When
Center for Latin American Studies, Fall 2020 virtual Charlas con Café – a weekly space to hear lectures from a wide variety of experts and discuss topics relevant to the Latin American region, every Friday from 1-2:30 p.m
Friday, Nov. 6, Embodied Populations Across Disciplines: Health and Area Studies in Latin America and the Middle East
This dual presentation on Area Studies and Public Health will be divided into two talks:
- Toxic States of Pandemonium by Dr. Stefanie Graeter.
This lecture connects emerging public health concerns over heavy metal toxicity with recent travails of the corona virus in Peru. The presentation will reflect upon both exposure events as structured by fundamental inequalities among the national populous including, but not limited to, access to health care, economy, migration, and knowledge production.
Dr. Stefanie Graeter is an Assistant Professor of Latin American Health at the University of Arizona. Her current book project, Mineral Incorporations, examines lead toxicity science and the politics of extractive economics in contemporary Peru. Dr. Graeter's peer-reviewed articles are published in Cultural Anthropology and American Anthropologist.
- Waiting for AIDS in Kuwait by Dr. Laura Goffman.
Amid global discussions of HIV/AIDS in the late 1980s and early 1990s, anxiety surrounding Kuwait’s integration into transnational networks brought tensions over gender roles, citizenship, sexuality, and infidelity to the forefront of public discourse. My talk will examine the significance of HIV/AIDS in a region in which reactions to the pandemic centered on the process of constructing a potential medical event. I'll argue that citizens and non-citizens in Kuwait articulated these anxieties in the context of waiting—waiting to be infected, waiting for a national outbreak, waiting in quarantine, and, for non-citizens who tested positive for HIV, waiting to be deported.
Dr. Laura Frances Goffman is Assistant Professor of Health Studies of the Middle East and North Africa in the School of MENAS at the University of Arizona. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Georgetown University and was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the project “The Lifetimes of Epidemics in Europe and the Middle East” at the University of Oslo.
This event is part of the webinar series: “Pandemics and Health Crises in the Middle East and Latin America", co-hosted with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona.
See this semester's full line up of LAS specialists, mark your calendars and prepare your coffee cup!
Join us at: https://arizona.zoom.us/s/97671662300