Reconfiguring Global Societies in the Pre-Vaccination Phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic examines lived experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic in communities and societies around the world before the arrival of vaccines. This collection presents analyses of scholars from eight countries, all of whom were engaged in the unfolding crisis of social forces across the world.

This timely volume conveys valuable insights about how public officials, the state, healthcare workers, and, ultimately, citizens responded to consequences of the pandemic upon not only the body but also social relations in community, city, and society. The contributing scholars document how state apparatuses, urban configurations, places of employment, legal structures, and ways of life responded to crisis-altered social conditions during the pandemic. The book investigates what societies experiencing crisis around the world reveal about the state's efficacy and inefficacy in fulfilling its social contract for its citizens, especially on unresolved issues related to social relations based on politics, race, ethnicity, gender, and crime.

This collection brings together a cross section of scholars experiencing the same temporal moment of crisis together, watching and observing how the pandemic of their age uncoiled itself into the fabric of community, onto the institutions and bureaucracies of society, and into the most intimate confines of the home.

The COVID-19 pandemic and other highly transmissible diseases outbreaks have given a new significance to the concept of "resilience", placing it in the spotlight of built environment-related studies. New directions have emerged from expanding on adaptive planning, urban layouts, urban morphologies, spatial planning, healthy cities, etc. To enhance resilience in the post-pandemic era, various theories, practices, and hypotheses are being formulated by scholars around the world.

The book aims to document resilience-related innovations and new perspectives for the built environment, how people's interactions adapt to new realities, and which mechanisms, tools, and strategies are required for such transformations in the following two scales of the built environments:

(1) City/district; research on planning, commuting and mobility, politics, urban configurations, regulations, transmission and prevention, models, top-down processes, innovation processes, etc.

(2) Community/neighborhood; research on collaboration, transmission and prevention, isolation and quarantine, social aspects, accessibility to services, technologies, education, policies, and innovative solutions.

This book explores the access to healthcare service during a global pandemic by rural ethnic women of Bangladesh. The authors consider different dimensions of accessibility such as- physical access, financial access, health behaviour and different socio-cultural factors of access, and attempts to explore the degree of access to healthcare of rural ethnic women from Santal tribe in Bangladesh during the COVID-19 pandemic. This exploration is likely to be helpful for healthcare providing organizations, international donor agencies, policy makers, and future researchers of gender studies, social policy, development studies among other fields.

The first scholarly exploration of the forums, practice, and economics of functional medicine.

Physicians of the Future interrogates the hidden logics of inclusion and exclusion in functional medicine (FM), a holistic form of personalized medicine that targets chronic disease. Rosalynn Vega uncovers how, as "wounded healers," some FM practitioners who are former chronic disease sufferers turn their illness narratives into a form of social capital, leveraging social media to relate to patients and build practices as "doctor-influencers." Arguing that power and authority operate distinctly in FM when compared to conventional medicine, largely because FM services are paid for out of pocket by socioeconomically privileged "clients," Vega studies how FM practitioners engage in entrepreneurship of their own while critiquing the profit motives of the existing healthcare system, pharmaceutical industry, and insurance industry. Using data culled from online support groups, conferences, docuseries, blogs, podcasts, YouTube, and TED Talks, as well as her own battles with chronic illness, Vega argues that FM practices prioritize the individual while inadvertently reinscribing inequities based on race and class. Ultimately, she opens avenues of possibility for FM interlocutors wrestling with their responsibility for making functional medicine accessible to all.

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(M. McEldowney, Emeritus Professor of Planning)

This book provides a post-Covid recovery strategy for the UK that is based on all aspects of health, but also addresses the ever-greater threat from global warming. Health and sustainability are interlocked.

More than other European nations, we favour libertarian values over social equity, privatized public services and lower taxes that reduce those services. From fair-minded pragmatism, we have descended into dogma, incompetence and intolerance.

Using the government's 5 guiding principles for a sustainable future, the book suggests how to improve distinct aspects of health:

• personal health through more preventive medicine;
• environmental health with lower transport and household emissions;
• economic health through local (rather than global) production of goods and services;
• social health by reducing gross health and wealth inequalities; and
• political health through strategic commitment, fair taxes (a bedroom tax just on the poor?) and real devolution to local councils.

We need to think local, act local and act now.

This book delves into the consequences of rapid population aging for Mexico and U.S. Latinos, impacting various institutions, including families, the labor force, and healthcare systems. It examines in depth the causes and consequences of the increasing prevalence of cognitive impairment and dementia, especially early-onset decline in the Mexican-origin population.

The book identifies resilience factors as critical to successful aging and health in the Mexican and Mexican-American populations from a transdisciplinary perspective. It also examines the diversity in the experiences of older adults with dementia and related disorders and that of their families in Mexico and the United States. The book also helps to better understand the levels of need and support capacity in both nations and the organizational contexts of long-term care in both countries.

The ultimate goal of this sixth volume in the series on aging in the Americas is to identify critical sources of vulnerability and possible policy options for closing the gap in affordable and sustainable long-term care and financial wellbeing for low-resource populations living with dementia and other medical conditions in both countries.

The volume presents new information, consensus data, potential venues for intervention, and action frameworks to advance current knowledge grounded in global aging health systems research of closing disparities in vulnerable populations at high risk of declining cognitive and physical health in two different political contexts. As such, the book provides a wealth of information for researchers, policy makers and professionals in the field of population aging.

Ageing of the Oppressed: A Pandemic of Intersectional Injustice explores what it is like to grow older with accumulating and intersecting discrimination. It condemns ageism and other "isms." Despite its visibility during the COVID-19 pandemic, ageism is not a new phenomenon but one that has been ignored for too long by policymakers and the general population. The negative language used to describe population ageing adds fuel to the fire by filling people's minds with ageist images that permeate all levels and sectors of society. We should all be recognized as full human rights holders, no matter our age, ability, disability, gender or sexual orientation, race, or socio-economic or any other status. This book combines theoretical models and academic essays by top experts with the real-life experience of older persons and activists. It is a must-read for advocates for human rights; policymakers; service providers; students of social and health sciences, the humanities, and law; and anybody willing to challenge assumptions and practices. The proposed UN Convention on the human rights of older persons will be a step forward to providing older persons with a remedy for daily and often life-long oppression.

Silvia Perel-Levin, a highly respected international expert and leading advocate on human rights and ageing, has brought together contributors from around the world and from different disciplines to reflect on ageing, human rights, and oppression in its many forms. The book offers provocative, moving, and powerful stories and analyses of marginalization in older age and the interaction of age and other forms of discrimination in the denial of human rights. The book demands of its readers that they reflect deeply on their own ageism, prejudices, and complacency. A must-have for anyone interested in ageing, human rights, law, and structures of power in our societies.

-Andrew Byrnes, Emeritus Professor of Law, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

As an eminent global advocate for the improvement of human rights of all citizens and most especially older people, Silvia Perel-Levin is well qualified to bring together leading experts in their field to convey through storytelling the manifest urgency for formal recognition and collective action against unjust treatment in all its forms. Each narrative will leave an imprint on your soul of the pain of being human yet most importantly the innate power in voice and meaningful engagement.

-Jane Barratt, Secretary General, International Federation on Ageing

Innovative and thought-provoking, the Handbook brings together an international range of top scholars from gerontology and geography to provide state-of-the-art assessments of the topic. Not only examining the latest literature, the chapters also challenge current thinking on the many intersections, opportunities and issues around place and aging that need to be addressed through policy and practice. The Handbook is split into four key sections: looking at different perspectives, core places of aging, making and re-making places for aging, and envisioning a future for the study of aging and place.

This Handbook invites students, scholars, practitioners and policy makers to consider a fresh examination of aging and place, offering theoretical, empirical and policy-relevant content. It will be of particular interest to those studying and working within gerontology, human geography, sociology, urban planning and environmental psychology.

This edited collection addresses concepts of value and its impact on economies and economic decision-making in Mesoamerica. It brings together various theoretical and methodological approaches to illuminate the little-studied topic of value in ancient economies.

While scholars increasingly note that tangible objects found in the archaeological record could assume different values, depending on how they were used and circulated, less attention has been paid to how we might infer consensus (or lack of consensus) on how value was determined in past cultures so different from contemporary ones. These contributions show how multiple and conflicting understandings of what is important and meaningful coexist within any society even as moments of exchange create the impression of shared formulations of value. They consider divergences between shared understandings based on systems of beliefs and patterns of practice and the individual decisions of social actors. They also discuss howinequalities in social structures might inform our understanding of value, and how a multiplicity of values might encourage closer inspection of inequality in turn.

The book brings together fifteen chapters focused on many parts of Mesoamerica, including Western Mexico, the Basin of Mexico, Veracruz, Oaxaca, and various parts of the Maya Lowlands, and range chronologically from the Classic period (250-900 CE) to the Spanish Conquest in the early 16^th Century. It appeals to those working in archaeology, economic anthropology, economic history, and all those interested in how value can be understood in terms of contemporary cultural and political differences.