Spring 2023 Class Schedule
Global Health Studies courses often reach their maximum capacity and subsequently close during registration. When this happens, students are advised to put themselves on a waitlist. If a student withdraws from a class, seats are filled from the waitlist. When necessary, graduating GHS seniors will be prioritized.
Students can add themselves to a waitlist in CAESAR by checking the “add me to the waitlist if this class is full” option when they put the course in their shopping cart.
Note that being on the waitlist does not guarantee admission into the class. Students will be contacted via email if spots become available. Students should not email GHS faculty or staff about gaining admission into a course. We are rarely able to add additional seats to a course, both because of space constraints in classrooms and to keep each faculty member's teaching capacity manageable.
Spring 2023 class Schedule
Core Courses
Note: this schedule is subject to change, and will be solidified during Winter 2023.
Elective Courses
Elective course options will be posted during Winter 2023.
Spring 2023 course descriptions
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 that underpin specific paradigms in the policy and science of global health and place present-day developments in historical perspective. We will focus on social determinants of health, settler colonialism, colonialism, health and human rights, global health ethics, ecological determinants of health, and an overview of public health disciplines.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 upper-level course 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, self-care, and care of loved ones This course focuses on the linkages between society and health inequalities in the U.S., U.S. territories, Brazil, and Africa. It offers a forum to explore how social standings (mis)inform policies. 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.
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 and disparities. With an emphasis on the ethical responsibility to reduce disparities, we consider some of the most pressing global bioethical issues of our time: equity, fairness, and climate change. Particular attention is given to the ethics of research during a pandemic and access to vaccines and therapies for Covid-19.
Fulfills Area V (Ethics and Values) distribution requirement
GBL_HLTH 320: Qualitative Research Methods in Global Health
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.
Fulfills Area III (Social and Behavioral Sciences) distribution requirement
GBL_HLTH 390: Special Topics in Global Health: Literary Genres + Health: A TBR Readalong
GBL_HLTH 390: Special Topics in Global Health: (Re)mixing Qualitative Methods
In this upper-level course exploring approaches to meld traditional data collection methods with alternative techniques, students will review 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 same processes can be applied in public health data collection to be inclusive and validate the methods and ways of knowing that have assisted underserved, underheard, and underrepresented communities in advocating for justice to survive. Course readings will consist of text that provides a critical lens to view qualitative data collection methods through and will include studies in historical and traumatic violence that underscore how people living in Black bodies work to survive by Joy DeGruy and the 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 Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Jean Stefancic.
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.