Disease, Death, and the Body Politic

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 49-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
James L. Wilson ◽  
Christopher J. Mansfield

More than a trillion dollars of public money is spent annually on health care in the United States. In order to inform policymakers, health advocacy groups, tax-paying constituents, and beneficiaries, it would be useful to present and analyze health outcome and health-related data at the U.S. congressional district level. Presently, health event data are not reported at this political unit; however, recent interest and advances in areal interpolation techniques are beginning to transcend the inherent limitations imposed by legacy data collection and analyses systems. In this paper, the authors use the dasymetric approach to illustrate how this areal interpolation technique can be used to transfer county-level mortality rate data from several causes of death to the U.S. congressional district level. The study’s primary goal is to promote areal interpolation techniques in the absence of a systematic and comprehensive national program for geocoding health events.

Author(s):  
James L. Wilson ◽  
Christopher J. Mansfield

More than a trillion dollars of public money is spent annually on health care in the United States. In order to inform policymakers, health advocacy groups, tax-paying constituents, and beneficiaries, it would be useful to present and analyze health outcome and health-related data at the U.S. congressional district level. Presently, health event data are not reported at this political unit; however, recent interest and advances in areal interpolation techniques are beginning to transcend the inherent limitations imposed by legacy data collection and analyses systems. In this paper, the authors use the dasymetric approach to illustrate how this areal interpolation technique can be used to transfer county-level mortality rate data from several causes of death to the U.S. congressional district level. The study’s primary goal is to promote areal interpolation techniques in the absence of a systematic and comprehensive national program for geocoding health events.


2002 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-574 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lanny Thompson

The doctrine of incorporation, as elaborated in legal debates and legitimated by the U.S. Supreme Court, excluded the inhabitants of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam from the body politic of the United States on the basis of their cultural differences from dominant European American culture. However, in spite of their shared legal status as unincorporated territories, the U.S. Congress established different governments that, although adaptations of continental territorial governments, were staffed largely with appointed imperial administrators. In contrast, Hawai'i, which had experienced a long period of European American settlement, received a government that followed the basic continental model of territorial government. Thus, the distinction between the incorporated and unincorporated territories corresponded to the limits of European American settlement. However, even among the unincorporated territories, cultural evaluations were important in determining the kinds of rule. The organic act for Puerto Rico provided for substantially more economic and judicial integration with the United States than did the organic act for the Phillippines. This followed from the assessment that Puerto Rico might be culturally assimilated while the Phillippines definitely could not. Moreover, religion was the criterion for determining different provincial governments within the Phillippines. In Guam, the interests of the naval station prevailed over all other considerations. There, U.S. government officials considered the local people to be hospitable and eager to accept U.S. sovereignty, while they largely ignored the local people's language, culture, and history. In Guam, a military government prevailed.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth S. Manley

Chapter 4 addresses three inter-related strategies employed by women following the demise of the Trujillato to reconstruct the body politic in the face of drastic political transition, a second U.S. occupation, and general social upheaval. First, Dominican women again called on the rhetoric of motherhood and maternalism in support of a return to domestic tranquility and for a nation free of dictatorial politics and foreign meddling. Second, political participation by women served to demonstrate a re-envisioning of the nature of Dominican politics through their burgeoning support of full gendered equality. Third, as now long-term members of a number of inter-American organizations, women called for continental solidarity to return sovereignty to Latin American nations plagued by foreign intervention, particularly their own. These strategies demonstrate both the potential for maternal politics as a form of national healing as well is its limitations for creating true gender equity.


Author(s):  
N. Bruce Duthu

United States law recognizes American Indian tribes as distinct political bodies with powers of self-government. Their status as sovereign entities predates the formation of the United States and they are enumerated in the U.S. Constitution as among the subjects (along with foreign nations and the several states) with whom Congress may engage in formal relations. And yet, despite this long-standing recognition, federal Indian law remains curiously ambivalent, even conflicted, about the legal and political status of Indian tribes within the U.S. constitutional structure. On the one hand, tribes are recognized as sovereign bodies with powers of self-government within their lands. On the other, long-standing precedents of the Supreme Court maintain that Congress possesses plenary power over Indian tribes, with authority to modify or even eliminate their powers of self-government. These two propositions are in tension with one another and are at the root of the challenges faced by political leaders and academics alike in trying to understand and accommodate the tribal rights to self-government. The body of laws that make up the field of federal Indian law include select provisions of the U.S. Constitution (notably the so-called Indian Commerce Clause), treaties between the United States and various Indian tribes, congressional statutes, executive orders, regulations, and a complex and rich body of court decisions dating back to the nation’s formative years. The noted legal scholar Felix Cohen brought much-needed coherence and order to this legal landscape in the 1940s when he led a team of scholars within the Office of the Solicitor in the Department of the Interior to produce a handbook on federal Indian law. The revised edition of Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law is still regarded as the seminal treatise in the field. Critically, however, this rich body of law only hints at the real story in federal Indian law. The laws themselves serve as historical and moral markers in the ongoing clash between indigenous and nonindigenous societies and cultures still seeking to establish systems of peaceful coexistence in shared territories. It is a story about the limits of legal pluralism and the willingness of a dominant society and nation to acknowledge and honor its promises to the first inhabitants and first sovereigns.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 205630512094069
Author(s):  
Rachael Kent

Instagram and self-tracking technologies enable multiple ways to perform and represent the body and health. No research has yet explored how self-tracking technologies and self-representations of health identity on social media, in particular Instagram, influence health “sharing” online and individual health management offline. To enable a thorough investigation of how self-tracking mediations of identity construction work in practice, through a textual and thematic analysis of empirical ethnographic data from online content, reflexive diaries and semi-structured interviews with 14 participants, this research examines the use of these converged technologies to share health-related data on Instagram in the performance of optimal health identities. Participants identified pressures that arose from this continual performative identity of being a healthy role model under persistent self- and community surveillance, which also led to the development of powerful compulsions to use these technologies to document and share many aspects of health and lifestyle. Over time, the participants attempted to disengage and detox either temporarily or permanently from Instagram, to enable a protective shield from the pervasive, normalized surveillance and community practices. Most interestingly, even when they removed these technologies and platforms from their daily lives, participants still felt neglectful to their devices, to themselves, and to their communities online in their abstinence and resistance to perform optimal health practices.


Prospects ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 387-404
Author(s):  
Emily Miller Budick

InPlaying in the Dark, Toni Morrison sets out to chart a new “geography” in literary criticism, to provide a “map” for locating what she calls the “Africanist” presence in the American literary tradition. The assumption of Americanist critics, she argues, has been that “traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the fourhundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then, African Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence — which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture — has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture's literature.” For Morrison, recording the Africanist presence produces nothing less than an absolute revision of our notion of what constitutes the American literary tradition.


Prospects ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 109-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Laderman

Abraham Lincoln has been mythologized and deified in the American imagination, occupying a preeminent place in the collective memory of the nation. He occupies this place because he is believed to embody the ideals and values of the country and because he seemed to preside with grace, equanimity, and wisdom over one of the most destructive conflicts in America's history. In life, but even more consequently in death, his presence – as “rail splitter,” “Great Emancipator,” and “Father Abraham” – conjures up an array of events, symbols, and myths that give definition and meaning to the American nation. When he died, an unprecedented funeral celebration occurred in the Northern region of the United States that solidified his privileged place in the country's pantheon of great heroes. The series of events that took place after his assassination, as well as his emplotment in public memory since then, suggest that his death, as tragic and painful as it was, added to the cohesion, unity, and the very life of the nation when it was most seriously threatened by chaos and degeneration.


Author(s):  
Edward E. Curtis IV

The future of US democracy depends on the question of whether Muslim Americans can become full social and political citizens. Though many Muslims have worked toward full assimilation since the 1950s, it has mattered little whether they have expressed dissent or supported the political status quo. Their efforts to assimilate have been futile because the liberal terms under which they have negotiated their citizenship have simultaneously alienated Muslims from the body politic. Focusing on both electoral and grassroots Muslim political participation, this book reveals Muslim challenges to and accommodation of liberalism from the Cold War to the war on terror. It shows how the Nation of Islam both resisted and made use of postwar liberalism, and then how Malcolm X sought a political alternative in his Islamic ethics of liberation. The book charts the changing Muslim American politics of the late twentieth century, examining how Muslim Americans fashioned their political participation in response to a form of US nationalism tied to war-making against Muslims abroad. The book analyzes the everyday resistance of Muslim American women to an American identity politics that put their bodies at the center of US public life and it assesses the attempts of Muslim Americans to find acceptance through military service. It concludes with an examination of the role of Muslim American dissent in the contemporary politics of the United States.


Author(s):  
Ravi K. Perry ◽  
Aaron D. Camp

Symbolic and structural inequities that seek to maintain White supremacy have sought to render Black LGBTQ Americans invisible in the body politic of powerful institutions that govern society. In the face of centuries-long oppression at the hands of the state, Black LGBTQ Americans have effectively mobilized to establish visibility on the national policymaking agenda. Members of this community have demonstrated a fierce resilience while confronting a violent anti-Black and anti-LGBTQ mainstream agenda narrative in media and politics. This sociopolitical marginalization—from members of their shared demographic, or not, is often framed in partisan or ideological terms in public discourse and in the halls of American political institutions. Secondary marginalization theory and opinion polling frame how personal identity and social experience shape the Black LGBTQ political movement’s expression of what participation in politics in the United States ought to earn them in return. Double-consciousness theory contextualizes the development of Black LGBTQ sociopolitical marginalization in the United States and the community’s responsive mobilization over time—revealing the impact of coalition building and self-identification toward establishing political visibility necessary to improve the lived conditions of the multiply oppressed.


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