Promoting the health of marginalized populations in Ecuador through international collaboration and educational innovations

This paper examines two innovative educational initiatives for the Ecuadorian public health workforce: a Canadian-funded Masters programme in ecosystem approaches to health that focuses on building capacity to manage environmental health risks sustainably; and the training of Ecuadorians at the Latin American School of Medicine in Cuba (known as Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina in Spanish). We apply a typology for analysing how training programmes address the needs of marginalized populations and build capacity for addressing health determinants. We highlight some ways we can learn from such training programmes with particular regard to lessons, barriers and opportunities for their sustainability at the local, national and international levels and for pursuing similar initiatives in other countries and contexts. We conclude that educational efforts focused on the challenges of marginalization and the determinants of health require explicit attention not only to the knowledge, attitudes and skills of graduates but also on effectively engaging the health settings and systems that will reinforce the establishment and retention of capacity in low- and middle-income settings where this is most needed.

La escritura desterritorializada: dos insufribles discursos de Roberto Bolaño (Dossier: Literaturas de la integración, el Sur y su diversidad)

La obra de Roberto Bolaño tiende a establecer una relación fronteriza y marginal con el mundo, en la medida en que expresa una subjetividad movediza, susceptible de ser leída en varios niveles de sus textos y de interpretarse como una escritura “desterritorializada’. Dicha noción permite vincular la producción del autor con ciertos procesos socioculturales –como las migraciones y las nuevas formas de exilio–, en tanto reinterpretados o reinventados por una perspectiva contemporánea. En concreto, nos abocamos aquí a examinar “Los personajes fatales” y “El último lugar del mapa”, del libro Entre paréntesis (2004), los cuales no se ajustan a ningún género canónico o tipología textual, al transgredir continuamente sus reconocidos límites.