Dr. Susan Levine speaks on medicine and the politics of knowledge and healing on Monday, Nov. 4 from 4-5:15 p.m. in Keller Hall in the UNM Center for the Arts on the University of New Mexico main campus. Levine's work delineates the debate between western and non-western medicine and the epistemology of knowledge production as it pertains to the contested legitimacy of traditional medicine. Her work focuses on regions as diverse as South Africa, Mexico, India and China; and with a diverse range of medical practices including allopathic physicians and traditional healers.
The lecture is sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy and the University of Cape Town, in collaboration with UNM’s Arts-in-Medicine: Healing and the Humanities Program, the Music Department and College of Fine Arts, and the Anthropology Department.
Levine lectures in medical anthropology at the University of Cape Town. She is the editor of Medicine and the Politics of Knowledge (2012) Medicine and is author of Children of a Bitter Harvest (2013), which chronicles the history of child labor in South Africa’s wine industry. Levine is currently involved in building the medical humanities in Africa by way of drawing together scholars and practitioners who are invested in the social-economic underpinnings of ill health, as well as imagining creative ways to bolster and enhance the work of allopathic care.
Levine has degrees from Temple University, Bard College and Harvard University and a fascinating legacy of the construction of medical knowledge.
