One Blue Child

Asthma, Responsibility, and the Politics of Global Health

Susanna Trnka

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781503602465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Radical changes in our understanding of health and healthcare are reshaping twenty-first-century personhood. In the last few years, there has been a great influx of public policy and biometric technologies targeted at engaging individuals in their own health, increasing personal responsibility, and encouraging people to "self-manage" their own care.

One Blue Child examines the emergence of self-management as a global policy standard, focusing on how healthcare is reshaping our relationships with ourselves and our bodies, our families and our doctors, companies, and the government. Comparing responses to childhood asthma in New Zealand and the Czech Republic, Susanna Trnka traces how ideas about self-management, as well as policies inculcating self-reliance and self-responsibility more broadly, are assumed, reshaped, and ignored altogether by medical professionals, asthma sufferers and parents, environmental activists, and policymakers. By studying nations that share a commitment to the ideals of neoliberalism but approach children's health according to very different cultural, political, and economic priorities, Trnka illuminates how responsibility is reformulated with sometimes surprising results.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Taking Responsibility for Asthma: New Kinds of People, New Kinds of Health
• 1. Democratizing Knowledge: Patients Caught between Compliance and Self-Management
• 2. Domestic Experiments: When Parents Become “Half a Doctor”
• 3. Patient Agency, Personal Responsibility, and the Upholding of Medical Expertise
• 4. Knowledge, Discipline, and Domesticity: The Work of Raising Healthy Children
• 5. Body, Breath, and Mind: Subjugated Knowledge and Alternative Therapeutics
• 6. The Best Holiday Ever: The Pleasures and Pains of Spa Cures and Summer Camps
• 7. Redistributing Responsibility among States, Companies, and Citizens: Struggles in the Steel Heart of the Republic
• Conclusion: Problematizing Asthma
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List