This course focuses on the knowledge politics of health, environment, multispecies relations, and scientific/biomedical interventions in Latin America and beyond. We examine diseases, pandemics, and other global health concerns through the lens of multispecies entanglements to analyze the ongoing effects of ecological and environmental changes in the Latin American region but also the practices of world-making that drive new imaginings and becomings of natureculture. Participants in this course learn to assess the changing role of scientific knowledge, science experts, the uses of biotechnology, and human-non-human relations in medicine and health. This course considers a wide range of interdisciplinary literature, including works in medical anthropology, multispecies ethnography and animal studies, feminist Science and Technology Studies, history and philosophy of science, and Latin American history.

  

By examining the discourse of transition and the globalization of disease, we explore shifting society-environment relations and consider representations and associations of immigration and disease in/from Latin America. We further study the reconfiguration of expert and anthropological knowledge as we focus on multispecies entanglement, ontological multiplicity, and non-human agency. We critically examine the rise of global health to govern human populations and the politics of knowledge production vis-à-vis ethics, epistemic hierarchies, and the racialization of disease. We discuss the role of expert knowledge and biomedical interventions and move further to examine recent projects of securitization, containment, and biotechnological control throughout the region. Finally, we engage deeply with the politics of multispecies entanglements, social justice, disease, and the epistemic reconstitution of global health through multispecies care and newly arising planetary imaginaries.