Browse

Gynecological teaching associates (GTAs) are trained laypeople who teach medical students the communication and technical skills of the pelvic examination while simultaneously serving as live models on whose bodies these same students practice. These programs are widespread in the United States and present a fascinating case for understanding contemporary emotional socialization in medical education. Feeling Medicine traces the origins of these programs in the Women’s Health Movement and in the nascent field of medical education research in the 1970s. It explores how these programs work at three major medical schools in Chicago using archival sources and interviews with GTAs, medical faculty, and medical students. This book argues that GTA programs embody the tension in medical education between the drive toward science and the ever-presence of emotion. It claims that new regimes of governance in medical education today rely on the modification of affect, or embodied capacities to feel and form attachments. Feeling Medicine thus explores what it means to make good physicians in an era of corporatized healthcare. In the process, it considers the role of simulation and the meaning of patient empowerment in the medical profession, as well as the practices that foster caring commitments between physicians and their patients—and those that are exploitable by for-profit healthcare.

The world currently faces several severe social and environmental crises, including economic under-development, widespread poverty and hunger, lack of safe drinking water for one-sixth of the world's population, deforestation, rapidly increasing levels of pollution and waste, dramatic declines in soil fertility and biodiversity, and global warming. This book sheds light on the structural causes of these and other social and environmental crises, highlighting in particular the key role that elite-controlled organizations, institutions, and networks play in creating these crises. The book focuses on four topics—globalization, agriculture, mining, and U.S. energy and military policy—to show how organizational and institutional inequality and elite-controlled organizational networks produce social and environmental harm. It focuses on key institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. Military and the World Trade Organization to show how specific policies are conceived and enacted in order to further elite goals. The book lays out a path for environmental social scientists and environmentalists to better understand and help solve the world's myriad social and environmental crises.