How do Anthropologists understand and investigate the social and cultural contexts of health and illness? This course will examine the diverse ways in which humans use cultural resources to cope with pain, illness, suffering and healing in diverse cultural contexts. In addition, we will analyze various kinds of medical practices as cultural systems, examining how disease, health, body, and mind are socially constructed, how these constructions articulate with human biology, and vice versa. The course will provide an introduction to the major theoretical frameworks that guide anthropological approaches to studying human health-related behavior. Theory will be combined with case studies from a number of societies, from India, Japan, Brazil, and Haiti to the U.S. and Canada, enabling students to identify similarities across seemingly disparate cultural systems, while at the same time demonstrating the ways in which American health behaviors and practices are socially embedded and culturally specific. The course will emphasize the overall social, political, and economic contexts in which health behavior and health systems are shaped, and within which they must be understood.
Gbl Hlth 390-0-1 Population and Reproductive Health
This course will examine the ways in which population growth concerns in Africa, Asia and Latin America have evolved over time towards a more woman-centered approach. Debates continue between demographers and advocates of “sexual and reproductive health and rights.” In the meantime, family planning policies and programs have broadened from their original medical focus that prioritized quantitative measurement and the views of providers. Today, they can address quality of care from the client’s perspective, gender power dynamics including male involvement in decision-making, attention to both married and unmarried young people, and even efforts to increase the empowerment of women and girls. Students will learn about past and current challenges to advancing reproductive health in the global South, advances (and gaps) in knowledge about what works, and efforts towards reaching the United Nations goal of ensuring “universal access to sexual and reproductive health care services” by the year 2030.
Gbl Hlth 390-0-2 Managing Global Health Challenges
Disease knows no borders. Both pathogens and lifestyles move around the world and the people of every country share the risks. The responsibility for ensuring the public health rests with governments at local, national and international levels. Public health interventions require cooperation and partnerships at each level and with civil society organizations, corporations, businesses and individuals. Advances in technology can significantly reduce the burden of disease and improve the quality of health and life. To effectively address global health challenges, technology must be integrated into health systems in ways that are both appropriate and sustainable. These interventions are affected by public policies, availability of resources and theories of public health and disease. Existing health organizations are increasingly challenged by the scope and magnitude of the current and future threats to public health such as the AIDS pandemic; the emergence of new and more virulent infectious diseases; the threats of bio-terrorism; growing resistance to antibiotics; lack of basic infrastructure of water, sanitation and inadequate access to drugs in developing countries; and overabundance of foods and complications from affluence, leading to health problems such as diabetes in higher income countries. This course will examine the global epidemiology of these diseases and threats to the populations of the world, and the current technological and organizational strategies that have been established to respond. A series of diseases and geographical regions will be analyzed to consider how the international community uses technology and organizes its response to current problems in global public health. Special attention will be given to examples of effective technologies and intervention strategies.
Gndr St 101-6 Our Bodies Ourselves: The Women's Movement
The U.S. 1970s Women's Health Movement demanded everything from safe birth control on demand to an end to for-profit healthcare. Some participants formed research collectives and published D-I-Y guides to medical knowledge such as the Boston Women's Health Collective's Women and Their Bodies or Carol Downer's A New View of a Woman's Body. Some movement members established battered women's shelters, underground abortion referral services, and feminist health clinics. Others formed local committees and national networks, such as the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA) and the National Women's Health Network (NWHN), with the goal of transforming contemporary medical protocols and scientific research agendas. Because many of these local and national groups are still in existence, original movement goals continue to define the parameters of a "women's health" agenda in the present moment. On the other hand, the Women's Health Movement was (and is) a heterogeneous movement. Then, as now, groups with competing ideas about the healthcare needs of women as a group identified as part of same movement. Thus, an examination of historical and current debates over "women's health" is also a means of assessing several distinct, often competing, paradigms of health and disease. Moreover, how we articulate a "women's health agenda" depends on our (often taken-for-granted) ideas about gender, sexuality, and embodiment itself.
This course is an analysis of ethical and political issues that arise in medicine, with particular attention to questions posed by developments in biotechnology. Topics to be considered include human research, abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering, and the allocation of medical resources.
This course will examine how society shapes sexuality, as well as how sexuality shapes society. Although many consider sexuality to be deeply personal, in fact, social context greatly affects how individuals understand and experience sexuality. Questions this course will consider include: What is the relationship between individual identities and practices and broader social, cultural, and structural contexts? How does sexuality intersect with gender, class, race/ethnicity, geographic location, age, and nationality? What are sexual subcultures? The course will also consider how sexuality is related to different types of social inequalities. At the end of the course, students will be able to discuss how studying sexuality helps us better understand complex social processes.
