Bøger af Stephanie Greco Larson

Part memoir, part indictment, Relentless is one woman's honest and unflinching account of suffering from terminal cancer. In December 2006, Stephanie Greco Larson, a forty-six year old political science professor at Dickinson College, was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. Oncologists told her that the disease would kill her in mere months. In the four years following her diagnosis, Larson endured being pricked, prodded, cut, injected, ignored, and scolded by doctors who tried to stave off her incurable cancer. Drafted between her diagnosis and death in 2011, Relentless provides one patient's perspective of living and dying with peritoneal cancer in the American medical system, a system she found ill-equipped to hear, treat, and comfort those with aggressive and eventually fatal forms of cancer. From health insurance to hospice care, Larson catalogs the shortcomings of the American healthcare system and its failure to serve those who cannot be cured. Larson deconstructs our society's notion that the ideal cancer patient should be the positive fighter who keeps the messy parts of the disease to herself: I'm more comfortable with the term "cancer victim," but that term is passé. It has been stripped from the discourse by those seeking agency, and ironically, by those who want to empower us. If I call myself a cancer victim, people get unhappy. They don't want to think of me as a victim. I don't fit the cowering, helpless stereotype they have in their heads. So they correct me: "You're no victim"; "You're still here, aren't you"; or the generic "Don't say that. You have to stay positive." So if I'm not a victim or a survivor, and I'm not really living with cancer or necessarily in treatment, what am I? I'd say that I am a "cancer sufferer." I am a cancer sufferer. I have cancer. I suffer from it. I am not always fighting. I am not always in treatment. I am not yet dead from cancer, but I will be in months or years, and until then, my life is fundamentally altered by the presence of cancer and the medical protocols for treating it. I am a cancer sufferer. Like fools, I don't suffer it gladly. Edited and published posthumously, Relentless is Larson's refusal to stay silent about the uncomfortable realities of her treatment and terminal illness. Under the steady hands of Meg Allen, her former student, and David Srokose, her devoted husband, this, her final rallying cry, boldly challenges readers to cease substituting catch phrases like "stay positive" and "think pink" for actual compassion. All profits from this memoir go toward the Stephanie Greco Larson Scholarship at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

"You''re fired!" became the catch phrase in the spring of 2004 as NBC''s The Apprentice captured public and media attention. Even though The Apprentice was not exclusively about race, it communicated and reinforced racial messages that are part and parcel of the dominant American ideology. No matter which minority group is represented, the media in America offer the same bill of fare: first, exclusion; followed by stereotyping that makes a sharp distinction between "good" minority members and "bad" ones; and finally, the telling of stories that justify racial inequality in American society. Media & Minorities looks at all these tendencies with an eye to identifying the "system-supportive" messages conveyed and offering challenges to them. The book covers all major mediaΓÇöincluding television, film, newspapers, radio, and magazinesΓÇöand systematically analyzes their representation of the four largest minority groups in the United States: African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans. Entertainment media are compared and contrasted with news media, and special attention is devoted to coverage of social movements for racial justice and politicians of color. Political communication scholar Stephanie Greco Larson brings sharp insight into how the white-dominated media do a disservice to all their audiences when it comes to their representation of racial and ethnic minorities. She gives us ammunition for decoding the dominant messages and then combating them, whether through political activism, "culture jamming," or the creation and patronage of alternative media. Larson encourages readers to fight the misleading media messengers, saying "you''re fired!" to media that undermine racial equality.