BiblioVault - Books about Rural

Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots

The Social History of a Community of Handicraft Papermakers in Rural Sichuan, 1920–2000

Jacob Eyferth

Harvard University Press, 2009

This book charts the vicissitudes of a rural community of papermakers in Sichuan. The process of transforming bamboo into paper involves production-related and social skills, as well as the everyday skills that allowed these papermakers to survive in an era of tumultuous change. The Chinese revolution—understood as a series of interconnected political, social, and technological transformations—was, Jacob Eyferth argues, as much about the redistribution of skill, knowledge, and technical control as it was about the redistribution of land and political power.

The larger context for this study is the “rural–urban divide”: the institutional, social, and economic cleavages that separate rural people from urbanites. This book traces the changes in the distribution of knowledge that led to a massive transfer of technical control from villages to cities, from primary producers to managerial elites, and from women to men. It asks how a vision of rural people as unskilled has affected their place in the body politic and contributed to their disenfranchisement. By viewing skill as a contested resource, subject to distribution struggles, it addresses the issue of how revolution, state-making, and marketization have changed rural China.

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Electric Mountains

Climate, Power, and Justice in an Energy Transition

Shaun A. Golding

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Climate change has shifted from future menace to current event. As eco-conscious electricity consumers, we want to do our part in weening from fossil fuels, but what are we actually a part of?

Committed environmentalists in one of North America’s most progressive regions desperately wanted energy policies that address the climate crisis. For many of them, wind turbines on Northern New England’s iconic ridgelines symbolize the energy transition that they have long hoped to see. For others, however, ridgeline wind takes on a very different meaning. When weighing its costs and benefits locally and globally, some wind opponents now see the graceful structures as symbols of corrupted energy politics.

This book derives from several years of research to make sense of how wind turbines have so starkly split a community of environmentalists, as well as several communities. In doing so, it casts a critical light on the roadmap for energy transition that Northern New England’s ridgeline wind projects demarcate. It outlines how ridgeline wind conforms to antiquated social structures propping up corporate energy interests, to the detriment of the swift de-carbonizing and equitable transformation that climate predictions warrant. It suggests, therefore, that the energy transition of which most of us are a part, is probably not the transition we would have designed ourselves, if we had been asked.

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Embodied Politics

Indigenous Migrant Activism, Cultural Competency, and Health Promotion in California

Rebecca J. Hester

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Embodied Politics illuminates the influential force of public health promotion in indigenous migrant communities by examining the Indigenous Health Project (IHP), a culturally and linguistically competent initiative that uses health workshops, health messages, and social programs to mitigate the structural vulnerability of Oaxacan migrants in California. Embodied Politics reconstructs how this initiative came to exist and describes how it operates. At the same time, it points out the conflicts, resistances, and counter-acts that emerge through the IHP’s attempts to guide the health behaviors and practices of Triqui and Mixteco migrants. Arguing for a structurally competent approach to migrant health, Embodied Politics shows how efforts to promote indigenous health may actually reinforce the same social and political economic forces, namely structural racism and neoliberalism, that are undermining the health of indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico and the United States.

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Energy Impacts

A Multidisciplinary Exploration of North American Energy Development

Jeffrey B. Jacquet

University Press of Colorado, 2020

Development of various energy sources continues across North America and around the world, raising questions about social and economic consequences for the places and communities where these activities occur. Energy Impacts brings together important new research on site-level social, economic, and behavioral impacts from large-scale energy development. Featuring conceptual and empirical multidisciplinary research from leading social scientists, the volume collects a broad range of perspectives to understand North America’s current energy uses and future energy needs.

Twelve chapters from respected scholars in a variety of disciplines present new ways to consider and analyze energy impact research. Focused on varied energy topics, geographies, and disciplines, each chapter includes a policy brief that summarizes the work and provides “key takeaways” to apply the findings to policy and public discourse.
Meaningful public engagement is critical in limiting the negative implications of energy development, and understanding the social influences on and of energy systems is a cornerstone of addressing the climate crisis. As such, Energy Impacts is a significant work for students, scholars, and professionals working in sociology, education, geography, environmental studies, and public health.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1528422. Publication is also supported, in part, by Montana State University.

Contributors:
Ali Adil, Lisa Bailey-Davis, Nancy Bowen-Elizey, Morey Burnham, Weston Eaton, Heather Feldhaus, Felix Fernando, Emily Grubert, C. Clare Hinrichs, John Hintz, Richard Hirsh, Season Hoard, Tamara Laninga, Eric Larson, Achla Marathe, Natalie Martinkus, Seven Mattes, Ronald Meyers, Patrick Miller, Ethan Minier, Myra Moss, Jacob Mowery, Thomas Murphy, Sevda Ozturk Sari, John Parkins, Christopher Podeschi, Nathan Ratledge, Sanne Rijkhoff, Kelli Roemer, Todd Schenk, Anju Seth, Kate Sherren, Jisoo Sim, Marc Stern, Jessica Ulrich-Schad, Cameron Whitley, Laura Zachary

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Engaging the Intersection of Housing and Health

Volume Three

Edited by Mina Silberberg

University of Cincinnati Press, 2021

Researchers often hope that their work will inform social change. The questions that motivate them to pursue research careers in the first place often stem from observations about gaps between the world as we wish it to be and the world as it is, accompanied by a deep curiosity about how it might be made different. Researchers view their profession as providing important information about what is, what could be, and how to get there. However, if research is to inform social change, we must first change the way in which research is done.

Engaging the Intersection of Housing and Health offers case studies of research that is interdisciplinary, stakeholder-engaged and intentionally designed for “translation” into practice. There are numerous ways in which housing and health are intertwined. This intertwining—which is the focus of this volume—is lived daily by the children whose asthma is exacerbated by mold in their homes, the adults whose mental illness increases their risk for homelessness and whose homelessness worsens their mental and physical health, the seniors whose home environment enhances their risk of falls, and the families who must choose between paying for housing and paying for healthcare.

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