Medical Transnationalism examines Korean immigrants’ distinctive healthcare behaviors, contributing factors to their medical tourism, and their experiences and evaluations of medical tourism. Analyzing survey data of 507 Korean immigrants and in-depth interviews with 120 Korean immigrants in the New York–New Jersey area, this book finds that there are three distinctive types of healthcare behaviors that Korean immigrants employ to deal with their barriers (e.g., the language barrier and not having health insurance) to formal US healthcare: dependence on co-ethnic doctors in the United States, the use of Hanbang (traditional Korean medicine) in the United States, and medical tours to the homeland. This book also finds that social transnational ties and health insurance status are the most influential contributing factors to Korean immigrants’ decision to take medical tours to the home country. The vast majority of Korean immigrant medical tourists are satisfied with their medical tourism experiences. In this book, Sou Hyun Jang makes both empirical and theoretical contributions to the literature on immigrant healthcare and immigrant transnationalism by focusing on one immigrant group and connecting medical transnationalism to other types of transnationalism. The findings of this book imply that health programs for the most marginalized group—small business owners and their employees—and better support for bilingual Korean-English translators at hospitals are needed.

While placing the notion of transnationalism within the broader study of globalization, this book particularly addresses the emergence and impacts of migrant transnational practices. Each chapter demonstrates ways in which new and contemporary transnational activities of migrants are fundamentally transforming social, religious, political and economic structures within their 'homelands' and places of settlement.

Traditional Chinese medicine is often portrayed as an enduring system of therapeutic knowledge that has become globalized in recent decades. In Other-Worldly, Mei Zhan argues that the discourses and practices called “traditional Chinese medicine” are made through, rather than prior to, translocal encounters and entanglements. Zhan spent a decade following practitioners, teachers, and advocates of Chinese medicine through clinics, hospitals, schools, and grassroots organizations in Shanghai and the San Francisco Bay Area. Drawing on that ethnographic research, she demonstrates that the everyday practice of Chinese medicine is about much more than writing herbal prescriptions and inserting acupuncture needles. “Traditional Chinese medicine” is also made and remade through efforts to create a preventive medicine for the “proletariat world,” reinvent it for cosmopolitan middle-class aspirations, produce clinical “miracles,” translate knowledge and authority, and negotiate marketing strategies and medical ethics. Whether discussing the presentation of Chinese medicine at a health fair sponsored by a Silicon Valley corporation, or how the inclusion of a traditional Chinese medicine clinic authenticates the “California” appeal of an upscale residential neighborhood in Shanghai, Zhan emphasizes that unexpected encounters and interactions are not anomalies in the structure of Chinese medicine. Instead, they are constitutive of its irreducibly complex and open-ended worlds. Zhan proposes an ethnography of “worlding” as an analytic for engaging and illuminating emergent cultural processes such as those she describes. Rather than taking “cultural difference” as the starting point for anthropological inquiries, this analytic reveals how various terms of difference—for example, “traditional,” “Chinese,” and “medicine”—are invented, negotiated, and deployed translocally. Other-Worldly is a theoretically innovative and ethnographically rich account of the worlding of Chinese medicine.

This innovative book explores the dynamic and contested interactions – including the mutually constitutive relationships – among sexualities, transnationalism, and globalisation. Bringing together contributors with a variety of disciplinary, geographic, and theoretical perspectives, this text explores new theories and trends in sexuality research, including lived experiences of sexuality in this rapidly globalising world; changing relationships between sexualities, transnationalism, and globalisation; interventions, activism, and policy responses to the global challenges of sexual health; and relevant reflections on and implications for equity and social justice in the ongoing processes of contemporary globalisation. It is comprised of three sections, focusing on: transnational sexualities; transnational sexual politics; and transnational sexual activism. Sexualities, Transnationalism, and Globalisation will be of interest to students and scholars from a range of disciplines and fields, including sociology, sexuality studies, anthropology, geography, international relations, politics, and public health.

Networks in Tropical Medicine explores how European doctors and scientists worked together across borders to establish the new field of tropical medicine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book shows that this transnational collaboration in a context of European colonialism, scientific discovery, and internationalism shaped the character of the new medical specialty. Even in an era of intense competition among European states, practitioners of tropical medicine created a transnational scientific community through which they influenced each other and the health care that was introduced to the tropical world. One of the most important developments in the shaping of tropical medicine as a specialty was the major sleeping sickness epidemic that spread across sub-Saharan Africa at the turn of the century. The book describes how scientists and doctors collaborated across borders to control, contain, and find a treatment for the disease. It demonstrates that these medical specialists' shared notions of "Europeanness," rooted in common beliefs about scientific, technological, and racial superiority, led them to establish a colonial medical practice in Africa that sometimes oppressed the same people it was created to help.

This book offers several essays with transnational and historical perspectives on global health, welfare and humanitarianism. This anthology brings together a series of essays on transnational themes and methodological approaches pertaining to the historical study of global health, welfare and humanitarianism. The essays on topics ranging from missions to methods offer a more nuanced understanding of the interconnectedness and evolving nature of global charitable work, as well as its contribution as an historical antecedent of contemporary (secular) notions of 'global citizenship' and global health. Written by and about northern Europeans and North Americans interested in transnational knowledge exchanges in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, these essays reflect the complex ways in which both historians and their subjects transverse(d) national, gendered, racial and religious boundaries. Through them, the authors open up new questions about the nature of transnationalism (and transnational research) itself. *** "[this book] is a well thought through volume with an introduction that grounds this work on the 'transnational turn' identifying the transnational as 'open-ended movements, exchanges, networks, individual and connections' outside the nation state." -- Carmen M. Mangion (Birkbeck, University of London), Social History of Medicine, 2014 *** "As a whole, the essays contribute much to a deeper understanding of the historical development of global charitable efforts, both within the structures of religious establishments and in the secular movements that have grown out of them." -- J. Stephen Fountain (Global Center for Advanced Studies), Literature and Theology, 2015Ã?Â?

Minor Transnationalism moves beyond a binary model of minority cultural formations that often dominates contemporary cultural and postcolonial studies. Where that model presupposes that minorities necessarily and continuously engage with and against majority cultures in a vertical relationship of assimilation and opposition, this volume brings together case studies that reveal a much more varied terrain of minority interactions with both majority cultures and other minorities. The contributors recognize the persistence of colonial power relations and the power of global capital, attend to the inherent complexity of minor expressive cultures, and engage with multiple linguistic formations as they bring postcolonial minor cultural formations across national boundaries into productive comparison. Based in a broad range of fields—including literature, history, African studies, Asian American studies, Asian studies, French and francophone studies, and Latin American studies—the contributors complicate ideas of minority cultural formations and challenge the notion that transnationalism is necessarily a homogenizing force. They cover topics as diverse as competing versions of Chinese womanhood; American rockabilly music in Japan; the trope of mestizaje in Chicano art and culture; dub poetry radio broadcasts in Jamaica; creole theater in Mauritius; and race relations in Salvador, Brazil. Together, they point toward a new theoretical vocabulary, one capacious enough to capture the almost infinitely complex experiences of minority groups and positions in a transnational world. Contributors. Moradewun Adejunmobi, Ali Behdad, Michael Bourdaghs, Suzanne Gearhart, Susan Koshy, Françoise Lionnet, Seiji M. Lippit, Elizabeth Marchant, Kathleen McHugh, David Palumbo-Liu, Rafael Pérez-Torres, Jenny Sharpe, Shu-mei Shih , Tyler Stovall