About the EIA project

The Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene is a Wellcome Trust funded collaboration between UFRGS Brazil, CIESAS Mexico and UCL in the UK. It brings together environmental, indigenous, biosocial, multispecies, gender and theoretical expertise in Medical Anthropology, to examine how the Anthropocene impacts on human health. 

Our group aligns interest and expertise in diverse fields of inquiry relevant to the embodied inequalities of the Anthropocene including gender, justice and power, indigenous health, well-being and sustainability. 

We are committed to developing research and learning capacity within Medical Anthropology in the UK and Latin America, fostering intellectual exchanges between diverse disciplinary traditions and knowledges. In doing so, we aim to collaboratively understand the context of and to address the consequences for human health and wellbeing of unfettered economic growth, environmental degradation and climate change, and the related social, economic and ecological disorders that characterise this geological period, defined as the Anthropocene.

Meet the EIA team

Our web pages and open access teaching resource offer a careful curation and collection of resource material for a trilingual Medical Anthropology of the Anthropocene and a collaborative resource for engaging with Anthropocene Health.

Our project invites you to think about health inequalities in the face of contemporary social and environmental issues, examining how bodies are unequally affected by the ongoing presence of colonisation and capitalism, biosocial processes, extractivism and expansionist rhetoric with disregard for local cultures and more than human communities. Some of the questions which we seek to answer are:

How are human (and non human) bodies unequally affected by and responding to Anthropocene contexts?

What are the consequences for health and well being of the ongoing environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity and climate change?

What alternative ways of knowing and living in the Anthropocene are relevant to the urgency of action and intervention?

How can debate about the Anthropocene spark changes in the field of medical anthropology and vice versa?

Explore our learning resources

 

Three specific challenges are reflected in the materials and resources you can find on these pages. They include: 

Multiple Anthropocenes

We directly challenge the universalist framings that assign global responsibility to the Anthropocene and its consequences given that the Anthropocene has arisen predominantly from Western Industrial Capitalism. Medical Anthropology is ideally placed to show how the Anthropocene is diversely defined, lived and experienced.

 

 

Health Inequities

Showing how the Anthropocene is diversely defined, lived and experienced links to the challenge to examine the uneven and inequitable contexts and contexts of the Anthropocene.

 Health Inequities

Showing how the Anthropocene is diversely defined, lived and experienced links to the challenge to examine the uneven and inequitable contexts and contexts of the Anthropocene.

 

 

Re-tooling Embodiment 

We aim to rethink or re-tool our understanding of embodiment to incorporate questions of scale and time in examining diverse bodily experiences and planetary health in the context of the Anthropocene.

 Re-tooling Embodiment 

We aim to rethink or re-tool our understanding of embodiment to incorporate questions of scale and time in examining diverse bodily experiences and planetary health in the context of the Anthropocene.

 

This project brings expertise in medical anthropology to contribute to knowledge in five thematic areas; Gender, Reproductive and Environmental Justice, Multi-species Ethnography and Human-Animal Health, Covid-19 and Public Understanding of the Anthropocene, Chemical Toxicity and Exposure, Indigenous Experience and the Coloniality of the Anthropocene. 

Read about our research themes

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