PROGRAM IN GLOBAL HEALTH STUDIES

This course introduces students to pressing disease and health care problems worldwide and examines past and current efforts to address them. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the course identifies the main actors, institutions, practices and forms of knowledge production characteristic of what we call “global health” today, and explores the environmental, social, political and economic factors that shape patterns and experiences of illness and healthcare across societies. We will scrutinize the value systems that underpin specific paradigms in the policy and science of global health and place present-day developments in historical perspective. 

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 upper-level seminar in medical anthropology examines the role of social markers of difference including race, class, nationality, gender, sexuality, age and religion in current debates and challenges in the theory and practice of global health. We will explore contemporary illness experiences and therapeutic interventions in sociocultural and historical context through case studies from the US, Brazil, and South Africa. Students will be introduced to key concepts such as embodiment, medicalization, structural violence, the social determinants of health, and biopolitics. Central questions of the seminar include: How do social categories of difference determine disease and health in individuals and collectivities? How is medical science influenced by economic and political institutions and by patient mobilization? How does social and economic inclusion/exclusion govern access to treatment as well as care of the self and others? The course will provide advanced instruction in anthropological and related social scientific research methods as they apply to questions of social inequality and public health policy in both the United States and in emerging economic powers. The course draws from historical accounts, contemporary ethnographies, public health literature, media reports, and films.

This course draws on perspectives from anthropology, related social scientific fields, and the humanities to provide a critical introduction to psychological trauma and its increasingly significant place in contemporary global health discourses and agendas. We will explore the history of the concept and its applications in Western literature, science, and medicine; consider the relatively recent construction of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a diagnostic category and the clinical approaches developed to treat it; and examine the politics and effects of applying the concept abroad through humanitarian psychiatry and/or global mental health projects. Key questions of the course will include: how and why has trauma become one of the most important signifiers of our era—and a key criterion of “victimhood?” What politics and debates have shaped the development and application of the PTSD diagnosis in recent decades? And how have notions of trauma and their varied applications transformed politics, suffering, and care in diverse communities around the world?

In this course, we examine the historical basis of global health, in particular considering the actors, their actions, and the uneven and unequal distribution of power in global health interventions from the late nineteenth century to the present. Taking a chronological as well as thematic approach, we will consider how and why biomedicine became the dominant form of medical practice globally, how it was tied to ideas of modernity, and how biomedical interventions came to dominate global health by looking at the campaigns to fight malaria, smallpox, and HIV, to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity, and to slow human population growth. We will pay particular attention to historical changes and continuities as we consider historical themes and patterns, with the intention of placing – and better understanding – current global health concerns, decisions, and interventions within these historical themes and patterns. 

Health communication is an interdisciplinary field focused on understanding and leveraging communication as a means to promote health and wellbeing. This includes communication related to the prevention, management, andtreatment of illness. In the past, the health communication field has drawn on interpersonal communication traditions instudying and improving communication between individuals, such as patients and healthcare providers. The field has also drawn on mass communication traditions in designing, disseminating, and evaluating health campaigns. Both traditionshave been disrupted by the rapid adoption of digital media. Digital media have dramatically shifted the contexts andchannels through which individuals encounter health information; the volume, content, and quality of this information;and the ways that individuals can respond to health-related messages or generate their own. These changes giveconsumers and patients unprecedented agency in seeking and evaluating health information, shaping public understanding of health and wellness, participating in advocacy efforts, and organizing new communities of support. Industry, publichealth, and medical communities have also embraced digital media and the opportunities it offers to reach new audiences, disseminate engaging and persuasive campaigns, and improve the delivery of care. This course will examine the many opportunities digital health communication provides to enhance the public health, as well as potential “dark sides” of digital health communication, including the spread of health-related misinformation and smartphone “addiction.”