Social Justice as Epidemic Control: Two Latin American Case Studies

ABSTRACT

In this article, we draw on two cases—one of the reproductive justice movements in the wake of the Latin American Zika epidemic, and one of an environmental justice movements spurred by an epidemic of chronic kidney disease among sugarcane workers—to argue for social justice as an “elastic” technology of epidemic control. In its compressed form, social justice simply refers to the fair distribution of medical goods. In its expanded form, it emphasizes the recognition and representation not just of medical problems, but of entangled histories of racial, gendered, and economic inequity.

KEYWORDS:

• Latin America
• Zika
• epidemiology
• health communication
• race and gender
• social movements

Acknowledgments

This article was originally presented at the Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology’s Zika Forum, and at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at Cambridge University. Thanks to the colleagues who provided feedback on early parts of the article, as well as to Christos Lynteris, Branwyn Poleykett, and the anonymous reviewers and editor of Medical Anthropology.

Additional information

Funding

Portions of this research were funded by a Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Post-PhD grant.

Notes on contributors

Alex Nading

Alex Nading is a senior fellow in the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He is the author of Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health and the Politics of Entanglement (2014).

Lucy Lowe

Lucy Lowe is a lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She specializes in women’s health, motherhood, and reproductive justice, with a particular focus on contexts of conflict and migration.