addicted.pregnant.poor (Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography) - Softcover

Knight, Kelly Ray

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822359960 ISBN 13: 9780822359968

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2015

Synopsis

For the addicted, pregnant, and poor women living in daily-rent hotels in San Francisco's Mission district, life is marked by battles against drug cravings, housing debt, and potential violence. In this stunning ethnography Kelly Ray Knight presents these women in all their complex humanity and asks what kinds of futures are possible for them given their seemingly hopeless situation. During her four years of fieldwork Knight documented women’s struggles as they traveled from the street to the clinic, jail, and family court, and back to the hotels. She approaches addicted pregnancy as an everyday phenomenon in these women's lives and describes how they must navigate the tension between pregnancy's demands to stay clean and the pull of addiction and poverty toward drug use and sex work. By creating the space for addicted women's own narratives and examining addicted pregnancy from medical, policy, and social science perspectives, Knight forces us to confront and reconsider the ways we think about addiction, trauma, health, criminality, and responsibility.  

About this title

About the Author

Kelly Ray Knight is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. 

Review

"Kelly Ray Knight has the courage to expose eloquently and ethnographically one of the most painful public secrets of addiction and urban poverty (and gentrification) that medicine, public health, science, and society cannot solve. What this book documents ethnographically and explores theoretically must be confronted in all its impossible complexity and violence."  (Philippe Bourgois, coauthor of Righteous Dopefiend)

"Kelly Ray Knight writes with compassion and self-reflection, and one of her great strengths is the way she gracefully renders her own doubts and self-ironies into the stories she collects from pregnant addicts, making both her subjects and herself more 'real' and complicated. addicted.pregnant.poor brings the experience of pregnant drug addicts close to the reader, giving them human voices, faces, and fears. Knight's plunge into the dangerous, barely survivable world these women inhabit is tremendously compelling." (Rayna Rapp, author of Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America)

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0822359960
• ISBN 13: 9780822359968
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 328