Tag: Weighing

Weighing the Future Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era


Free Download Valdez, "Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era"
English | 2021 | ISBN: 0520380142, 0520380134 | EPUB | pages: 289 | 1.9 mb
Epigenetics, the study of heritable changes in gene expression, has been heralded as one of the most promising new fields of scientific inquiry. Current large-scale studies selectively draw on epigenetics to connect behavioral choices made by pregnant people, such as diet and exercise, to health risks for future generations. As the first ethnography of its kind, Weighing the Future examines the sociopolitical implications of ongoing pregnancy trials in the United States and the United Kingdom, illuminating how processes of scientific knowledge production are linked to capitalism, surveillance, and environmental reproduction. Natali Valdez argues that a focus on individual behavior rather than social environments ignores the vital impacts of systemic racism. The environments we imagine to shape our genes, bodies, and future health are intimately tied to race, gender, and structures of inequality. This groundbreaking book makes the case that science, and how we translate it, is a reproductive project that requires feminist vigilance. Instead of fixating on a future at risk, this book brings attention to the present at stake.

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Weighing In Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism (California Studies in Food and Culture)


Free Download Julie Guthman, "Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism (California Studies in Food and Culture) "
English | ISBN: 0520266250 | 2011 | 242 pages | AZW3 | 697 KB
Weighing In takes on the "obesity epidemic," challenging many widely held assumptions about its causes and consequences. Julie Guthman examines fatness and its relationship to health outcomes to ask if our efforts to prevent "obesity" are sensible, efficacious, or ethical. She also focuses the lens of obesity on the broader food system to understand why we produce cheap, over-processed food, as well as why we eat it. Guthman takes issue with the currently touted remedy to obesity―promoting food that is local, organic, and farm fresh. While such fare may be tastier and grown in more ecologically sustainable ways, this approach can also reinforce class and race inequalities and neglect other possible explanations for the rise in obesity, including environmental toxins. Arguing that ours is a political economy of bulimia―one that promotes consumption while also insisting upon thinness―Guthman offers a complex analysis of our entire economic system.

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Scottish Independence Weighing Up the Economics


Free Download Gavin McCrone, "Scottish Independence: Weighing Up the Economics"
English | 2014 | pages: 192 | ISBN: 1780272340, 178027159X | EPUB | 0,5 mb
In autumn 2014 those living in Scotland will face the most important political decision of a lifetime. Whether Scotland becomes an independent state once again, as it was before 1707, or remains within the United Kingdom will have profound consequences for everyone in Britain. There are many issues involved in this important choice, but a key part of the debate centres around the question of whether Scotland would prosper more or less after independence. How well off are we? Would we have a faster or slower growing economy if we were independent? What currency would we use – the pound, the euro or a new currency of our own? What should our energy policy be? There are those who would like to see a more egalitarian society, like Scandinavia, with a reduction in poverty and deprivation; would we be likely to achieve that? Would we continue to be in the European Union but with Scotland becoming a member in its own right? Is that right for Scotland and what problems might that involve? In this impartial, clearly expressed and thought-provoking book, economist Gavin McCrone addresses these, and many other, questions which are of vital importance in the run up to the referendum.

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