The International Studies Public Forum (ISPF), UC-CUBA Academic Initiative and Department of Chicano/Latino Studies presents

"Travels in Exceptionalism? Cuban Health(care) on the Island and Around the World"
with Nancy Burke, Associate Professor, UC San Francisco

Thursday, October 17, 2013
5:00-6:20 p.m.
Social Science Plaza A, Room 1100

The Cuban healthcare system is evoked as a symbol of revolutionary success and counterhegemonic possibility for health practitioners, scholars, journalists, and politicians around the world. Cuban government statistics on infant mortality, infectious disease control, and physician/patient ratios are heralded as “first world numbers” emerging from “third world conditions.” Experienced firsthand by those in countries hosting Cuba doctors and returning medical students trained at the Latin American School of Medicine (Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina or ELAM) outside of Havana, the Cuban model travels both practically and ideologically. Building upon the recently published Health Travels: Cuban Health (care) on and off the Island (UC Medical Humanities Press 2013), Burke will discuss how ethnographic accounts of the daily lived reality of the production and reproduction of this healthcare system lend complexity to exceptional claims and illustrate the creative labor involved in the provision of care in the context of scarcity and rapid change.

Nancy J. Burke is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and the joint UCB-UCSF Ph.D. Program in Medical Anthropology. Since 2009 she has served as the Director of the Health Diplomacy and Medical Education Program in the UCSF Institute of Global Health Sciences. Her research focuses on the anthropology of cancer in the United States and chronic disease management in Cuba.

For further information, please contact Sylvia Lotito, slotito@uci.edu or 949-824-3344.