions of identity, this history sheds new light on larger debates about Brazil’s past and future.

The book offers an interdisciplinary qualitative study of the history of policing in Brazil and its colonial underpinnings, providing theoretical accounts of the relationship between biopolitics, space, and race, and post-colonial/decolonial work on the state, violence, and the production of disposable political subjects. Focused empirically on contemporary (1985-2015) police killings and disappearances in favelas, particularly in Rio de Janeiro, the books argues that the invisibility of this phenomenon is the product of a colonial mindset – one that has persisted throughout Brazil’s experience of both dictatorship and re-democratisation and is traceable to the legacies of the Portuguese empire and the plantation system implemented. Analysing the development of the police as a colonial mechanism of social control, Villenave shows how the "war on drugs" reproduces this same colonial logic and renders some, overwhelmingly black, lives disposable and thus vulnerable to unchecked police brutality and death. It will be of interest to students and scholars of international politics and also contributes to critical security studies, postcolonial and de-colonial thought, global politics, the politics of Latin America and political geography.

Passion was never in the bargain Addison Reed lost her fiancé, but she'll do whatever it takes to protect his legacy. When the gorgeous and arrogant landowner, Brazilian billionaire Bruno Duarte, who is thwarting her at every turn, refuses to meet with her, she puts her plan into action. He will listen to her. Bruno's plan was simple: return to Brazil and marry to fulfill his father's dying wish. But when his engagement crumbles, and he's then stranded with an idealistic woman hell-bent on saving a tribe of people on his land, he sees the perfect solution. If his feisty and passionate abductor agrees to a bogus marriage, he'll relocate the tribe. With the Brazilian heat rivaling the growing heat of their desire, will Bruno and Addison abandon their respective plans and give in to each other, or will their differences tear them apart?

"In An Epidemic of Uncertainty, Jenny Trinitapoli advances a new model for studying social life by emphasizing something that social scientists routinely omit from their theories, models, and measures--what people know they don't know. The book takes Malawi's ongoing AIDS epidemic as its entry point for understanding the stakes of uncertainty. After a four-decades-long battle, new infections are down and AIDS-related mortality has declined. But in the wake of pandemic AIDS, an epidemic of uncertainty persists; at any given point in time, half the population doesn't know their HIV status. The author argues that AIDS-related uncertainty is measurable, pervasive, and impervious to biomedical solutions. The consequences of uncertainty are pertinent to multiple domains of life including relationship stability, fertility, health, and well-being. Even as HIV is transformed from a progressive, fatal infection to a chronic and manageable condition, the accompanying epidemic of uncertainty remains central to understanding social life in this part of the world. This book is based on a ground-breaking longitudinal study that documents how the lives of young adults in Balaka, Malawi, unfold over a ten-year period. Trinitapoli also makes three general contributions: first, a demography of uncertainty and a set of theoretical and empirical tools for integrating what people know they don't know into social-scientific models of human behavior; second, a decade-long longitudinal study articulating what demographic approaches have to offer the social sciences; and third, an expansive attitude toward the empirical, which brings longitudinal survey data to life by incorporating accounts of uncertainty and its resolution through ethnography designed to capture population chatter and gossip in Balaka"--

"A wake-up call to those who are honestly concerned with global childhood safety."—Carol Stack, author of All Our Kin