Thematic workshops are offered to local K-14 teachers to learn about important topics in Latin America and the Caribbean and integrate new content into their curriculum. SCECH credit available.
Race and Public Health in Latin America
4:30-8:30 pm, virtual workshop via Zoom
All registered participants will receive 4 State Continuing Education Clock Hours (SCECHs). Participation is free.
This event will bring together scholarly presentations and group activities to provide Michigan K-14 teachers with context and resources for teaching about the intersection of race and public health in Latin America.
The workshop will offer activities and resources to help educators foster classroom dialogue about the global impact and historical context for these critically important and contemporary issues. The evening workshop will include four lectures by leaders in the scholarly field of Latin American public health, as well as group discussion, Q and A, and a set of breakout activities designed to foster classroom discussion around a set of images and teaching materials.
Featuring:
Steven Palmer, University of Windsor
Steven Palmer is a professor of history at the University of Windsor, Canada. From 2006 to 2016 he was the Canada Research Chair in History of International Health. He has published widely on the history of international health in Latin America and on Cuban medical science in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is the author of Medicine and Public Health in Latin America: A History (Cambridge, 2015), co-written with Marcos Cueto. His documentary feature film, Ghost Artist, about the maker of a revolutionary medical film from 1967, was released in 2019.
Alana Rodriguez, University of Michigan
Alana Rodriguez is the Academic Program Manager for the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She is finishing her M.A. in Latin American Studies and an M.P.H. in Epidemiology from SDSU. Her research interests lie in sexual and reproductive health disparities among rural adolescent and young women in Oaxaca and among women in Cuba, Indigenous worldviews related to health and sexuality, and Cuban reproductive health care policy and practice. Her thesis research was compiled over two summers in Havana, Cuba and looks at declining fertility rates in Cuba and in particular the impact of Cuba’s socialist policies on the notion of ‘choice’ in reproduction. She explored hidden barriers to fertility and questioned how recent capitalistic market reforms in Cuba may impact fertility in the future by indirectly addressing these barriers in unequal ways across the population. Her research questions whether these inequalities will surface along racial lines as a result of a colorblind racial policy instituted during and after Cuba’s revolution and may impact access to reproductive freedom.
Victoria Langland, University of Michigan
Victoria Langland holds a joint position in History and Romance Languages and Literatures and is currently serving as the Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Brazil Initiative. She specializes in twentieth-century Latin American history, especially Brazil and the Southern Cone, and writes about gender, dictatorship, the uses of memory, student and other social movements, and, more generally, the intersections of culture and power. She is the author of Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil (Duke University Press, 2013) and the co-editor of The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics, 2nd edition, (Duke University Press, 2019), and Monumentos, Memoriales y Marcas Territoriales (Siglo XXI, 2003). Langland's current research project is a history of breastfeeding in Brazil that looks at how cultural understandings, public policies, formula marketing and other factors have transformed popular beliefs and practices about infant nutrition and women’s bodies over time.
Alexandra Stern, University of Michigan
Alexandra Minna Stern is the Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate Professor in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan. She also holds appointments in the Departments of History, Women's Studies, and Obstetrics and Gynecology. Stern directs the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab, an interdisciplinary, multi-institutional research team that is reconstructing and analyzing the history of eugenics and sterilization in four U.S. states (Michigan, North Carolina, Iowa, and California).
Dr. Stern’s research has focused on the history of eugenics, genetics, society, and justice in the United States and Latin America. Through these topics, Stern has explored the dynamics of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, disability, social difference, and reproductive politics. Among Dr. Stern’s books is the prize-winning Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America
