PROGRAM IN GLOBAL HEALTH STUDIES

Global health is a popular field of work and study for Americans, with an increasing number of medical trainees and practitioners, as well as people without medical training, going abroad to volunteer in areas where there are few health care practitioners or resources. In addition, college undergraduates, as well as medical trainees and practitioners, are going abroad in increasing numbers to conduct research in areas with few health care resources. But all of these endeavors, though often entered into with the best of intentions, are beset with ethical questions, concerns, and dilemmas, and can have unintended consequences. In this course, students will assess these ethical challenges. In so doing, students will examine core ethical codes, guidelines, and principals – such as solidarity, social justice, and humility – so they will be able to ethically assess global health practices in a way that places an emphasis on the core goal of global health: reducing health inequities and disparities. 

This course is designed to provide global health students with the tools they will need in order to design, revise, conduct, and write up current and future qualitative research projects relating to global health topics. This course is experientially driven, allowing students opportunities to actually "do" research, while providing careful mentoring and engaging in in-depth discussions about ethical and methodological issues associated with qualitative approaches and with working with living humans. Students will learn methods such as: writing research proposals, research ethics, writing ethnographic field notes, doing qualitative interviews and focus groups, analyzing and writing up data.

This course introduces students to the social determinants of health influencing the broader health status and access to health care for Native American populations in the United States. Students will engage in a reading-intensive, discussion-based seminar, drawing upon research and scholarship from a variety of disciplines including public health, Native American and Indigenous Studies, anthropology, sociology, history, nursing, and medicine. Seminar topics will include infectious diseases and the Columbian Exchange, federal obligations to Native American people, community-based participatory research, and Indigenous health globally.

This course introduces life history theory as an integrated framework for understanding the biological processes underlying the human life cycle and its evolution. After constructing a solid foundation in life history theory and the comparative method, the class will address questions such as: Why do humans grow and develop much more slowly than other primate species? Why do we have so few offspring? What is the significance of puberty? What is the function of menopause? In-depth analysis of several case studies will allow the class to examine in detail the utility of life history theory for explaining aspects of human development and behavior from an evolutionary perspective.

This course will examine human growth and development. By its very nature this topic is a biocultural process that requires an integrated analysis of social construction and biological phenomena. To this end we will incorporate insight from evolutionary ecology, developmental biology and psychology, human biology and cultural anthropology. Development is not a simple matter of biological unfolding from birth through adolescence; rather, it is a process that is designed to be in sync with the surrounding environment within which the organism develops. Additionally we will apply these biocultural and socio-ecological insights to emerging health challenges associated with these developmental stages.

This course draws together scholarship from queer migration studies, queer diasporic critique and critical race and feminist studies in order to examine the historical and contemporary conditions for the intersections of sexuality and mobility. In this course, we will attend to the formation of "gender" and "sexuality" as categories of anthropological, historical and social analysis, surveying the major shifts within the intellectual history of studies in gender and sexuality. At the same time, however, we strive to keep in analytical view the politically pressing ways in which race, class, and nationality complicate studies of mobility and those of gender and sexuality alike. In other words, if one major question that animates the course is what studies of mobility have to contribute to historical and anthropological studies of gender and sexuality, the other is what kind of new analytical ground studies of gender and sexuality could open up in anthropology of mobility, migration and transnationalism.

The immune system is the primary defense mechanism of vertebrates against invading pathogenic organisms. This cellular system has the remarkable ability to recognize as foreign any material which is not normally a constituent of an individual's own tissues. This includes not only bacteria, viruses, and tumor cells when they express modified or new proteins, but nearly all compounds from a chemist's shelf - natural and synthetic. The immune system confronts this vast universe of foreign materials, referred to as antigens, by synthesizing an equally vast array of proteins each of which can bind to one antigen, and by so doing eliminate it. How this array of antigen-receptors is generated, how the genes which encode these are organized, the strategies adopted by the immune system to specifically activate the cells which bear the receptors and fastidiously eliminate self recognition are addressed in this course.

Social justice is often defined as the just and equal access to resources, privileges, and social status, and involves the recognition of persistent social inequalities, and that work toward social justice involves ongoing structural social change.  This course examines social justice as idea and process, in historical perspective and around the world, and through the lens of active social justice movements in Chicago today.  We look in particular at the Black Lives Matter movement, struggles against urban gentrification and displacement, and the immigrant rights movement, as case studies offering new internship opportunities.  Course readings and meetings emphasize reflection, debate, and constructive critique, as we pay attention to the intersections of race, class, gender, citizenship, and sexuality, but focus especially on the discourses and practices of race and racism that frame social justice struggles.

This course provides an overview of health information technologies (HIT) from a medical informatics perspective. The course is directed towards health communication students who want to understand the rapidly evolving field of HIT and its integral role in healthcare systems.

The doctor-patient relationship is founded on storytelling. Whether you hope to become a healthcare provider or not, the medical experience requires a kind of narrative literacy. Both physicians and patients must grapple with narrative expectations (such as notions of causal sequence, symbolism, and closure) when conferring on medical decisions. As a group of future doctors, nurses, caregivers, and patients, we will explore what kinds of stories congregate around Western conceptions of the medical experience. We will approach this task with a multi-disciplinary lens, examining the history of medicine, medical ethics, religious practices, and narrative theory. We will pair contemporary theoretical and non-fiction works on illness with various kinds of narratives designed to communicate a patient’s perspective. We will analyze the distinctive opportunities for immersion in stories about illness offered by different genres and media, including personal essays, poetry, films and even a cancer-themed video game. Finally, we will debate the limits of narrative in medical practice—as in communicating the unique cognition of autism, the experience of physical pain, or the process of dying.

Does death have a history? This course explores the changing realities of, attitudes towards and ways of coping with death drawing on examples from Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Latin America and the United States. We will look in particular at the role of death in shaping the modern world via the global slave trades, imperial conquest, pandemics, wars and genocides. In addition, we will explore the more complicated issue of the changing ways people have made sense of death, both in extraordinary circumstances as well as during calmer times. We will examine long continuities and transformations in rituals relating to death, intellectual and philosophical debates about the personal and social meanings of death, and the political and intimate consequences of particular ways and patterns of dying.

How can we encourage and inspire meaningful social change? How can we design and implement effective programs that address social problems and social needs? How can we realize human rights and secure civil rights in our communities and around the world? We will attempt to answer these questions by exploring specific steps of the design and implementation process. By examining characteristics of youth and community programs in the fields of education, social justice, human development, health promotion, human rights, and civic engagement –at the local, national, and international levels –we will seek to identify commonalities and understand differences among them. A major goal of this course is to acquire an intellectual and applied understanding of the principles of program design and development, which include a sustained consideration of issues affecting the quality of program implementation. Considerable attention will be devoted to specific steps within the design and implementation process, as well as case studies of actual programs.We will examine a range of topics, including: finding inspiration; identification, recruitment, and retention of target audiences; staff selection; setting global and incremental goals; and ensuring sustainability.We must also acknowledge that what counts as a social need or social problem is subjective and complex and that programs can therefore be controversial, difficult to manage, and difficult to evaluate. In light of this, we will touch on the organizational, ethical,and political contexts of implementation.While much of the design and implementation process can be seen as intuitive, you are encouraged –through class discussion, your writing, and your designs –to actively challenge your assumptions about creating community programming, as well as critique the programs that we learn about and the design techniques that we practice.

This reading and discussion intensive course will focus on the sociology of medicine in the contemporary international context. How does biomedicine and health care work at the close of the 20th century? What is the nature of the doctor-patient relationship, and what roles do other players--advocacy groups, drug companies, governments, insurance companies--play in the processes of health care? How does biomedicine compare across countries? How do contemporary globalization processes influence the conduct of biomedicine and health care worldwide? The course will cover major concepts in medical sociology: the social shaping of disease, dynamics of the doctor/patient relationship, gender and race issues in medical care, structures of health care and medical institutions, regulation of biomedicine, patient activism, intellectual property issues, and the conduct of biomedical research--using US and international examples. Each broad theme will be explored through empirically rich case studies, from debates about stem cell research to the globalization of AIDS drugs, the birth of biotechnology to the discovery of the "gay gene".