Global processes have an increasing influence on local contexts and the nature and distribution of opportunities among populations across the globe. While capital and population mobility, advances in information and communications technology, and economic liberalization have fostered economic development, industrialization, and wealth for some, they have also engendered growing inequalities in income, prosperity, well-being, and access. Those left behind by these global transformations often experience not only material deprivation, but broader dislocation from the contexts, institutions, and capabilities that provide access to social and economic opportunity. The concept of "social exclusion" has been widely adopted to describe the conditions of economic, social, political, and/or cultural marginalization experienced by particular groups of people due to extreme poverty, discrimination, dislocation, and disenfranchisement. This book explores the dynamics of social exclusion within the context of globalization across four countries--China, India, South Korea, and the United States. In particular, it examines how social exclusion is defined, manifested, and responded to with regard to diverse social arenas and processes, varying mechanisms and scales, and a range of impacted populations. Based on collaborative research activities and in-depth deliberation among leading scholars from major academic institutions in each of the four aforementioned countries, the volume provides a rich account of the interplay between globalization and social exclusion, while highlighting the ways in which responses may be more or less effective in different contexts. Its insights will be of particular interest to academics, researchers, and students across diverse social science disciplines.

In Cape Town, South Africa, many people with tuberculosis also use substances. This sets up a seemingly impossible problem: People who use substances are at increased risk of tuberculosis disease; and substance use seems to result in erratic behavior that makes successful treatment of people affected by tuberculosis extremely difficult. People affected don’t get healthy, healthcare providers are frustrated, and families seek to balance love and care for those who are ill with self-protection. How are we to understand this? Where does the responsibility for poor health and healing lie? What are the possibilities for an effective healthcare response? Through a close look at lives and care, Making Uncertainty: Tuberculosis, Substance Use, and Pathways to Health shows how patterns of substance use, tuberculosis disease, and their interaction are shaped by history, social context, and political economy. This, in turn, generates new perspectives on what makes poor health, and what good care might look like.

This incisive Research Handbook examines the relationship between energy and society, across both macro- and micro-scales, in the context of the climate crisis. Featuring an extensive examination of current research in the field from fifty expert international contributors, it offers important insights into the inter-connections between the globally organised fossil fuel energy system and the changing structures of society.

The Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia is the first comprehensive and critical overview of the ethnographic and anthropological work in Highland Asia over the past half a century. Opening up a grand new space for critical engagement, the handbook presents Highland Asia as a world-region that cuts across the traditional divides inherited from colonial and Cold War area divisions - the Indian Subcontinent/South Asia, Southeast Asia, China/East Asia, and Central Asia. Thirty-two chapters assess the history of research, identify ethnographic trends, and evaluate a range of analytical themes that developed in particular settings of Highland Asia. They cover varied landscapes and communities, from Kyrgyzstan to India, from Bhutan to Vietnam and bring local voices and narratives relating trade and tribute, ritual and resistance, pilgrimage and prophecy, modernity and marginalization, capital and cosmos to the fore. The handbook shows that for millennia, Highland Asians have connected far-flung regions through movements of peoples, goods and ideas, and at all times have been the enactors, repositories, and mediators of world-historical processes. Taken together, the contributors and chapters subvert dominant lowland narratives by privileging primarily highland vantages that reveal Highland Asia as an ecumune and prism that refracts and generates global history, social theory, and human imagination. In the currently unfolding Asian Century, this compels us to reorient and re-envision Highland Asia, in ethnography, in theory, and in the connections between this world-region, made of hills, highlands and mountains, and a planetary context. The handbook reveals both regional commonalities and diversities, generalities and specificities, and a broad orientation to key themes in the region. An indispensable reference work, this handbook fills a significant gap in the literature and will be of interest to academics, researchers and students interested in Highland Asia, Zomia Studies, Anthropology, Comparative Politics, Conceptual History and Sociology, Southeast Asian Studies, Central Asian Studies and South Asian Studies as well as Asian Studies in general.

Each year in India more than two million people fall sick with tuberculosis (TB), an infectious, airborne, and potentially deadly lung disease. The country accounts for almost 30 percent of all TB cases worldwide and well above a third of global deaths from it. Because TB's prevalence also indicates unfulfilled development promises, its control is an important issue of national concern, wrapped up in questions of postcolonial governance. Drawing on long-term ethnographic engagement with a village in North India and its TB epidemic, Andrew McDowell tells the stories of socially marginalized Dalit ("ex-untouchable") farming families afflicted by TB, and the nurses, doctors, quacks, mediums, and mystics who care for them. Each of the book's chapters centers on a material or metaphorical substance—such as dust, clouds, and ghosts—to understand how breath and airborne illness entangle biological and social life in everyday acts of care for the self, for others, and for the environment. From this raft of stories about the ways people make sense of and struggle with troubled breath, McDowell develops a philosophy and phenomenology of breathing that attends to medical systems, patient care, and health justice. He theorizes that breath—as an intersection between person and world—provides a unique perspective on public health and inequality. Breath is deeply intimate and personal, but also shared and distributed. Through it all, Breathless traces the multivalent relations that breath engenders between people, environments, social worlds, and microbes.

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the importance of safety and ergonomics in the workplace. From work-life balance and mental health to risk prevention, maintaining a healthy and happy workforce has become essential for the progress of every company. Moreover, ensuring inclusive spaces has become a pillar of business with some worrying that the diversity agenda will be overshadowed by the recent pandemic. It is imperative that current research is compiled that sheds light on the advancements being made in promoting diversity and wellbeing in the modern workforce. The Research Anthology on Changing Dynamics of Diversity and Safety in the Workforce is a comprehensive reference source that provides the latest emerging research on diversity management and initiatives as well as occupational health and safety practices in the workplace. These concepts are necessary for global workplaces to remain safe, efficient, and inclusive. Covering topics such as employee equity, human resources practices, and worker wellbeing, this anthology provides an excellent resource for researchers, human resources personnel, managers, safety officers, policymakers, CEOs, students, professors, and academicians.

Biosocial Worlds presents state-of-the-art contributions to anthropological reflections on the porous boundaries between human and non-human life – biosocial worlds. Based on changing understandings of biology and the social, it explores what it means to be human in these worlds. Growing separation of scientific disciplines for more than a century has maintained a separation of the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’ that has created a space for projections between the two. Such projections carry a directional causality and so constitute powerful means to establish discursive authority. While arguing against the separation of the biological and the social in the study of human and non-human life, it remains important to unfold the consequences of their discursive separation. Based on examples from Botswana, Denmark, Mexico, the Netherlands, Uganda, the UK and USA, the volume explores what has been created in the space between ‘the social’ and ‘the natural’, with a view to rethink ‘the biosocial’. Health topics in the book include diabetes, trauma, cancer, HIV, tuberculosis, prevention of neonatal disease and wider issues of epigenetics. Many of the chapters engage with constructions of health and disease in a wide range of environments, and engage with analysis of the concept of ‘environment’. Anthropological reflection and ethnographic case studies explore how ‘health’ and ‘environment’ are entangled in ways that move their relation beyond interdependence to one of inseparability. The subtitle of this volume captures these insights through the concept of ‘health environment’, seeking to move the engagement of anthropology and biology beyond deterministic projections.