Professor Juan Eduardo Bonin of the University of San Martin (UNSAM) will present his lecture Language policies and indigenous healthcare in Argentina: Looking for evidence for hope on February 14 at 1:30pm via Zoom.
This presentation aims to describe and understand discourses about multilingual indigenous healthcare by analyzing the State as a space of social struggle rather than a homogeneous agent with a well-defined, dominant ideology. He describes this struggle, in a broad sense, as a basic opposition between a dominant ideology of access and practices of creativity and resistance in Wichi communities, both at different levels in the state apparatus. To account for this struggle, he uses data from different research projects in the field of LPP in indigenous healthcare and Wichi communities. He describes how the dominant ideology of access is shaped and replicated at the highest state power levels and analyzes indigenous health practices at lower levels of State – at a primary care center in Chaco – which challenges dominant ideas about State monolingualism, language, and cultural diversity. In the discussion section, he observes how these practices of resistance and creativity are instrumental in decolonizing Western medical knowledge in actual institutional practices and education programs.
Juan Eduardo Bonnin is Senior Researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET), Director of CITRA (El Centro de Innovación de las Trabajadoras y los Trabajadores), and Professor of Discourse Studies at the University of San Martín (UNSAM), Argentina. He is interested in the role of language in the access to human rights, especially as a domain for the exercise of voice, agency and social change. His latest book is “Discourse and Mental Health. Voice, Inequality and Resistance in Medical Settings' (Routledge, 2019).
The Zoom event requires registration which may be done here: https://bit.ly/BonninAtUMass
Department hosts presentation by Prof. Juan Bonin of the University of San Martin, Argentina
