Description
This talk will begin with a political economy/ecology analysis of the health impact of Canadian mining in Latin America, with a particular focus on Ecuador. We also examine the ways in which Canadian tax, judicial, corporate, and diplomatic policies allow – indeed encourage – Canadian mining companies to generate extensive health and environmental harms (with the Canadian public also complicit, if indirectly). We then turn to the role and reach of transnational activism and resistance in countering the impunity of Canadian extractivism and discuss Andean worldviews that build non-extractive, ecologically just futures.
Speakers
Anne-Emanuelle Birn is Professor of Global Development Studies and of Social and Behavioural Health Sciences at the University of Toronto. Her research explores the history, politics, and political economy of global health, particularly in Latin America. Current projects examine: the history of child health in Uruguay; transnational perspectives on social activism and policy-making during the COVID-19 pandemic; social justice-oriented South-South health cooperation; and the health harms of Canadian extractivism. She has published widely in Latin American, African, Asian, North American, and European journals and presses. Her books include: Marriage of Convenience: Rockefeller International Health and Revolutionary Mexico (Rochester, 2006); Comrades in Health: US Health Internationalists, Abroad and at Home(Rutgers, 2013); Oxford University Press’s Textbook of Global Health; (2009; 2017/18); Peripheral Nerve: Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America (Duke, 2020); and Going Public: The Unmaking and Remaking of Universal Healthcare (Cambridge, 2023).
Among other scholar-activist roles, she serves on the coordinating committee of People’s Health Movement-Canada, and as North America co-representative on the Global Steering Council of the People’s Health Movement. In 2023 she received the Viseltear Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Public Health History.
Erika Arteaga Cruz is an Ecuadorean feminist physician, MD, MPH, PhD. She is past coordinator of the Ecosystem and Health circle of the People´s Health Movement (PHM), a global network bringing together grassroots health activists, civil society organizations and academic institutions from around the world. She has been an activist for the Right to Health for two decades and is past coordinator of the Latin-American Social Medicine Association (ALAMES) in Ecuador. Erika is an advisor to the Traditional Birth Attendants School “Unanchu Mama” from the Peasants Organizations Union (UNORCAC) in Cotacachi and part of the Ñawpa Magazine Editorial team, a magazine for Plurinational, Intercultural and socialist debate.
Erika is a mother of two, a former professor of the San Francisco de Quito University in Public Health and Gender and Society. Her research focus is the resistance to the industrial-medical complex by Indigenous traditional birth attendants and Indigenous health promoters. Erika is currently a member of the Popular and Plurinational Parliament of Women’s and Feminists’ organizations in Ecuador and has been active in the national uprisings of October 2025, June 2022, and October 2019.