“This searing, intimate ethnography of five rural New England families, struggling with homelessness, disabilities, and financial insecurity, analyzes 'paradoxes of care' of state and healthcare services that lead to dismantling families, and concludes at decade's end with successful post-homeless security, and a passionate call for nonpunitive compassionate services.”
Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, emerita Harvard Medical School, Harvard University
“At long last, a fiercely argued ethnography that refuses the reductive simplicities of 'homelessness.' There for the long haul, Families on the Edge captures the distinctive contours of rural precarity: its hardscrabble intimacies, makeshift economies, oft-hapless social assistance, and fraught, hazardous moral project of parenting.”
Kim Hopper, Professor of Clinical Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University
“Families on the Edge is a gripping exploration of the way homelessness and its aftermath is experienced by families in a rural area of New England.”
Ethos
“Carpenter-Song's writing is lucid and evocative, which makes the book a good choice for undergraduate courses in medical anthropology, cultural psychiatry, psychological anthropology, and social work.”
Medical Anthropology Quarterly
