Breathtaking: Asthma Care in a Time of Climate Change

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Breathtaking analyzes asthma care in the twenty-first century.

Symptoms resembling asthma have been documented for more than two thousand years, yet today's changing ecologies, health care systems, medical sciences, and built environments are reshaping the disease. Now identified as a global epidemic, asthma (and our efforts to control it) demands an analysis attentive to its complexity, its contextual nature, and the care practices that emerge from both. Breathtaking presents diverse contemporary perspectives informed by interviews with individuals who are living with asthma today.

Alison Kenner advances three arguments about asthma care in the United States. The first builds on the assertion that care practices are context-specific and temporally anchored. The second relates to how asthma sufferers use (or don't use) prescription drugs, paying special attention to biomedicalization, as well as to the environmental dimensions of disordered breathing and the structural conditions that make pharmaceutical treatments possible. Finally, she shows how, in the United States, contemporary approaches to environmental health have largely emphasized individual over collective responsibility. In conclusion, she reviews how new modes of collective care practices may be generating public health reforms that can more effectively address the asthma epidemic during a period of climate change.

Clearly written and theoretically insightful,Breathtaking is a sweeping ethnographic account of asthma's heterogeneity, told through the lived experiences of disordered breathers with a focus on their support networks, from new smartphone applications tailored to asthmatics to mobile asthma clinics to alternative breathing practitioners.

Reviews

"This elegant first monograph from the Asthma Files Project is written simply for all audiences and provides five practical recommendations. Breathtaking is social science at its best: experiential, explanatory, critical, and providing ways forward. Alison Kenner herself is an active participant as community social-scientist and as partner to someone who suffers disordered breathing. She guides us vividly across scales and registers."Michael M.J. Fischer, author of Anthropology in the Meantime

"Breathtaking is a sweeping ethnographic account of asthma and its treatments that expertly traverses questions of lived experience, medical technology, and critical ecology as they bear on the epidemic of disordered breathing. Beautifully written and poignant, this book makes a robust contribution to our understanding of the health effects of environmental degradation and climate change, deepens the critiques of biomedicalization, and heralds the promise of complementary and alternative medicine."Anthony Ryan Hatch, author of Blood Sugar

"Breathtaking is an engrossing read."CHOICE

"Breathtaking presents a compelling and very readable ethnographic overview of the ways that asthma is grappled with across a variety of 21st century American contexts. This book offers an insightful and multi-faceted account of a condition that affects so many around the world."Somatosphere

"Overall, Breathtaking takes asthma from the biomedical world, and using a multi-sited ethnography, traces connections between the experience of asthma, the environment and our bodies, allowing us to imagine new carescapes that could make the world more breathable."LSE Review of Books

"In the absence of swift and uncompromising action on the part of US legislators to combat climate change, Kenner advocates democratizing access to affordable health care; integrating breathing training into the doctors toolkit; and enacting policy, at all levels of government, to improve the indoor environments in which we spend the majority of our time."H-Environment

Author Bio

Alison Kenner is assistant professor in the department of politics and the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Drexel University.