Law, Environmental Illness and Medical Uncertainty

The Contested Governance of Health

Tarryn Phillips (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

202 Seiten

2015
Routledge (Verlag)
978-0-415-82856-7 (ISBN)

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We’ve seen it before, with asbestos-related disease, leukaemia clusters and lung cancer caused by cigarettes. There tends to be a lag between the emergence of environmental risks and chemical injuries, and their recognition and therapeutic treatment by medicine and the law. Law, Environmental Illness and Medical Uncertainty examines how our society governs new health concerns as they emerge, and the barriers that face new and uncertain theories seeking recognition in the law.

In this book, Tarryn Phillips focuses her investigation on the struggle over the controversial condition multiple chemical sensitivities, or MCS (also known as environmental illness). Presenting nine case studies where workers sought compensation for MCS from their multinational employers, she captures a nuanced portrait of their embittered, unequal battles over the scientific, legal and insurance paradigms for understanding toxic risk, environmental illness and the regulation of industry. It draws on three years of fieldwork in Australia, including interview data with lay people and sympathetic and sceptical experts, participant observation in the courtroom and textual analysis of official reports.

The book gives a unique, ethnographic insight into the governance of risk and uncertainty within a neoliberal economy, medico-scientific controversies and courtroom dramas. It highlights how a skeptical approach towards emergent environmental concerns is encouraged within the current regime, and decision-makers face disincentives for taking a sympathetic approach. Compellingly written and easy to read, it should appeal widely to interested lay people, and students and scholars of science and technology studies, medical anthropology, sociology of health and illness, and critical legal studies.

Tarryn Phillips is an anthropologist and lecturer in Legal Studies at La Trobe University. Her interests lie in social justice and inequality. She researches how medicine and the law manage uncertainty, define and punish deviance and interact with their socio-cultural surroundings

Chapter 1: Introducing the Disease of Uncertainty, Chapter 2: Knowledge and Power at the Medico-Legal Interface, Chapter 3: Risk Entrepreneurialism: The Social Construction of Toxicity and Disease, Chapter 4: The Medico-Legal Illness Narratives, Chapter 5: Medical, Legal and Insurance Reasoning in the Governance of Uncertainty, Chapter 6: The Deviance of Sympathetic Experts, Chapter 7: Non-legal Governance and Epistemological Possibilities, Chapter 8: Neoliberalism, Scepticism and Toxic Knowledge, Conclusion: Environmental Illness and The Role of the Law

Erscheint lt. Verlag	12.3.2015
Reihe/Serie	Social Justice
Zusatzinfo	3 Tables, black and white; 1 Line drawings, black and white
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Gewicht	453 g
Themenwelt	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie
	Medizin / Pharmazie
	Recht / Steuern ► Allgemeines / Lexika
	Recht / Steuern ► EU / Internationales Recht
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Mikrosoziologie
	Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Planung / Organisation
ISBN-10	0-415-82856-2 / 0415828562
ISBN-13	978-0-415-82856-7 / 9780415828567
Zustand	Neuware