This book provides a textual analysis of the implementation of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in health care. Using sexual health as a case study, the authors apply Foucault's notions of biopower and biopolitics to discuss the power struggle between local needs and wants and universal ambitions embedded in the SDG ideology. Reproductive and sexual health are settings where health policy, religious and cultural norms, and gender policy meet personal and moral standards. As such, tensions, dilemmas, and conflicts are powerfully demonstrated in this interdisciplinary field of public health. Tensions, dilemmas and conflicts are particularly visible in reproductive and sexual health settings, where health policy meets personal or moral standards, gender policy, and religious and cultural norms. This book will be valuable supplementary material for graduate students and academics wishing to enhance their knowledge in the fields of global health, sexual health, reproductive health and rights, and cultural studies. The book will also be of interest to professionals and students within the disciplines of medical sociology, medical anthropology, sustainability studies, gender and sexuality studies, and public health.

The COVID-19 crisis has transformed the highly specialized issue of what constitutes reliable medical evidence into a topic of public concern and debate. This book interrogates the assumption that evidence means the same thing to different constituencies and in different contexts. Rather than treating various practices of knowledge as rational or irrational in purely scientific terms, it explains the controversies surrounding COVID-19 by drawing on a theoretical framework that recognizes different types of rationality, and hence plural conceptualizations of evidence. Debates within and beyond the medical establishment on the efficacy of measures such as mandatory face masks are examined in detail, as are various degrees of hesitancy towards vaccines. The authors demonstrate that it is ultimately through narratives that knowledge about medical and other phenomena is communicated to others, enters the public space, and provokes discussion and disagreements. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.