Book Review – Migration and Health: Critical Perspectives

Written by: Heide Castañeda

London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-138-49043-7

This book offers a radical rethinking of the field by unsettling conventional ideas of mobility and borders to highlight the ways in which they produce health inequalities. Covering a wide range of topics, the text provides insight through a critical lens, and proposes areas for intervention along with an added emphasis on the need for future research to address the health inequities that affect migrants. It illustrates how a critical perspective can deepen our understanding of the relationship between migration and health, which remains a defining global issue of our century.

The text employs a critical approach to examine the structural conditions of inequality and larger historical and political processes, recognizing that exclusionary bordering practices increasingly occur away from physical points of entry. It posits the concept of migration as complex, tangled and multi-directional and underscores how migrant vulnerability can shape the lives of people in wider communities. Furthermore, it acknowledges diverse and intersectional standpoints, as well as shifting spatial and temporal influences. Chapters include coverage of health in transit; healthcare access and utilization; clinical encounters; communicable disease; labor and occupational health; gender and sexuality; immigration enforcement, detention, deportation; and the effects of forced displacement on refugee and asylum-seeker health.

Continue reading

Book Review: Forgetting Items: The Social Experience of Alzheimer’s Disease

By Catherine Van Son

The number of people living with dementia is growing exponentially. The effects of this neurocognitive disorder (the majority are the Alzheimer’s type) are not confined to the numbers affected by the condition. The impact of dementia on the lives of persons living with dementia (PLWD), their caregivers and care professionals must be explored. It is important to reflect on the relationship between society and dementia as it has an overwhelming effect on the individual and those around them. From the moment a person is suspected to be suffering from dementia, their social interactions with others progressively changes.

Continue reading