Research
My Research
My interdisciplinary research lies at the nexus between medical geography, political ecology, and the history of public health, with a regional focus on Latin America. In terms of methodology, I mainly use qualitative social research methods and historical archival research techniques. My main areas of interest include:
The political ecology of infectious and vector-borne diseases.
Environmental and social history of disease control.
Social medicine and public health in Latin America.
Biopolitics of public health interventions.
Social impacts of Covid-19 pandemic in Argentina.
I have published research in such venues as the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, The Professional Geographer, Health and Place, Social Science and Medicine, Journal of Historical Geography, and Global Public Health.
Books
Throughout Latin America, social medicine has been widely recognized for its critical perspectives on mainstream understandings of health and for its progressive policy achievements. Nevertheless, it has been an elusive subject: hard to define, with puzzling historical discontinuities and misconceptions about its origins. Drawing on a vast archive and with an ambitious narrative scope that transcends national borders, Eric D. Carter offers the first comprehensive intellectual and political history of the social medicine movement in Latin America, from the early twentieth century to the present day.
While maintaining a consistent focus on health equity, social medicine has evolved with changing conditions in the region. Carter shows how it shaped early Latin American welfare states, declined with the dominance of midcentury technocratic health planning, resurged in the 1970s in solidarity against authoritarian regimes, and later resisted neoliberal reforms of the health sector. He centers socialist and anarchist doctors, political exiles, intellectuals, populist leaders, and rebellious technocrats from Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and other countries who responded to and shaped a dynamic political environment around health equity. The lessons from this history will inform new thinking about how to achieve health equity in the twenty-first century.
Published in 2023 by University of North Carolina Press. Available in paperback or e-book!
Enemy in the Blood: Malaria, Environment, and Development in Argentina examines the dramatic yet mostly forgotten history of malaria control in northwest Argentina. I trace the evolution of malaria science and policy in Argentina from the disease’s emergence as a social problem in the 1890s to its effective eradication by 1950. Published by the University of Alabama Press in 2012, it was awarded the received the 2013 Elinor Melville Prize for the best book on Latin American environmental history, awarded by the Conference on Latin American History. It is now in paperback!
Selected reviews:
“This is a much needed volume that attends to the sociopolitical dimensions of infectious disease. Carter brings together historical documents with a place-based analysis to inform the production of malaria eradication campaigns in Argentina in a way that offers much to the social sciences.”
—AAG Review of Books
"...the impressively well researched and referenced work has much to offer students of social, ecological, and medical history."
—Lancet
"Deeply researched and thoughtfully argued, Enemy in the Blood represents an important contribution to the history of malaria."
—Journal of the History of Medicine
“Enemy in the Blood is exhaustively researched, well written, and provides detail about a compellingly important issue for Argentina as well as other poor countries. The book will be of great interest to scholars not just in Latin American social history but also in the history of medicine, geography, and public health.”
—Latin Americanist
Other Selected Publications
Political Ecology of Health and Disease
Carter, E.D. and W. G. Moseley (2021). "COVID-19 and the Political Ecology of Global Food and Health Systems." In G. Andrews, J. Pearce, V. Crooks and J. Messina (eds.), COVID-19 and Similar Futures: Geographical perspectives, issues and agendas. Springer Press.
Here we explain what political ecology has to offer as we continue to make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences.
Harris, M. and E. D. Carter (2019). "Muddying the waters: a political ecology of mosquito-borne disease in rural Ecuador." Health and Place 57: 330-338.
I collaborated with a fantastic Macalester undergraduate, Miranda Harris, to better understand how people conceptualize and manage their local environments in areas infested with Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which carry the viruses that cause dengue, Zika, and chikungunya.
Carter, E. D. (2016). “Zika Anxieties and a Role for Geography.” Journal of Latin American Geography 15(2): 157-161.
An invited editorial for the Journal of Latin American Geography in which I explain the political ecology of the 2016 Zika epidemic in Latin America.
Carter, E. D. (2016). "Environmental Justice 2.0: New Latino Environmentalism in Los Angeles." Local Environment 21(1-3): 3-23.
Based on a multiyear study of environmental values, attitudes, and practices among Latinos, in this article I outline the features of a new kind of environmental justice movement in Los Angeles. I used to be really involved in environmental justice research, but it is such a challenge to keep up with all the great theoretical and methodological innovations in the field.
Social Medicine and Public Health in Latin America
Carter, E.D. and M. Sánchez Delgado (2020). "A debate over the link between Salvador Allende, Max Westenhöfer, and Rudolf Virchow: contributions to the history of social medicine in Chile and internationally. História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos 27: 899-917. In Spanish or in English.
This article in the leading Brazilian history of science journal, Manguinhos, re-evaluates the roots of Salvador Allende's social medicine ideology. Without diminishing the importance of Allende -- as a politically active young physician, Minister of Health in the 1930s, and Chile's president in the 1970s -- we seek to dispel certain myths about social medicine's origins in Chile.
Carter, E. D. (2018). "Population control, public health, and development in mid twentieth century Latin America." Journal of Historical Geography 62: 96-105.
An outgrowth of my book project on social medicine, here I reconsider the population growth and development question (which in Geography centers on debates around neo-Malthusianism) from the perspective of Latin American public health discourses. As I aim to do in much of my work, I highlight the intellectual contributions of Latin American figures, like Josue de Castro (Brazil) and Benjamin Viel (Chile). I also take up the overpopulation question here, in the Routledge Companion to Environmental Studies.
Carter, E. D. (2019). "Social medicine and international expert networks in Latin America, 1930–1945." Global Public Health 14: 791-802.
This article examines international expert networks that constituted the epistemic community of "social medicine" in the interwar period in Latin America. I focus particularly on networks that helped to promote social security and nutrition policies.
Environmental and social history of disease control
Carter, E. D. (2014). "Malaria Control in the Tennessee Valley Authority: Health, Ecology, and Metanarratives of Development." Journal of Historical Geography 43 (Jan.): 111-127.
I got interested in the Tennessee Valley Authority's malaria control program in the 1930s and 1940s as I did my dissertation research on malaria campaigns in Argentina during roughly the same time period. Here I try to draw a distinction between holistic "socio-ecological" perspectives that viewed malaria as a product of complex political, economic, and social processes, versus a "reductionist techno-science" that viewed malaria more narrowly, as a vector-borne disease susceptible to environmental engineering. Interestingly, though, even though malaria control officials in TVA usually took the latter approach, they had deep background in ecology that helped them to "think like mosquitoes" in order to destroy them.
Biopolitics of public health interventions
Carter, E. D. (2015). "Making the Blue Zones: Neoliberalism and Nudges in Public Health Promotion." Social Science and Medicine 133 (May): 374-382.
This is a critical assessment of a public-private partnership for health promotion, initially in the state of Iowa, called the Blue Zones Project. Here I lay out the difference between neoliberal health governance and a subtle variant, libertarian paternalism, that forms the philosophical basis of the Blue Zones and similar health promotion projects.
Social Impacts of Covid-19 pandemic in Argentina
Cordero, M. L., & Carter, E. D. (2023). Between the personal and the political: life experiences during the covid-19 pandemic in Tucumán, Argentina, 2020-2022. História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos, 30, e2023030. (Also in Spanish)
This article analyzes feelings, experiences, practices, and actions that underlie the meanings attributed to the covid-19 pandemic. Based on a case study located in the province of Tucumán (Argentina), a mixed-methods investigation was developed, interested in capturing life experiences. Discourse analysis show the resignification of life itself, the valorization of close ties, community social capital, the State and politics. From the personal to the political, the interpretive frames people use to signify life experiences during the covid-19 pandemic exhibit differentiated feelings, experiences, practices, and actions.
Carter, E. D., & Cordero, M. L. (2022). Salir Adelante: Social capital and resilience during the Covid-19 pandemic in Argentina. Health & Place, 77, 102870.
The Covid-19 pandemic has stimulated new appraisals of how social cohesion, including neighborhood-level social capital, fosters resilience in the face of crisis. Several studies suggest better health outcomes in neighborhoods with higher level of social capital, in general and during the pandemic. Building on a growing body of research which suggests that those who live in close-knit neighborhoods have fared better during the pandemic, this article analyzes how social capital influences individual and collective perceptions and attitudes about the experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic in Tucumán, Argentina. To assess this question, we used a mixed-methods approach, combining focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and an online survey (n = 701 respondents) conducted in September 2021. We find widespread experiences of resilience in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, in spite of difficult socioeconomic conditions and perceived poor government performance. Results from logistic regression analysis indicate that perceptions of high neighborhood social capital are associated with more positive outcomes in many dimensions, including personal resilience, ability to cope with uncertainty, perceptions of community solidarity, and reported compliance with public health measures. We further argue that conceptualizations of social cohesion need to be adjusted to local or national-level cultural norms to accurately capture the experience of countries of the Global South.
Other subjects
Carter, E. D. (2016). "El desarrollo de la geografía médica: una reseña de tendencias actuales." ["The development of medical geography: a review of current trends."]. Población & Sociedad 23 (2): 207-220.
El objetivo de esta nota consiste en reseñar la evolución del campo de la geografía médica, sobre todo en el ámbito de la producción científica del mundo angloparlante. Se identifican vertientes principales que sirven para orientar la evolución de la geografía médica, y se detalla la diversificación reciente de los temas, bases teóricas y orientaciones metodológicas de este campo. Además, se propone que la geografía médica es beneficiaria de ciertos cambios ajenos del ámbito de la geografía académica, sobre todo tendencias favorables en la formación de profesionales del sector salud y en las políticas de salud pública a nivel internacional.