My research explores the active production, reproduction and transformation of health inequalities by studying how the administrative and legal structures of health care systems influence the ways in which individuals and social groups experience and respond to particular aspects of illness and treatment. I have conducted several studies on the everyday dynamics of patients, workers and health care programs and institutions. I have presented data and analyses on new bureaucratic access barriers to health care that derive from the administration of market-based systems. I have also published on problems of quality of care that relate to insurance companies fragmentation of their contracts with clinics and providers and on the challenges of health care activism both under a publicly oriented system such as Brazil´s or a privatized system such as Colombia´s. I have also documented health care workers’ labor conditions and their strategies to defend the infrastructure of public hospitals. I was also invited to collaborate with an activist-oriented approach to human rights in Cameroon. This interesting experience is helping push an agenda around public anthropology and human rights. Currently, my research explores three areas. 1) I study the relationship between morality and the political economy of health care. In this line of research I attempt to understand the social dynamics that link individual and collective experiences of seeking justice (primarily around the right to health care) with institutional mechanisms implemented by judicial and legal systems. This current research takes justice as a cultural dynamic in which debates around affordability and disease pattern inform societal moral values around people’s right to health care. During this summer, I started a new research project with the NGO Salud al Derecho to assess the changes in the use of judicial mechanisms over time and the impacts of newer health care legislation. 2) Given my involvement with the Global Health and Human Rights research program of the Human Rights Institute, I have started a series of exchanges and conversations around health as a human right, which has brought new and fresh ideas. I was invited by Sarah Willen to co-author an article for an invited collection for the prestigious journal The Lancet. The four co-authors, led by Sarah, have recently received positive reviews and we have been invited to revise and resubmit the paper. In this paper, in which we claim for a fruitful dialogue between syndemics vulnerability and health as a human rights framework. In addition, I served as Co-I in a seed grant from InChip. Along with colleagues Kim Gans (HDFS) and Deborah Redford-Badwal (Dental Schools), who served as Co-PIs, we put together a grant called “Formative Research to Inform Childhood Obesity and Dental Caries Interventions.” We recently heard that the grant was funded. With this grant, my goal is to start bringing together the human rights framework to health access and prevention in the United States. I am also the co-organizer of two panels around the right to health in the next American Anthropological Association conference. 3) I was fortunate to be awarded one of the Humanities Institute fellowships for the 2015-2016 academic year. This fellowship allowed me to concentrate most of my efforts in the writing of a book manuscript. The book that started as a book project 9 months ago and has now introduction and 6 chapters is tentatively called Health Ruins: Closure and Privatization of a Legendary University Hospital. In the book I present the history of the oldest child and maternity hospital in the Colombia. Once considered the epitome of modern medicine in Colombia, this university hospital was assessed as “economically unviable” and was ordered to close its doors to new patients in 2006. Drawing from close to a decade of collaborative research with hospital workers and university professors, I present how the country’s market-based health care reform was experienced and resisted and also how such neoliberal reform transformed the practice of medicine in the country. As a whole, the ethnographic material helps elucidate the dispute between different epistemologies around medical care and illuminates current discussions in global health and health care reform. Thanks to the fellowship, I also published an article about this research in the journal Medical Anthropology: Cross-cultural studies in health and illness. I also presented at several conferences, published two more articles, and submitted another piece.

My work as a professor is informed by critical pedagogy, a tradition with roots in Latin American scholarship that insists education must deconstruct historical power dynamics that are reproduced in educational institutions and harm both learning and teaching. I have a special interest in helping students become critical thinkers dedicated to studying complex power dynamics in contemporary societies and developing innovative ideas for action and advocacy. I support students to bring their own interests and experiences to class discussions, paper assignments, research projects and extracurricular activities, and encourage them to address issues that have defined their personal experience. I help them reflect on how opinions and experience are supported or challenged by scholarly debates informed by theory. I support lively and respectful discussions so that students express and develop their opinions and learn from one another. I have used film, exercises such as poster presentations and in-class discussion in small groups to motivate students to link concepts with different data sources and to think of different ways to express and represent arguments. In order to provide feedback that centers students’ interests and learning trajectories I prefer to evaluate students through final paper assignments developed over the course of the semester. In my feedback on student papers and assignments, I comment on general argumentative logic and consistency, and also on specific problems and I raise questions that help students reflect on their writing and thinking process. I value and enjoy mentoring students’ projects and theses. My commitment to meeting each participant where they are at and thoughtfully engaging their way of thinking and acting stems from my belief in the power of education and transformative learning. I frequently organize gatherings in which students present their research progress and receive feedback from peers; I believe that the process of providing feedback to others fosters reflection about how research is developed. At the same time, by reading and hearing others, students and professors exchange ways of thinking and ways of producing texts. In the more advanced processes of writing, issues of ethnographic narrative and structure come to the fore as we (students and professor) search for ways in which arguments and data can be best articulated. I signed up for workshops organized by the Institute for Teaching and Learning, which I found extremely valuable. In the Fall 2015, I had the opportunity to teach an undergraduate course titled Global Health and Human Rights in the library class of 1950 classroom, which was adapted as part of UCONN’s “collaborative learning initiative.” In this course with 30 students I put in practice several strategies around critical pedagogy with the technology and furniture that facilitates class interaction, use of technology, and group learning. It was a highly successful course. Because of that experience, I took the initiative to present the course to the Faculty of both the Department of Anthropology and the Human Rights Institute, who gave an enthusiastic endorsement. I then submitted the materials and presented the course at the CC&C committee for approval. The course was approved and I am very excited about teaching it again in the Fall. My teaching specialties include Medical Anthropology; Social Medicine and Global health; Health as a Human Right; Latin American Epistemologies and Other Critical Epistemologies; and Ethnographic research and mixed-methods research. Medical Anthropology: As a medical anthropologist, I teach general introductory and advanced medical anthropology courses for both undergraduate and graduate students. At the undergraduate level I offer courses with an interdisciplinary emphasis and at the graduate level I have taught both graduate students in the social science and medical school students. Advance seminars include topics such as Subjectivity, Social Movements and Capitalism and Health. Social Medicine and Global Health: As a medical anthropologist and dentist, I have offered courses that link clinical case studies with social science theory as it applies to health. Usually, I offer this course as a component of the training of public health students or in the new undergraduate and graduate programs in Global Health. Health as a Human Right: My own research largely concentrate on the transformation of access and quality of health care by market forces. I take human rights in general and the right to health in particular as areas of historical contestation in which law, advocacy and political economy intersect. I design undergraduate and graduate courses in which I offer historical and theoretical foundations followed by specific case studies so that students can debate, analyze and write with a solid knowledge base. Latin American Epistemologies and other Critical Epistemologies. As a scholar trained both in Latin America and in the United States, I have developed an understanding of the intersections, debates and emphases of different critical epistemologies around health and society. I put different Latin American traditions in dialogue with other critical perspectives, primarily around ethnographic research, post-colonial/coloniality debates and critical political economy. Ethnographic Research and Mixed-Methods Research: I privilege ethnographic research, the prime method of research in social anthropology. This method has experienced significant transformations in the last decades and has been called to dialogue with other applied and basic science traditions. In particular, in the emerging field of Global Health and in more traditional Public Health programs, mixed-method approaches are receiving significant attention. I have taught methods courses in both anthropology departments and interdisciplinary programs. When I teach mixed-methods, I teach it accompanied by experts in statistical and epidemiological methods given that I have basic knowledge of these fields but I am not an expert. Nonetheless, I do conduct and direct mixed-method research and usually partner with quantitative researchers for all the phases of the research process, including research design, data collection, analysis and writing. For these courses, I like to use the student’s own projects to further discussion of the research approach and the most adequate techniques for data collection.