Injury : The Politics of Product Design and Safety Law in the United States / Sarah S. Lochlann Jain.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jain, Sarah S. Lochlann, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Wounds and injuries--Social aspects--United States.

Wounds and injuries.

Product safety--Social aspects--United States.

Product safety.

Personal injuries--United States.

Personal injuries.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 214 pages) : illustrations

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Summary:

Injury offers the first sustained anthropological analysis and critique of American injury law. The book approaches injury law as a symptom of a larger American injury culture, rather than as a tool of social justice or as a form of regulation. In doing so, it offers a new understanding of the problematic role that law plays in constructing Americans' relations with the objects they consume. Through lively historical analyses of consumer products and workplace objects ranging from cigarettes to cheeseburgers and computer keyboards to airbags, Jain lucidly illustrates the real limits of the product safety laws that seek to redress consumer and worker injury. The book draws from a wide range of materials to demonstrate that American law sets out injury as an exceptional state, one that can be redressed through imperfect systems of monetary compensation. Injury demonstrates how laws are unable to accommodate the ways in which physical differences among citizens are imposed by the physical objects of culture that distribute risk differently among populations. The book moves between detailed accounts of individual legal cases; historical analyses of advertising, product design, regulation, and legal history; and a wide reading of cultural theory. Drawing on an extensive knowledge of law and social theory, this innovative book will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in design, consumption, and the politics of injury.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

Introduction. Injury in U.S. Risk Culture

Chapter 1. American Injury Culture

Chapter 2. Sentience and Slavery

Chapter 3. Keyboard Design

Chapter 4. "Come Up to the 'Kool' Taste"

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. [157]-208) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Mai 2019)

ISBN:

9780691190242

0691190240

OCLC:

1132221775