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Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene

Building Capacity in Medical Anthropology. Wellcome Trust Funded 2021-2023

This two-year collaboration between UFRGS Brazil, CIESAS Mexico and UCL in the UK brings together environmental, indigenous, biosocial, multispecies, gender and theoretical expertise in Medical Anthropology, to extend interdisciplinary engagement concerning how the Anthropocene epoch impacts on human health. Our group aligns interest and expertise in diverse fields of inquiry relevant to the embodied inequalities of the Anthropocene including gender, justice and power, indigenous health, well-being and sustainability.

As Medical Anthropologists we are concerned with how human bodies are affected by and responding to the Anthropocene context. Yet the problematisation of this phenomena is unsettled and restricted by Western categorisations of planetary life, human experiences and the methods of achieving sustainable social and environmental futures. The very definition of this epoch as the ‘Anthropocene’, suggests a global human responsibility for what is effectively the fallout of Western industrial social orders. Key questions which guide our work include:

  • How are human and non-human bodies affected by and responding to Anthropocene contexts?
  • What is Medical Anthropology's role in explaining the consequences for health, well being of ongoing environmental degradation of loss of biodiversity and climate change?
  • How should we understand and intervene in the unequal distribution, patterning and responses to health in the Anthropocene?

Our collaboration is committed to developing research and learning capacity within Medical Anthropology in the UK and Latin America, fostering intellectual exchanges between diverse disciplinary traditions and knowledges.  In doing so we aim to collaboratively understand the context of and to address the consequences for human health and wellbeing of unfettered economic growth, environmental degradation and climate change, and the related social, economic and ecological disorders that characterise this geological period, defined as the Anthropocene.

We are currently developing medical anthropology expertise in a number of key areas: i) indigenous experience and coloniality of the Anthropocene, ii) gender, reproduction and environmental justice, iii) multispecies ethnography and human-animal health, iv) COVID-19 and public understanding of the Anthropocene v) chemical toxicity and exposure.

Our activities include virtual and face to face seminars and workshops, early career development through the appointment of postdocs in Brazil, Mexico and the UK, and the curation and collection of resource material for a tri-lingual Medical Anthropology of the Anthropocene open access teaching resource.

Upcoming seminars

 

Past seminars

Blue Anthropocene in Latin America seminar series

Maximilian Viatori - Current Inequalities: The Movements and Meanings of Ocean Waste in Peru

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Environmental entanglements and health: what era are we living in?

19 March 2024 

With Dr Andrea Mastrangelo

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A colonial metabolism: food, nutrition and extraction in Malawi

29 January 2024

With Prof Megan Vaughan

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Cosmocentrism, the ethics of indigenous civilizations, and the right to resist global extractivist-capitalism: The contemporary experience of the Asháninka (Peru/Brazil)

22 November 2023

With Prof Stefano Varese and Dr. Carolina Comandulli

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Inside the Medicine Anthropology Theory special issue

4 October 2023

Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene: Hear about the papers in this special issue and for the opportunity to speak with authors. 

A link to this issue:  http://www.medanthrotheory.org/issue/view/537

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Dr. Francisco Vergara-Silva: "The ‘conquest of Mexico’ and the ‘patchy Anthropocene’: reinterpreting an episode in the history of the Americas from a multispecies anthropology and eco-evolutionist perspective"

9 March 2023

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Dário Kopenawa: The illegal mining in the Yanomami Indigenous Territory (TI), in Brazil, and its consequences to my people

8 February 2023

Dário Votório Kopenawa Yanomami is a well-known rights defender and leader of the Yanomami Indigenous People. He is the Hutukara Yanomami Association (HAY) vice president and is currently student of Territorial Management at Federal University of Roraima, in Brazil. Dário is Davi Kopenawa’s son, the Hutukara Association president and a respected Yanomami shaman.

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Jean Segata: Feeding the end of the world: agribusiness, pandemics, and Anthropocene in Brazil

25 April 2023

Professor Jean Segata delivers the next Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene seminar, in collaboration with UFRGS Brazil and CIESAS Mexico
How does the way we have been eating feed the end of the world? To answer this question, the presentation describes how agribusiness produces a scenario of chronic destruction that is highly exploitive and makes humans, animals and environments sick. 

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Renzo Taddei: 'Can the (Indigenous) subaltern speak (at the IPCC)'

23 January 2023

Renzo Taddei delivers the third seminar in the Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene series, hosted by UFRGS, Brazil

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Elizabeth Roberts: ‘Grappling with lead in Mexico City’

17 November 2022

Elizabeth Roberts delivers the second seminar in the Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene series, hosted by CIESAS Mexico

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Heather Davis - ‘Plastic Matter: On Materiality, Plasticity and Toxicity’

28 September 2022

Heather Davis (New School, New York) delivers the inaugural virtual seminar in new series ‘Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene’

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