Fall 2022 Class Schedule
fall 2022 class Schedule
Core Courses
Elective Courses
| Course | Title | Instructor | Day/Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| ANTHRO 309 | Human Osteology | Erin Waxenbaum Dennison | F 11:00am-1:00pm |
| ANTHRO 390-0-24 / INTL_ST 393-0-20 | Development in the Global Context: Participation, Power, and Social Change | Diego Arispe-Bazan | MW 3:30-4:50pm |
| ASIAN_AM 360 / GNDR_ST 341-0-20 | Studies in Race, Gender, and Sexuality: Trans*-Related Medical Surgeries in Thailand | Jillana Enteen | MW 2:00-3:20pm |
| BIOL_SCI 337 | Biostatistics | Joseph Walsh | MW 12:30-1:50pm |
| BIOL_SCI 380 | Biology of Cancer | Xioamin Bao | TuTh 12:30-1:50pm |
| BMD_ENG 325 | Introduction to Medical Imaging | Alan Varteres Sahakian | MWF 1:00-1:50pm |
| BUS_INST 394-LK-24 | Professional Linkage Seminar: Lessons in Non-Profit Management | Mary Graettinger | Th 2:00-4:50pm |
| CFS 391 | Field Studies in Social Justice | Sarah Sillins | TBA |
| CFS 392 | Field Studies in Public Health | Jessica Ibrahim Puri | M 6:30-8:30pm |
| CFS 397 | Field Studies in Civic Engagement | Elizabeth McCabe | TBA |
| COMM_ST 395-0-21 | Topics in Communication Studies: The Experience of Illness | Bruce Lambert | W 2:00-4:50pm |
| ECON 307 | Economics of Medical Care | Frank Limbrock |
TuTh 12:30-1:50pm F 1:00-1:50pm |
| GNDR_ST 332-0-21 / SOCIOL 376-0-20 / HUM 370-5-20 | Gender, Sexuality, and Health: Race/Gender/Sex & Science | Steven Epstein | TuTh 3:30-4:50pm |
| HISTORY 275-1 | History of Early Modern Science and Medicine | Lydia Barnett | TuTh 11:00am-12:20pm |
| IEMS 385 | Introduction to Health Systems Management | Sanjay Mehrotra | TuTh 12:30-1:50pm |
| JOUR 390-0-23 / AMER_ST 310-0-30 / GNDR_ST 390-0-21 | Special Topics: Viruses and the Viral Media | Steven Thrasher | MW 10:00-11:20am |
| POLI_SCI 384 | International Responses to Mass Atrocities | Daniel Krcmaric | MW 11:00am-12:20pm |
fall 2022 course descriptions
Core Courses
GBL_HLTH 201: Introduction to Global Health
This course introduces students to pressing disease and health care problems worldwide and examines efforts currently underway 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 underpinning specific paradigms in the policy and science of global health practice, and place present-day developments in historical perspective. As an introductory course on global health, the class delves into comparative health systems, including comparative health systems in high- and low-income countries. Key topics will include: policies and approaches to global health, key actors in global health, comparative health systems, structural violence, gender and reproductive health, chronic and communicable diseases, politics of global health research and evidence, and the ethics of global health equity.
GBL_HLTH 222: The Social Determinants of Health
The human body is embedded into a health framework that can produce hypervisibility, invisibility, or both. This course in social science and medical anthropology examines the role of social markers of difference, including race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and religion, in current debates and challenges in the theory and practice of global health. We will explore recent illness experiences, therapeutic and self-care interventions, and health practices and behaviors in socio-cultural and historical context through case studies in the U.S., Brazil, and South Africa. The purpose of this course is to introduce students to key concepts such as embodiment, medicalization, structural violence, social determinants of health, biopolitics, health equity, and an ethic of care. Central questions of the course include: How do categories of "Othering" determine disease and health in individuals and collectives? How is medical science and care influenced by economic and political institutions and by patient trust? How do social and economic inclusion/exclusion control access to health treatment and self-care and care of others? This course focuses on the linkages between society and health inequalities in the U.S. and economic powers. It offers a forum to explore policy application with a particular emphasis on definitions that form social factors. This course utilizes historical accounts, contemporary ethnographies, Twitter threads of health experiences, public health literature, media reports, TedTalks, and films to bring to life the "why's" of health differences.
Fulfills Area III (Social and Behavioral Sciences) distribution requirement
GBL_HLTH 302: Global Bioethics
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 healthcare 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 explore and consider these ethical challenges. In so doing, students will examine core global bioethical concerns - such as structural violence - and core global bioethical codes, guidelines, and principals - such as beneficence and solidarity - so they will be able to ethically assess global health practices in a way that places an emphasis on the central goal of global health: reducing health inequities. With an emphasis on the ethical responsibility to reduce inequities, we consider some of the most pressing global bioethical issues of our time: equity, fairness, and planetary health. Particular attention is given to the ethics of research during a pandemic and equitable access to vaccines and therapies for Covid-19. Beatriz will not be use ungrading for this course but each student will create an assignment bundle.
Fulfills Area V (Ethics and Values) distribution requirement
GBL_HLTH 310-1: Supervised Global Health Research
Maternal health, in particular, maternal mortality, is a significant concern in global health, and in this class we will consider the historical roots of two areas of focus on improving maternal health and reducing maternal mortality: women having access to skilled birth attendants and birth control options. We will look at this broad international concern by focusing on the work of one organization in the 1960s-1970s, the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM), by examining their papers, held at the Wellcome Library and Archives in London. We will visit the library the week before classes start and this research will form the basis of the seminar course during the quarter. This class will culminate in a major paper using the primary sources from the ICM research done in London.
Course available to accepted applicants only.
GBL_HLTH 324: Volunteerism and the Ethics of Help
Since the early 2000s, there has been an exponential increase in the number of foreigners volunteering in low-income communities, within orphanages, clinics, schools, and communities. This expansion has been echoed by locals, who are also providing voluntary labor in a variety of locales throughout their communities. This class explores the discourses and practices that make up volunteering and voluntourism, from the perspectives of volunteers, hosts, and a range of professional practitioners both promoting and critiquing this apparent rise in “the need to help”. What boons and burdens occur with the boom of volunteer fervor world-wide? Why do people feel the need to volunteer, and what consequences do these voluntary exchanges have on the volunteers, and on those communities and institutions that are subject to their good intentions? What are the ethics and values that make up “making a difference” amongst differently-situated players who are involved in volunteering? Given that volunteers often act upon best intentions, what are the logics that justify philanthropy and the differential standards by which volunteers are judged based on where they go and how they engage in volunteering? This class seeks out some answers to these questions, and highlights why the increased concern for strangers that undergirds volunteering should also be, in itself, cause for our concern.
Fulfills Area V (Ethics and Values) distribution requirement
GBL_HLTH 325: History of Reproductive Health
The history of reproduction is a large subject, and during this course we will touch on many, but by no means all, of what can be considered as part of this history. Our focus will be on human reproduction, considering the vantage points of both healthcare practitioners and lay women and men. We will look at ideas concerning fertility, conception, pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, birth control, abortion, and assisted reproduction. Because, at a fundamental level, reproduction is about power - as historian Amy Kaler (but by no means only Kaler), pointed out, "[c]control over human reproduction is eternally contested, in zones ranging from the comparative privacy of the conjugal bedroom to the political platform and programs of national polities" - we will pay attention to power in reproductive health. And, since the distribution of power in matters of reproduction has often been uneven and unequal - between men and women, between colonizing and Indigenous populations, between clinicians and lay people, between those in upper socioeconomic classes and those in lower socioeconomic classes - we will pay particular attention during this class to struggles over matters of reproduction as we explore historical changes and continuities in reproduction globally since 1900.
Fulfills Area IV (Historical Studies) distribution requirement
GBL_HLTH 390: Special Topics in Global Health: Biocultural Perspectives on Water Insecurity
The first objective of this course is to introduce students to the many ways that water impacts humans around the world. We will discuss what the international recommendations for safely managed water are and the health and social consequences of water insecurity. The second objective is to explore why there is such variety in water insecurity worldwide. Influences on access to water will be broadly considered; we will draw on literature in global health, ethnography, the life sciences, and public policy. These discussions will be guided by the socio-ecological framework, in which dimensions ranging from the individual to the geopolitical are considered. The third objective is to develop critical thinking and writing abilities to reflect on the multi-dimensional causes and consequences of water insecurity and the appropriateness of potential solutions. This will be accomplished through readings and documentaries that we have lovingly selected, writing weekly reflection pieces, preparing a short in-class presentation on recent media, and writing an OpEd.
Please note this class will be taught as part of the Northwestern Prison Education Program. Classes will be taught remotely on Tuesdays, from Stateville Correctional Center, and in person on Thursdays, in Evanston.
GBL_HLTH 390: Special Topics in Global Health: Native American Health Research and Prevention
Native nations in what is currently the United States are continuously seeking to understanding and undertake the best approaches to research and prevention with their communities. This course introduces students to the benefits and barriers to various approaches to addressing negative health outcomes and harnessing positive social determinants of health influencing broader health status. Important concepts to guide our understanding of these issues will include settler colonialism, colonialism, sovereignty, social determinants of health, asset-based perspectives, and decolonizing research. 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, sociology, history, and medicine. This course does not focus on nor teach traditional Native medicine or philosophies as those are not appropriate in this predominately non-Native environment.
GBL_HLTH 390: Special Topics in Global Health: Hazards, Disasters, and Society
This course examines how socioeconomic and environmental factors work together to cause hazards and disasters in human society. In this course we learn the main concepts about disaster such as preparedness, vulnerability, resilience, response, mitigation, etc. We learn that a disaster does not have the same effect on everyone (all groups of people), and factors of social inequality such as race, ethnicity, class, and gender, make people more vulnerable to impacts of disasters. Also, this course, with an interdisciplinary perspective, analyzes disasters in the global North and South. This is a discussion-intensive course for advanced undergrad students. The classes are the student-centered with an emphasis on collaborative learning. The class meetings will consist of lecture, discussion, presentations, teamwork, activities, video/audio materials and projects.
GBL_HLTH 390: Special Topics in Global Health: Environmental Justice
This course examines how environmental problems reflect and exacerbate social inequality. In this course, we learn the definition of environmental (in)justice; the history of environmental justice; and also examples of environmental justice will be discussed. We will learn about environmental movements. This course has a critical perspective on health disparities in national and international levels. How environmental injustice impacts certain groups more than others and the social and political economic reasons for these injustices will be discussed in this course. This is a discussion-intensive course for advanced undergrad students. The classes are student-centered with an emphasis on collaborative learning. The class meetings will consist of lectures, discussions, presentations, teamwork, activities, video/audio materials and projects.
GBL_HLTH 390: Special Topics in Global Health: (Re)mixing Qualitative Methods
This course explores traditional and alternative data collection methods in public health research. The course focuses on decolonizing ways that Black/African American individuals have used to reveal their truths and construct and reconstruct images of themselves. Students will explore how these decolonizing processes can be applied in public health data collection to make research inclusive and to validate methods and ways of knowing that have assisted underserved, underheard, and underrepresented communities in advocating for justice to survive. Course readings and videos will provide a critical lens on qualitative data collection methods, including studies on historical and traumatic violence underscoring how people living in Black bodies work to survive, and negotiating processes that Black individuals use to exercise agency and evaluate systemic oppressions that impede how they navigate life as articulated by authors such as Joy DeGruy, Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Jean Stefanci.
GBL_HLTH 390: Special Topics in Global Health: Trauma and its Afterlives
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?
GBL_HLTH 390: Special Topics in Global Health: Mental Health and the Arts
This course draws on perspectives from anthropology, related social scientific fields, and the humanities to explore the role of the arts and media narratives in shaping politics and experiences of mental health and illness around the world. We will consider forms of storytelling—including literature, film, and theater—across eras and cultures, tracking shifts in perspectives on normality and pathology and their consequences for the most vulnerable. How does the power of Western psychiatry intersect with that of global media to reinforce reigning paradigms and imperatives for how suffering is to be understood, classified, and experienced? Conversely, what counter-narratives are being produced by artists and their communities? What role can the arts play in individual and collective forms of healing—or in exacerbating pain and grievance? What kinds of voices seem to have power, and which are neglected? Where is the line between cathartic and exploitative representation of trauma and mental illness? How, in short, do the stories we tell about mental illness “get under the skin” and shape forms of suffering and care?
GBL_HLTH 390: Special Topics in Global Health: International Public Health
This course introduces students to pressing disease and health care problems worldwide and examines efforts currently underway 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. Key topics will include: policies and approaches to global health governance and interventions, global economies and their impacts on public health, medical humanitarianism, global mental health, maternal and child health, pandemics (HIV/AIDS, Ebola, H1N1, Swine Flu), malaria, food insecurity, health and human rights, and global health ethics.
GBL_HLTH 390: Special Topics in Global Health: Global Epidemics
From modern pandemics such as Ebola and COVID-19, to ancient scourges such as leprosy and the plague, epidemics have shaped human history. In turn, the response of human societies to infectious disease threats have varied wildly in time and across cultures. We are currently living such an event, and experiencing in dramatic fashion how disease reshapes society. This course will cover several prominent global epidemic episodes, examining the biology of the disease, epidemic pathways, sociopolitical responses and public health measures, and the relationship between the scientific and the cultural consequences of these outbreaks.
GBL_HLTH 390: Special Topics in Global Health: Humanitarian Interventions and Health Inequities
This course analyzes humanitarian responses to complex international humanitarian crises which have impacted both domestic and international communities. Case studies will address a wide range of issues including: natural disasters, refugee and migrant health, gendered violence, war and healthcare, and reproductive health. We focus on the relationship between global health actors and persistent inequities in aid and social protections. We will confront “real-life questions” related to proposed solutions for global health challenges, including: What frameworks do we use to advocate for and implement equitable global health programs in crisis situations? What are the ethical challenges involved in interventions designed to improve health equity across cultural and geographical boundaries, especially those serving vulnerable populations? How do we negotiate the historical, political, and cultural structures that reinforce inequity around the globe?