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Culture, Disease, and Well-Being: The Grey Zone of Health and Illness
Series Editor: Alan Blum
The series, Culture, Disease, and Well-Being: The Grey Zone of Health and Illness, represents the work of a multidisciplinary project in Medical Humanities funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and based in downtown Toronto at the Culture of Cities Centre which is supported by the Faculty of Arts, University of Waterloo. The Grey Zone project develops a framework for studying health and illness by isolating a range of case studies in which the tension between medicine's promise and its particular interpretations and incorporations become visible and dramatic under conditions of modern life. The idea of the Grey Zone identifies the ways in which indeterminacy, uncertainty, and ambiguity inhabit our interpretations and actions even when they are most resolute and appear most unassailable. The Grey Zone does not make reference to conspiracy or domination but to the natural working of language as a living social relationship between words and deeds where we must invariably speak and act under "imperfect" conditions. Though this zone of ambiguity might often appear terrifying in health care because of the import and urgency of problems involved, it operates whenever we strive to make sense of our situations. Works in the Grey Zone series use resources from classical theorizing, the humanities and social sciences that bear upon the interdisciplinary study of interpretive instabilities, their grounds and effects, in relation to the negotiation of problems of health, illness, and disease in everyday life. Forthcoming publications in the series include a monograph by Alan Blum, The Grey Zone of Health and Illness, and two collections of essays, Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability edited by Tristanne Connolly, and Of Indeterminate Birth: Studies in the Culture of Origins, Fertility and Creation, edited by Elke Grenzer and Jan Plecash.
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The Method of Metaphor

Spectacular Death
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)representability
An interdisciplinary collection of essays on the medical and social articulation of death this anthology considers to what extent a subject as elusive as death can be examined. Though it touches us all we can perceive it only in life – with the predictable result that we treat it either as a clinical or social problem to be managed or as a phenomenon to be studied quantitatively. This volume goes beyond these models to question self-reflexively how the management of death is organized and motivated and the ways that death is at once feared and embraced. Drawing on the very latest in the medical humanities Spectacular Death gives us an enlightening new perspective on death from the classical world to the twenty-first century.

The Grey Zone of Health and Illness
Culture, Disease, and Well-Being
Most discussions of health care center on medical advances cost and the roles of insurers and government agencies. With The Grey Zone of Health and Illness Alan Blum offers a new perspective outlining a highly nuanced theoretical approach to health and health care alike. Drawing on a range of thinkers Blum explains how our current understanding of health care tends to posit it as a sort of state of permanent emergency like the nuclear standoff of the Cold War. To move beyond that he argues will require a complete rethinking of health and sickness self-governance and negligence. A heady cutting-edge intervention in a critical area of society The Grey Zone of Health and Illness will have wide ramifications in the academy and beyond.