PURPOSE:
The purpose of this assignment is for you to discuss your reactions to the book, The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills, by David Ansell. It requires that you read all assigned portions of the book and write a paper in response.
Part I: Overall impressions:
• What did you find most interesting in the book? What did you learn that helped to change your understanding of the social world? Was there anything that surprised you?
Part II: Consider the following questions, and critically and thoroughly answer 2-3 of them:
1. Is life expectancy a good measure of the overall health for a region or specific demographic? What are the advantages of using that measure? What might be overlooked?
2. In what ways does the current way of talking about health in America obscure the ways health is impacted by structural violence?
3. Ansell clearly has a deep concern for social justice. Should medical professionals be outspoken about issues of structural violence? Why or why not?
4. One way that structural violence continues to negatively impact health is through the racial bias and empathy gaps in medical practitioners themselves. How can hospitals, clinics, and medical schools address these issues?
5. How is redlining related to health?
6. In what ways might Ansell’s book inform how we practice healthcare in America? Where do the biggest changes need to be made? (e.g. Policy/insurance? Clinical/hospital care? Public health programs?)
Please include:
• A full reference citation for this book using American Sociological Association (ASA) or APA style.
• Your name.
• In text citations should be in ASA or APA Style (see start here module for ASA resources)
• Remember that quotations taken directly from a text should have quotation marks at the beginning and end and the authors’ last name, date and page numbers follow the end quote.
• ASA Example: After the magazine article first appeared, until the 1970’s, “the woman behind the HeLa cells would be known most often as Helen Lane, and sometimes as Helen Larson, but never as Henrietta Lacks. And because of that, her family had no idea her cells were alive” (Skloot 2010: 109).