Landscapes of Care:
Immigration and Health in Rural America
Thurka Sangaramoorthy is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at American University and author of three books including Treating AIDS, Rapid Ethnographic Assessments, and Landscapes of Care.
This insightful work on rural health in the United States examines the ways immigrants, mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean, navigate the health care system in the United States. Since 1990, immigration to the United States has risen sharply, and rural areas have seen the highest increases. Thurka Sangaramoorthy reveals that that the corporatization of health care delivery and immigration policies are deeply connected in rural America. Drawing from fieldwork that centers on Maryland's sparsely populated Eastern Shore, Sangaramoorthy shows how longstanding issues of precarity among rural health systems along with the exclusionary logics of immigration have mutually fashioned a "landscape of care" in which shared conditions of physical suffering and emotional anxiety among immigrants and rural residents generate powerful forms of regional vitality and social inclusion. Sangaramoorthy connects the Eastern Shore and its immigrant populations to many other places around the world that are struggling with the challenges of global migration, rural precarity, and health governance. Her extensive ethnographic and policy research shows the personal stories behind health inequity data and helps to give readers a human entry point into the enormous challenges of immigration and rural health.
Awards & Distinctions
Honorable Mention, 2023 SANA Book Prize, Society for the Anthropology of North America
Honorable Mention, 2024 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award, Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section, American Sociological Association
Media coverage:
Reviews
“Sangaramoorthy offers a glimpse into how and under what conditions migrant workers from Latin America, the Caribbean, and other parts of North America seek, receive, and fashion care. This book provides new ways of reimagining much of the conventional thinking within medical anthropology about immigration and immigrant health."
—Adia Benton, Northwestern University
“This is a deftly written book that skillfully brings together multiple strands of analysis through a clear, coherent, and well-theorized set of arguments. Drawing on a rich set of interdisciplinary scholarship, Sangaramoorthy complicates conventional ways of thinking about immigration and rural health in the US."
—Jennifer Liu, University of Waterloo
“[Sangaramoorthy] weaves observations and stories of immigrant workers and their health providers with interdisciplinary literature that makes clear that this treatise has applicability beyond the Eastern shore. . . . Recommended.”—CHOICE