Chronic Failures

Kidneys, Regimes of Care, and the Mexican State

Ciara Kierans

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780813596662
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

Chronic Failures: Kidneys, Regimes of Care and the Mexican State is about Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) and the relentless search for renal care lived out in the context of poverty, inequality and uneven welfare arrangements. Based on ethnographic research conducted in the state of Jalisco, this book documents the routes uninsured Mexican patients take in order to access resource intensive biotechnical treatments, that is, different modes of dialysis and organ transplantation. It argues that these routes are normalized, bureaucratically, socially and epidemiologically, and turned into a locus for exploitation and profit. Without a coherent logic of healthcare access, negotiating regimes of renal care has catastrophic consequences for those with the least resources to expend in that effort. In carrying both the costs and the burden of care, the practices of patients without entitlement offer a critical vantage point on the interplay between the state, markets in healthcare and the sick body.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Lenore Manderson
• Prologue
• Introduction: Encountering Regimes of Renal Care—The Crucible of Experience
• 1. Studying Regimes of Renal Care
• 2. Biopolitics and the Analytics of a Population on the Move
• 3. Labor: Producing Sickness and the State
• 4. Brokering Healthcare: Paper-work, Negotiation, and the Strategies of Navigation
• 5. Exchange: Bodies as Sites for the Production of (Surplus) Value
• 6. Transplant Scandals, the State, and the “Multiple Problematics” of Accountability
• 7. Political and Corporate Etiologies: Producing Disease Emergence and Disease Response
• Epilogue
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author