Leah Thompson – Staff Writer
Next month Gustavus will be hosting its seventh annual lecture centered around the Latin American perspective, featuring an array of presenters from various backgrounds. The event, titled “Health Equity in Latin America,” will be held from 6:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 2 in Confer 127. The National Hispanic Honor Society, Sigma Delta Pi, helps to organize the annual lectures and goes through a process each year to decide the speakers.
Sigma Delta Pi is responsible for coordinating and developing programs which help involve both students and the St. Peter community in Hispanic culture. To achieve this, the Honor Society hosts social events and volunteers locally.
Lectures in the past have spanned a variety of topics, from the first iteration in 2016 called “(In)visible Violences: Gender, Impunity and Justice in Argentina” by University of Minnesota Professor Ana Forcinito to “The Weight of a Mountain: The Politics of Landscape and History in the Inca Empire” by Professor Steve Kosiba in 2019 and “The Health Status of our Latinx Community in Minnesota and how to Improve it Creating Inclusive Spaces for All” by María Verónica Stevaz, MD in 2020.
“This year students were interested in a health [focused] topic because of the equity perspective and its connection to the Nobel Conference,” Professor of Modern Languages, Literature and Cultures Ana Adams said.
The annual event is supported by the Department of Latin American, Latinx, and Caribbean Studies (LALACS) and the Department of Modern Languages, Literature and Cultures.
This year’s topic is focused on health equity in Latin America and will bring Dr. Eric Carter to campus. Carter is the Edens Professor of Geography and Global Health at Macalester and is based in the Geography Department.
Professor Carter is also the co-director of the Community and Global Health concentration and is affiliated with the Latin American Studies program. The Community and Global Health concentration focuses on understanding population health on the local and global scales.
“[Carter] focuses on the social and environmental history of health and disease, and the politics of public health, especially in the Latin American context,” according to Carter’s website.
Another project Professor Carter is collaborating on with a colleague, that won’t be explicitly discussed during his presentation, is community resilience to the Covid-19 pandemic in Tucuman, Argentina.
Carter’s book, Enemy in the Blood: Malaria, Environment, and Development in Argentina, examines the mostly forgotten history of malaria control in Argentina. The book, which was published in 2012, was awarded the 2013 Elinor Melville Prize for the best book on Latin American environmental history by the Conference on Latin American History.
Throughout his extensive research surrounding health in Latin America, Carter has been able to publish works on political ecology of health and disease, social medicine and public health in Latin America, environmental and social history of disease control, and biopolitics of public health interventions.
The presentation will focus on the topic of Carter’s upcoming book In Pursuit of Health Equity: A History of Latin American Social Medicine.
Carter’s upcoming book is based on a research project on the historical development of Latin American social medicine from the 1930s to the present. In this book Carter hopes to analyze the discourse on social determinants of health outside the Global North.
Additionally, Carter’s hope is to explain how some societies develop egalitarian and cost-effective health systems by understanding the political role of the health professions in Latin American societies.
The presentation “Health Equity in Latin America” by Dr. Carter is a free event open to the public from 6:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov 2 in Confer 127. Neither tickets nor RSVPs are required to attend the event.