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Ecuador Acidification

This PECE essay details the quotidian anthropocene in Ecuador utilizing the Questioning Quotidian Anthropocenes analytic developed for the Open Seminar River School.

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joerene.aviles

The author is Didier Fassin, a French sociologist and anthropologist who was trained as a physician in internal medicine. He developed the field of critical moral anthropology and currently does research on punishment, asylum, and inequality. This research looks at the social and political forces that affect public health trends, so is not directly involved in emergency response.

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joerene.aviles

1. In this sense, gender-based violence makes it clear that the suffering body – while purportedly universal – requires certain political, historical and cultural attributes to render it visible and worthy of care.

2. It seems that humanitarianism, as universalism, both erases and depends on difference; on the one hand, it manages difference, declawing it so that it doesn’t tear apart the humanitarian kit, made to fit and rehabilitate everyone into a basic bare-bones humanity.

3. In this sense, bringing gender-based violence into the humanitarian mission has inadvertently opened up a space for confrontation with politically significant forms of difference and inequality in their real and rabid forms.

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joerene.aviles

Bruze Nizeye and Sara Stulac both work with Partners in Health (founded by Paul Farmer) while Salmaan Keshavjee is a physician and researcher whose expertise is in multi-drug resistant tuberculosis and global health. Farmer's and Keshavjee's anthropological research in particular is important to emergency response because it would allow for improved preparation of treatment to those communities. Their work in seeing the social causes of health epidemics would also allow for better prevention of disasters. 

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joerene.aviles

1. Multi-drug resistant HIV and impact to treatments and research

2. Rudolph Virchow and his work in public health

3. "In the two rural districts of Rwanda in which the PIH model was introduced in May 2005, an estimated 60 percent of inhabitants are refugees, returning exiles, or recent settlers; not a single physician was present to serve 350,000 people." -looked up how this came to be; was there any healthcare available to them at all?