The Laudato Si' Research Institute and Campion Hall are hosting a series of online multidisciplinary seminars analysing post-COVID intellectual developments of significance for theology, philosophy, and ethics.

Title: The Response of Amazonian Indigenous People to the Pandemic
Speaker: Dr Deborah Delgado Pugley
Chair: Dr Séverine Deneulin, Director of International Development, Laudato Si’ Research Institute & Research Fellow, Campion Hall

Abstract

COVID-19 is dramatically affecting the Amazonian regions of Peru and compromising people’s health and livelihoods. Facing an overwhelming challenge, indigenous peoples’ organizations have deployed a networked response and a very agile reaction to the pandemic. They have crafted an adapted logistics, putting together food chains among river communities and recovering traditional knowledge on endemic plants with therapeutic value. They have isolated healthy communities and have cared for convalescents in self-organized healthcare centres. This self-organization has proven essential as public sub-national health systems and social services were completely overwhelmed by the pandemic.

In this seminar, Dr. Deborah Delgado Pugley will address the following question: what are the particularities of the Amazonian indigenous organisations’ response to the urgent and longer-term effects of the pandemic? She will analyse and make explicit the potential that contemporary indigenous knowledge and networks have to build resilience in the face of complex global health challenges. She will focus, in particular, on the region of Ucayali, which has been severely hit by the pandemic but which has shown better signs of recovery in the Peruvian context.

How to Register

This seminar is open to members of the University of Oxford only and space is limited to 30 participants. To register your interest, please contact Timothy Howles with a brief description of your field of academic study. There is pre-reading material, which will be sent to you after registration.