Critical Medical Anthropology: perspectives from/of Latin America

Between the 31st October and the 2nd of November UCL will host a series of seminars to explore contemporary scholarship on critical medical anthropology, with academics from and focused on Latin America.

Rita Laura Segato: “ History and patriarchal violence” Tuesday 31^st October, 12.30pm, PUW Sem. room 2.

Jaime Breilh: “The relevance of critical Latin American science for counterhegemonic global health research and agency” Wednesday 1^st November, 12.45-2pm, Levinsky room

Charles L. Briggs, Rita Laura Segato, and Jaime Breilh: Lecture & Presentations, 2nd November, 5.30pm Leolin Price Lecture Theatre, UCL Institute for Child Health, 30 Guilford St.

***

More information on each of the events is outlined below.

Rita Laura Segato: “ History and patriarchal violence” 31^st October, 12.30pm, PUW Sem. room 2.

Dr. Segato, is Professor of Anthropology at Universidade Brasilia, Bioethics and Human Rights department is one of Latin America’s most celebrated feminist anthropologists and has published widely on feminism, patriarchy and violence. She obtained her MA and PhD (1984) at the Department of Social Anthropology, Queens University, Belfast. She has been a professor of Anthropology in the University of Brasilia since 1985, and in 2011 moved to the Postgraduate Programme of Bioethics and Human Rights.

As part of our seminar series on Gender and Global Health Rita will speak about ‘History and patriarchal violence’ when she will discuss the intersection of patriarchy and violence throughout history and the role of patriarchy in the development of our modern state.

Jaime Breilh: “The relevance of critical Latin American science for counterhegemonic global health research and agency” Wednesday 1^st November, 12.45-2pm, Levinsky room

Jaime Breilh, Rector of the University of the Andes, Ecuador, is a founder of the Latin American New Public Health movement and the field of Social Medicine. A medical doctor with postgraduate studies in Social Medicine (UAM-Mexico), and PhD in Epidemiology (University of Bahia, Brasil), Jaime is President of the Centre for Development Research (CINDES), co-founder of the Latin American Association for Social Medicine, and an affiliate of the Ecuadorian Academy of Medicine.

Jaime has authored numerous books on Social Epidemiology and Social Medicine, including his most recent and award winning book ‘Critical Epidemiology’.

He has been visiting professor at Berkeley, San Diego and Michigan universities in the US as well as universities in Spain, Portugal and throughout Latin America

Abstract for seminar

Starting with a brief outline of a century long construction of the critical Latin American academic tradition, which began with the university reform movement of 1918, the author discusses the present challenges of postgraduate strategic thinking. In the health field, the development since the late 70s of the Latin American Social Medicine Movement -presently known as collective health movement-, provided the organizational, epistemological and methodological conditions for the appearance and consolidation of renewed disciplinary fields like critical epidemiology which bring out consistent academic resources urgently demanded for understanding and tackling destructive processes of neoliberal globalization, through peoples based counterhegemonic science and emancipatory agency.

Charles L. Briggs, Rita Laura Segato, and Jaime Breilh: Lecture & Presentations, 2nd November, 5.30pm Leolin Price Lecture Theatre, UCL Institute for Child Health, 30 Guilford St.

“Critical Theory without Borders? Fostering New Dialogues with and within Latin American Critical Medical Anthropology” Charles L. Briggs, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley

Eduardo Menéndez argues that biomedicine relies on autoatención, care undertaken outside clinical spaces by laypersons, even as professionals often denigrate and erase it. I argue that critical theorizing about global health is similarly undertaken by persons denied the status of intellectuals when facing acute health inequities; like autoatención, it seldom crosses borders that protect centers of theoretical production. Innovative insights are generally rendered immobile due to their production in spaces between epistemologies, languages, and knowledge-production practices. The general failure by Europeans and North Americans to appreciate Latin American theorizing about health inequities similarly follows from geopolitical imbalances between English, Spanish, and Portuguese and academic infrastructures. Focusing on critical reflections by indigenous parents and leaders in the midst of a rabies epidemic in eastern Venezuela, the paper proposes dialogic practices that are as comfortable inhabiting borders as crossing them, that respect how critical theories become immobile as well as mobile.

“Femicide as symptom of the present” Laura Rita Segato, Department of Bioethics and Human Rights, University of Brasilia

In this paper I attempt to situate the issue of violence against women within the broader contemporary political and economic context, and will argue that the destiny of women can be seen as a device, or particular scenario, in which to identify power strategies and agendas, as well as explore their historical processes. With this, I will argue that we must relocate gender studies and transfer them “from edge to center”.

“Latin American critical science on the global life and health crisis: building trans-disciplinary intercultural research-teaching-agency” Jaime Breilh, Rector, Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito, Ecuador

Followed by a drinks reception.