This book concerns the post-illness experiences of about a hundred occupationally sick workers who suffer from the incurable diseases of pneumoconiosis or heavy metal poisoning in contemporary China. In exploring their struggles and conflicts in their private and social lives, at and away from home, the author hopes to show how the sufferers structure their own lives, their freedoms, rights, and constraints, and how they think and feel about their actions of acquiescence, compromise, resistance, and protest within the existing power relations. Informed by a framework that connects governmentality and the lifeworld of the victim, the books endeavors to shed new empirical and theoretical light on how the socially marginalized encounter and understand domination in everyday life in the specific context of China now and in the foreseeable future.
Price: £85.00
Pages: 232
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Series: New Ethnographies
Publication Date:
14 December 2017
ISBN: 9781526113610
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
MEDICAL / Public Health, Sociology and anthropology, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / General, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Social Services & Welfare, Social and ethical issues, Public health and preventive medicine, Sociology
'A well-written and original research monograph, which is an enjoyable read. The empirical and theoretical contributions of this book are significant.'
Desai Shan, Dalhousie University, Canada, Work, Employment and Society, August 2019
'This is is a compelling and informative account of lived experiences of occupational illness among Chinese workers and their struggles for compensation.'
China Review
Preface
Series editor's foreword
Maps
Part I: Life in perspective
1. Facts, theoretical gaze, and journeys
2. Sick workers as homines sacri
Part II: Responses to marginality
3. Cadmium-poisoned women: contesting for sick role status
4. Pneumoconiosis-afflicted workers: toward rightful resistance
5. Coalminers: the compromising citizenry
Part III: Sick life governed
6. Law as a technique of governmentality
7. The future of Chinese marginality
Appendix
References
Index
