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Podcast: New Books in Anthropology
Episode: César Ernesto AbadÃa-Barrero, "Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care at a Colombian Maternity Hospital" (Duke UP, 2022)
Description: In Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care at a Colombian Maternity Hospital (Duke UP, 2022), César Ernesto AbadÃa-Barrero chronicles the story of El Materno—Colombia’s oldest maternity and neonatal health center and teaching hospital—over several decades as it faced constant threats of government shutdown. Using team-based and collaborative ethnography to analyze the social life of neoliberal health policy, AbadÃa-Barrero details the everyday dynamics around teaching, learning, and working in health care before, during, and after privatization. He argues that health care privatization is not only about defunding public hospitals; it also ruins rich tradit...