Who Is Muhammad?

MICHAEL MUHAMMAD KNIGHT

Combining a historical and religious studies overview with contemporary analysis, this book is designed to serve as a basic, comprehensive, concise introduction to the founder and central figure of the Islamic tradition: the prophet Muhammad. Through Muhammad’s life story, teachings, and daily practices (hadith)—as well as how his teachings are received, viewed, and practiced around the world—Michael Knight offers readers an insightful introduction to the Islamic tradition. In Knight’s analysis, Muhammad is placed as simultaneously one of the most beloved historical figures in the world, and also one of the most contested, challenged, and disparaged. Knight argues that there was never a collective Muslim vision of Muhammad, but always a multiplicity of Muslim imaginaries. While Muslims defend Muhammad’s legacy against Islamophobic polemics, they also challenge each other regarding the proper authorities through which Muhammad’s life and message become comprehensible and applicable in our world.

Michael Knight is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Central Florida.

In Pursuit of Health Equity

ERIC D. CARTER

Drawing on vast source materials, Eric D. Carter offers the first comprehensive intellectual and political history of the social medicine movement in Latin America, from the early twentieth century to the present day. While maintaining a consistent focus on health equity, social medicine has evolved with changing conditions, shaping early Latin American welfare states, declining with the dominance of mid-century technocratic health planning, resurging again in the 1970s in solidarity against authoritarian regimes, and later in resistance to neoliberal reforms of the health sector. The book tells the stories of socialist and anarchist doctors, political exiles, brilliant intellectuals, populist leaders, and rebellious technocrats, from Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and other countries to help make sense of Latin American social medicine, how it responds to and shapes a dynamic political environment, and how lessons from this movement might lead to new ways of thinking about how to achieve health equity in the twenty-first century.

November 2023

208 pages

Religion

Rights: World

August 2023

320 pages

Health and Medicine

Rights: World

November 2023

320 pages

Latin American & Caribbean Studies / Health & Medicine

Rights: World

Surgery and Salvation

The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico, 1770–1940

ELIZABETH O’BRIEN

In this history of reproductive surgery in Mexico, Elizabeth O’Brien traces the intersection of religion, reproduction, and obstetric racism. Examining the relationship between medical ideas about surgical operations, Catholic theological debates, and evolving notions of modernity and Mexican identity, O’Brien argues that present-day claims about fetal personhood are rooted in the use of surgical force against marginalized and racialized women. This history illuminates the theological, patriarchal, and epistemological roots of obstetric violence and racism today.

Making the Green Revolution

Agriculture and Conflict in Colombia

TIMOTHY LOREK

In November 2017, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) celebrated its fiftieth anniversary at its headquarters outside Palmira, Colombia. As an important research center of the so-called Green Revolution in agricultural science and technologies, CIAT emphasizes its contributions to sustainability, food security, gender equity, inclusive markets, and resilient, climate-smart agriculture. Yet these terms hardly describe the Cauca Valley where CIAT is physically located, a place that has been transformed into an industrial monoculture of sugarcane where thirteen Colombian corporations oversee the vast majority of this valley’s famously fertile soil. This exemplifies the paradox described in Making the Green Revolution. Utilizing archives in Colombia, Puerto Rico, and the United States, Lorek tracks the paradoxical but intertwined twentieth-century processes that produced both CIAT and sugar in the Cauca Valley.

Timothy W. Lorek is associate professor of history the College of St. Scholastica.

May 2023

336 pages, Latin American & Caribbean Studies / Environmental Studies

Rights: World