Browsing by Subject "Brazil"

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Background: This thesis describes the perceived delays faced by patients and providers in Amazonas, Brazil while seeking or providing snakebite envenoming care in the region. Additionally, we compare the delays described by indigenous and non-indigenous patients while seeking care. Methods: This study analyzed previously recorded data from snakebite envenoming (SBE) patients and indigenous health care providers with intent to discuss their experiences. In-depth interviews and focus group transcripts were analyzed using the Three Delay Model. This model groups data into three separate delays; deciding to seek care, arriving to care, and receiving adequate care. Results: From this analysis we found that patients described many different themes for their decisions to seek care including choosing alternative methods, cultural restrictions, refusing traditional medicines and many more. The reasons behind the decisions to seek care or not were different between indigenous and non-indigenous patients. While travelling to care both study groups described the need to use multiple means of travel to arrive to distribution hospitals and the unavailability of transportation and emergency services which caused delays. Finally, once they arrived to health care facility delays were again presented by the need for multiple facilities to receive adequate care. Conclusion: The findings of this study support public health researchers push for the decentralization of antivenom. Both survivors of SBE and health care providers in the region have expressed the need for treatment to be available in their region. Due to the population of the region, any interventions whether education or political will need to consider the culture of the indigenous people to ensure positive uptake.

Background: Indigenous People around the world experience inequalities in health care. In Brazil, Indigenous inequalities in health are exacerbated by the poor system of health care delivery. The aim of this study is to understand barriers to care as defined from the Indigenous perspective.

Methods: This study was conducted on three Indigenous reserves of the Xavante people in Mato Grosso, Brazil. We utilized a mixed methods approach. In the quantitative portion of the study, we surveyed 50 individuals using an adapted version of the World Health Organization 2002 World Health Survey. Participants for the quantitative survey were recruited from a randomized list of prospective patients for a medical outreach mission. In the qualitative portion of the study, we interviewed 37 individuals, including patients, health care providers, and village chiefs, about their experiences with health care. Participants for the qualitative interviews were recruited randomly from a medical outreach patient listing (Expedicionários da Saúde).

Results: Overall, participants reported dissatisfaction with health-seeking experiences. We identified five barriers to obtaining satisfactory care: lack of transportation, lack of health care services and medication, attitudes of health care workers, lack of culturally appropriate services, and social determinants.

Conclusions: Given an overall sense of dissatisfaction with health care use among indigenous people, future research should focus on identifying interventions to help overcome key barriers to accessing care. Private-public partnerships and other innovative health systems models should be explored to meet the needs of underserved indigenous communities.

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This dissertation examines how perceptions of beauty in Brazil reflect both the existing social inequalities and the struggles to produce a more egalitarian society. While hegemonic discourses about beauty in Brazil foster an upper-middle class, white standard, the working-class make claims to citizenship by redefining beauty according to their own affective, sensory experiences. As I see it, the affective relationship that plastic surgery patients have towards their own bodies is central to understanding why beauty is a source of social recognition in Brazil. In this dissertation, I argue that even though discourse attempts to discipline the body to perceive only the "truths" it produces, subjects reinhabit discourses through their immediate sensory experiences, opening up the political space to generate social change.

In order to access this form of "cosmetic citizenship," however, working-class patients undergo low-cost aesthetic surgeries in public hospitals, which are subsidized by the State and help build the national reputation of plastic surgeons. I argue that this national investment in beauty establishes personal appearance as a precondition for citizenship and inclusion in the nation. While media narratives construct beauty as a vehicle for upward mobility in Brazil, the medical discourse about beauty imagines the Brazilian population as becoming progressively homogeneous through "miscegenation" and surgery. These discourses depend on the raciology established by Neo-Lamarckian eugenics at the beginning of the twentieth century, and later popularized by the work of Gilberto Freyre.

How do local politicians in the developing world respond to inflows of migrants into their constituencies? Unlike their counterparts in the developing world, most local politicians in the Global South tend to have very binding budgetary restrictions that constrain the set of possibilities and policies they can enact. With the inflow of new individuals into their municipalities, the question of how to deal with this increased demand for social services becomes key, as does the economic and social integration of migrants. In this dissertation, I draw on research from political inequality, migration, and political economy to understand how local politicians use the arrival of migrants strategically for their own gain. I argue that local politicians try to include or exclude migrant populations within their municipalities through the manipulation of a series of tools. Particularly local spending, regulation, and party platforms or through their choice of political rhetoric. I test this argument by studying three different migratory movements across two Latin American countries. First, focusing on the Brazilian case, I study how historical migration flows from Europeans determine the contemporary geography of support for affirmative action that cues politicians about the types of political regulations they should support. This chapter also shows how the historical choices of migration policy can have effects that expand for decades. Second, I analyze under what circumstances local Colombian politicians include internally displaced people in their informal networks of good distribution and vote-buying. Lastly, focusing on the arrival of millions of Venezuelans into Colombia, I analyze the conditions under which mayoral candidates use xenophobic rhetoric for electoral gain. The empirical sections of this study combine qualitative and quantitative methods with a series of original data collection exercises like surveys, the digitization of historical archives, and social media scrapping along with pre-existing public opinion and administrative data to test the argument. Overall, I find that exposure to European migrant settlements correlates with lower support for affirmative action, that local politicians will only incorporate internal migrants in clientelistic schemes in noncompetitive environments, and that politicians will engage in xenophobic rhetoric as a result of labor market competition between natives and migrants. Understanding these results presents an important step in understanding migrant political, economic, and social incorporation in the Global South.

My dissertation, Fascist Fiction: Inventing the Lesser Evil in Italy and Brazil, accounts for the resilience of fascism by tracing the rhetoric of the “lesser evil”—a discursive practice constitutive of fascism—through contemporary politics and literature in Italy and Brazil. By invoking the looming presence of a graver, more insidious threat the rhetoric of the lesser evil legitimizes fascist violence against dissidents and vulnerable populations. Through an analysis of texts by fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile and his Brazilian counterpart Miguel Reale, I reveal that the rhetoric of the lesser evil is a constitutive part of fascist discourse and that in Italy and Brazil this aspect of fascist doctrine met a favorable combination of subjective and objective conditions which has allowed it to thrive within democratic structures. Finally, I argue that when moral claims such as the lesser evil work to obfuscate the understanding of traumatic and violent events within the public sphere, novels––precisely because of their putative fictionality––can offer persuasive counter-histories that re-contextualize fascist crimes and sometimes provoke acts of reparative justice by the State. My dissertation advances scholarship on the transcultural reach of fascist ideology: it contributes to an understanding of fascism’s place within a broader tradition of right-wing thought that continues to shape present-day politics in Europe and the world, and enriches our perception of the powers of literary forms.

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The poor and overwhelmingly non-white Baixada Fluminense, on Rio’s urban periphery, saw Black Catholic priests and lay people engage in religiously-informed activism and grassroots educational initiatives in the 1980s and 1990s. Thus began the nationwide campaign that, by 2012, led to the adoption of racial and ethnic quotas in higher education admissions, the civil service, the diplomatic corps, and the military. As part of raising Black consciousness, they drew on a global theology of inculturation and joined others in pioneering a reform of the Catholic liturgy through “Afro Masses” that taught Catholics to respect Africa, its cultures, and its descendants. In doing so, these Catholic activists made common cause with ‘secular’ organizations ranging from trade unions, black movements, NGOs, and political parties that were often formed and led by Catholics. This dissertation suggests that post-Second Vatican Council Catholicism, especially threads that combined Latin American liberation and decolonial African and Asian theologies, is essential if we are to understand how Brazil came to adopt a bold quota system despite the vast under-representation of Blacks and the poor in the political system. Rather spouting class-only Marxism, liberation theology in its Brazilian heartland was a journey in pursuit of personal, spiritual, and collective liberation that contributed decisively to the country’s secular but nonetheless Catholic-informed legal and political culture in the 21st century.