One Blue Child ─ Asthma, Responsibility, and the Politics of Global Health

Radical changes in our understanding of health and healthcare are at the forefront of reshaping twenty-first-century personhood. In the last few years, there has been a great influx of public policy and biometric technologies targeted at engaging individuals in their own health, increasing personal responsibility, and encouraging people to "self-manage" their own care.

One Blue Child examines the emergence of self-management as a global policy standard, focusing on how the neoliberal turn in healthcare is reshaping our relationships with ourselves and our bodies, with our families and our doctors, and with companies and the government. Comparing responses to childhood asthma in New Zealand and the Czech Republic, Susanna Trnka traces how ideas about self-management, as well as policies inculcating self-reliance and self-responsibility more broadly, are assumed, reshaped, and ignored altogether by medical professionals, asthma sufferers and parents, environmental activists, and policymakers. By studying nations that share a commitment to the ideals of neoliberalism but approach children's health according to very different cultural, political, and economic priorities, Trnka illuminates how responsibility is reformulated with sometimes surprising results. Ultimately she demonstrates both the benefits and limitations of self-management policies and the need to look at more comprehensive solutions to the asthma epidemic.

Susanna Trnka is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Auckland. She is the author of State of Suffering: Political Violence and Community Survival in Fiji (2008) and the co-editor of Competing Responsibilities: The Politics and Social Ethics of Responsibility in Contemporary Life (2017).