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This chapter examines how members constructed being “returning citizens” through their experiences with community organizing. It argues that “returning citizenship” is a form of “cultural citizenship” and that narratives of participation in community organizing shape the construction of such citizenship. Most respondents drew from two main narratives, cultural deficit narratives and structural barrier narratives, to articulate community organizing participation. Cultural deficit narratives described households and neighborhoods as lacking collective efficacy—characterized by absentee parents, gangs, violence, drugs—while structural barrier narratives framed social problems as structural—due to unjust laws, poverty, housing, education, or mass incarceration. Most respondents drew from these narratives to describe how community organizing built relationships that provided social support—even kinship—to foster collective efficacy and overcome structural barriers. Returning citizenship rearticulated dominant, individualistic notions of citizenship (i.e., being “positive” and “productive”) into collective notions.

Mary Alice Scott and Richard Wright’s chapter explores the intersections of seemingly opposing understandings of health—as a “right” or a “responsibility”—in health care professionals’ commentaries on ACA implementation in a formerly free clinic in southern New Mexico. The concepts of co-responsibility and of patient engagement—increasingly central to health care and other social programs globally— were reflected in staff framing of health care problems, clinic activities, and conceptualizations of patients. Patient engagement requires motivating patients to increase participation in their own health care and empowering them to develop self-efficacy. As this chapter shows, there is often a mismatch between provider expectations of shared responsibility and the highly constrained actions of patients, who in this study confronted structural barriers including being homeless, lack of regular transportation, and undocumented immigration status.

This chapter traces the government's attempts to remove structural barriers and disincentives to work within the disability-benefits system itself, and to provide financial incentives to do paid work. It looks at the intention and mechanism of various new structural and administrative arrangements, and what evidence there is about the outcomes. The chapter finds that although there have been advantages and new opportunities for some people, conflicts and tensions remain.

This chapter looks at ways of connecting the social model of disability to the various labour market issues, particularly the experiences of Deaf people. It looks at access to employment for those who are considered ‘disabled’, and examines unemployment and underemployment for disabled people. The reasons for the ‘employment paradox’ are considered, along with the insufficiency of recent policy and practice initiatives. The chapter also addresses the societal-level policies and practices that can be used to overcome structural barriers to the employment of Deaf and disabled people.

This introductory chapter presents an interview with Juanita Miller, a black woman who was diagnosed with arthritis, diabetes, and hypertension, and has a medical history of heart attacks, and congestive heart failure. In relation to her condition, a study found that black women had more risk factors for heart disease than their white counterparts. Socioeconomic status, including occupational category, combined family income, educational level, and insurance status might be a contributing factor for the disease. In addition to being disproportionately at risk for heart disease, black woman have also been shown to have high rates of delaying care. Their delaying of care is related to structural barriers such as lack of time, child care, transportation, access to care, and so on. Juxtaposing the study with Miller's narrative, the book examines the causes of the disease alongside ideas about health inequalities.

The story of the Young Lords is intoxicating to many because it resonates with the suffering and aspirations of millions of young people who are outsiders in America. Like the children of NAFTA—migrants from Mexico, the Caribbean and Latin America during in the 1980s and 1990s— the Young Lords also underwent the crucible of migration as children. Their parents were the country’s superexploited workers, heavily concentrated in the lowest-paid, dirtiest, and most precarious and dangerous sectors of the economy. And Like migrants today, Puerto Ricans were blamed for America’s problems. As translators and cultural interlocutors between their parents and America’s hostile bureaucracies, the Young Lords gained a second sight. With it, they gave their generation the language and analysis to make sense of the trauma produced by the large-scale economic and political forces that massively displaced their parents from their homeland. They also helped their peers understand their place in American society as exploited, racialized, colonial people and the structural barriers they faced in an increasingly deindustrialized and dilapidated city. In struggle, they discovered who they were and asserted their place in America.

The primary agents of social control as the War on Drugs escalated were police, courts, jails, prisons, and drug treatment programs. This chapter discusses the social, historical, and economic forces behind the rise of the prison industrial complex and the recent pendulum swing from punishment to treatment, motived by the widespread acceptance of addiction as a disease and the unsustainable costs of mass incarceration. However, as treatment alternatives to jail became more popular, the criminal justice system incorporated treatment into its own administrative costs to maintain control. This led to the merging of the prison industrial complex with the treatment industrial complex—both with vested interest in perpetuating the War on Drugs. The analysis of treatment models suggests that while the social environment is recognized as an influential factor of problematic drug use, it is rarely addressed in treatment protocols, whose focus continues to be on changing the individual with little effort to change the structural barriers and situational context that led to problematic drug use and relapse.