HEALTH AND RURALITY IN THE AMERICAS: HEALTH POLICIES, SOCIAL ACTORS AND TERRITORIES (20TH-21ST CENTURIES)
This symposium proposes a space for interdisciplinary reflection on the development and implementation of health policies in rural areas of Latin America during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From a historical perspective, it seeks to analyze how the State, international organizations, local knowledge and inequality—through mediators such as teachers, police officers, soldiers, midwives and healers—have designed, implemented and resignified health interventions in rural territories, frequently marked by conditions of precarity, cultural diversity and structural inequality, while also constituting a space for innovation in health. Rural health policies are, in this sense, a privileged space for thinking through the tension between tradition and innovation.
The symposium calls for research addressing, among others, the following dimensions: the historical construction of rural public health policies; the tensions between biomedical knowledge and local or traditional knowledge; the role of health agents, midwives, healers and other state agents responsible for implementing health services; the effects of international health programs (PAHO, WHO, philanthropic foundations) on rural populations; inequalities in access to health services in rural contexts; and recent transformations associated with intercultural health policies.
