Winter 2024 Class Schedule
Winter 2024 class Schedule
Core Courses
Note: this schedule is subject to change, and will be solidified during Fall 2023.
Elective Courses
Winter 2023 electives will be posted during Fall Quarter 2023.
Winter 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 courseidentifies 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.
Fulfills Area III (Social and Behavioral Sciences) distribution requirement
GBL_HLTH 222: The Social Determinants of Health
This lecture-based survey in public health and medical anthropology explores how political, economic, historical, and sociocultural forces impact health inequalities at home and around the world. We will explore contemporary illness experiences and therapeutic interventions in 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. he course draws from historical accounts, contemporary ethnographies, public health literature, media reports, and films.
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 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 306: Biomedicine and Culture
Biomedicine (aka "Western" or allopathic medicine) is often represented as neutral and ‘scientific’— the opposite of culture. Yet experiences and practices surrounding biomedicine are influenced by culture, history, (infra)structures, and flows of ideas, people and resources. Thus, this course begins with the premise that biomedicine is produced through social processes, and therefore has its own inherent culture(s). The aim of this seminar course is to expose students to the social and cultural aspects of biomedicine through a geographic comparison between select world regions. Focusing on the interrelations between technology, medicine, science, politics, society, religion, power and place, topics covered will include: medical history, learning medicine, rethinking “care”, and unexpected aspects of biomedical cultures and practice. Through a focus on the logics by which biomedicine is practiced, we will be able to get into additional depth regarding how race, class, gender, history, and politics shape what medicine gets to be in different contexts, while also understanding how biomedicine converges with political economy, business, bureaucracy, profit, global health, and humanitarianism.
Fulfills Area III (Social and Behavioral Sciences) distribution requirement
GBL_HLTH 309: Biomedicine and World History
Course covers four centuries, focusing especially on the power of disease and the limits of global health governance. It explains how different medical professions became dominant, why drug industries secured monopolies, and what effects these changes had on other medical cultures. GBL_HLTH 309-0 and HISTORY 379-0 are taught together; may not receive credit for both courses.
Fulfills Area IV (Historical Studies) distribution requirement
GBL_HLTH 319: Trauma and its Afterlives
Fulfills Area III (Social and Behavioral Sciences) distribution requirement
GBL_HLTH 320: Qualitative Research Methods in Global Health
Fulfills Area III (Social and Behavioral Sciences) distribution requirement
GBL_HLTH 323: Global Health from Policy to Practice
This seminar explores global health and development policy ethnographically, from the politics of policy-making to the impacts of policy on global health practice, and on local realities. Going beyond the intentions underlying policy, this course highlights the histories and material, political, economic, and social realities of policy and its application. Drawing on case studies of policy makers, government officials, insurance agents, health care workers, and aid recipients, the course asks: what politics inform which issues become prioritized or codified in global health and development policy, and which do not? How do philosophies and values about “good governance,” “best practices,” “preparedness,” or “economic progress” influence the kinds of policies that are envisioned and/or implemented? How do politics affect global health or medical system governance, and to what effect on the ground? In what ways are policies adapted, adopted, innovatively engaged, or outright rejected by various global health actors, and what does this mean for the challenges that such policies aim to address? Ultimately, what is the relationship between global health politics and global health disparities?
Fulfills Area III (Social and Behavioral Sciences) 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 337: 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.
Fulfills Area III (Social and Behavioral Sciences) distribution requirement
GBL_HLTH 390-0-23: Native Nations, Healthcare Systems, and US Policy
In the territory currently called the United States of America, healthcare for Native populations is often experienced as a tension between settler colonial domination and activism among Native nations to uphold their Indigenous sovereignty. This reading-intensive, discussion-based seminar will provide students with a complex and in-depth understanding of the historical and contemporary policies and systems created for, by, and in collaboration with Native nations. In order to understand the U.S. government’s role and responsibility towards Native nations, we will delve into legal foundations of the trust responsibility and fiduciary obligation of the federal government as outlined in the U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court decisions. To understand how Native nations continuously work within and resist colonial settler systems to exercise their sovereignty, students will examine notable federal and state policies that affect Native health, wellbeing, and (lack of) access to meaningful care.
GBL_HLTH 390-0-25: (Re)Mixing Qualitative Methods
To be "healthy" is a complex obstacle course that many individuals living in certain bodies have to navigate. Black bodies, for example, are often the tied to (un)health because they are stereotyped as in need to be controlled, managed, and "guided" into healthfulness. In the U.S., these narrow stereotypes are just a few of the ways Black bodies get defined. In this course, we will move beyond those restrictive stereotypes, guided by questions such as, "How does culture define health?", "How does the food pipeline affect the health of certain bodies?" and "What does it mean to live in an obesogenic environment?" In this course, we examine the connection between health, culture, food, and environment with a focus on what is silenced and what is loud when generating "fixes" for "diseased" bodies. Silence refers to the disregard and dismissiveness of the narratives and experiences around the oppressions attached to the health of certain bodies. Yet, this silence echoes as Loud when connected to their culture, food, and environment when discussing diseases highlighted in Black bodies such as obesity, hypertension, and diabetes.
GBL_HLTH 390-0-26: Global Circulations and Human Health: Migrations and Trafficks of Human Beings, Human Parts, and Human Products
Human beings and human parts/products are on the move across the globe, shaped by inequities that drive poor health outcomes for many involved in these circulations. More human beings are being forced from their homes than ever before in history; more and more are being turned away as they seek resettlement. Global economic migration is poorly regulated and rife with exploitation. The flow of human organs for transplantation increasingly moves from the poor in the Global South to the rich in the Global North. Even the production of human babies through international surrogacy is driven by economic inequities. This course examines the role of advocacy, law, politics and ethics to preserve dignity and health as human beings and human parts increasingly circulate across global boundaries.
GBL_HLTH 390-0-27: Infectious Disease Eradication & Outbreak Control
Despite many efforts across several diseases spanning decades and billions of dollars, global health actors have only been able to eradicate one infectious human disease: smallpox. Why? This course will attempt to answer this question by examining several failed and continuing disease eradication efforts through a multidisciplinary lens. Case studies will include smallpox, malaria, polio, measles, and hypothetical emerging infectious diseases. We will examine the grandiose global health goal of total disease eradication in relation to sociopolitical realities that limit the applications of idealized technological interventions.