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Over the last twenty years, type 2 diabetes skyrocketed to the forefront of global public health concern. In this book, Mari Armstrong-Hough examines the rise in and response to the disease in two societies: the United States and Japan. Both societies have faced rising rates of diabetes, but their social and biomedical responses to its ascendance have diverged. To explain the emergence of these distinctive strategies, Armstrong-Hough argues that physicians act not only on increasingly globalized professional standards but also on local knowledge, explanatory models, and cultural toolkits. As a result, strategies for clinical management diverge sharply from one country to another. Armstrong-Hough demonstrates how distinctive practices endure in the midst of intensifying biomedicalization, both on the part of patients and on the part of physicians, and how these differences grow from broader cultural narratives about diabetes in each setting.

This book analyses how racism and anti-racism influences Black British middle class cultural consumption. In doing so, this book challenges the dominant understanding of British middle class identity and culture as being ‘beyond race’. Paying attention to the relationship between cultural capital and cultural repertoires, this book puts forward the idea that there are three black middle-class identity modes: strategic assimilation, class-minded, and ethnoracial autonomous. People towards each of these identity modes use specific cultural repertoires to organise their cultural consumption. Those towards strategic assimilation draw on repertoires of code-switching and cultural equity, consuming traditional middle class culture to maintain an equality with the white middle-class in levels of cultural capital. Ethnoracial autonomous individuals draw on repertoires of browning and Afro-centrism, self-selecting out of traditional middle- class cultural pursuits they decode as ‘Eurocentric’, while showing a preference for cultural forms that uplift black diasporic histories and cultures. Lastly, those towards the class-minded identity mode draw on repertoires of post-racialism and de-racialisation. Such individuals polarise between ‘Black’ and middle class cultural forms, display an unequivocal preference for the latter, and lambast other black people who avoid middle-class culture as being culturally myopic or culturally uncultivated. This book will appeal to sociology students, researchers, and academics working on race and class, critical race theory, and cultural sociology, among other social science disciplines.