Global Health & Health Policy
- DAN 208/THR 208/GHP 338: Body and LanguageIn this studio course open to all, we'll dive into experiences in which body and language meet. We'll think about these from aesthetic, cultural, political, medical, personal, and philosophical perspectives. We'll explore language from, in, around, and about (our) bodies. We'll question hierarchies between body and language, use embodied approaches to examine pressing issues of our time. We'll play with the physicality of voice and the material qualities of words and sentences. We'lll find literary structures in movement. We'll move and create together with tools from dance, theater, visual art, improvisation, writing, and somatic practices.
- EEB 327/MOL 327/GHP 327: Immune Systems: From Molecules to PopulationsHow do immune systems work, and why do they work as they do? Why is there so much immunological polymorphism? To address these questions, students will examine immunology across multiple biological scales. At the molecular and cellular scales, students will learn mechanisms by which animals recognize and kill parasites. At the population scale, students will investigate causes of immunological heterogeneity. Both the clinical relevance (including to COVID-19) and the evolutionary basis of heterogeneity will be emphasized.
- GHP 350/SPI 380/ANT 380: Critical Perspectives in Global HealthGlobal health brings together a vast array of actors addressing urgent health and environmental issues with unprecedented financial and technological resources. The course is a critical analysis of the social, political, and economic processes underlying this expanding medical and humanitarian field. As we scrutinize the design, evidence-making practices and values shaping global health, we will place interventions in historical perspective, gauge their impact, and explore new paradigms in-the-making. Students are encouraged to find new, collaborative ways to understand and act in and through the field of global health.
- LAS 202/GHP 342: Public Health in Latin AmericaThis is a course centered on the analysis and design of health challenges and the policies that can address them. It adopts a problem-oriented approach. It discusses what can be done to improve health systems, reduce health disparities in care access and outcomes and address both emerging and persistent health issues in Latin America. The course examines global epidemics, aging, racial and gender inequalities in health, violence, abortion, mental health and food habits.
- LAS 390/ANT 392/GHP 390: Multispecies Worlding and Global Health PoliciesThis course examines pandemics, diseases, and other global health concerns through the lens of multispecies relations. We study knowledge production (epistemology) throughout this course, the cultural structures that make certain "ways of knowing" possible, and the shifting boundaries of knowing and being provoked by modes of inquiry centering multispecies entanglements. We consider the ongoing effects of environmental change and the world-making knowledge practices of experts that drive new perspectives on global health. Finally, we reflect critically on multispecies care and the future of planetary health. First-year students are welcome.
- MOL 459/GHP 459: Viruses: Strategy and TacticsViruses are unique parasites of living cells and may be the most abundant, highest evolved life forms on the planet. The general strategies encoded by all known viral genomes are discussed using selected viruses as examples. A part of the course is dedicated to the molbio (tactics) inherent to these strategies. Another part introduces the biology of engagement of viruses with host defenses, what happens when virus infection leads to disease, vaccines and antiviral drugs, and the evolution of infectious agents and emergence of new viruses. These topics are intertwined with discussions of modern technologies that benefit the field of virology.
- MOL 460/STC 460/GHP 460: Diseases in Children: Causes, Costs, and ChoicesWithin a broad context of historical, social, and ethical concerns, a survey of normal childhood development and selected disorders from the perspectives of the physician, the biologist, and the bioethicist. There is an emphasis on the complex relationship between genetic and acquired causes of disease, the environment, medical practice, social conditions, and cultural values. The course features visits from children with some of the conditions discussed, site visits, and readings from the original medical, scientific, and bioethical literature.
- SLA 368/HUM 368/GHP 368/COM 388: Literature and MedicineThis course will examine themes that are paramount in our lives as individuals, communities, and societies' illness and healing, caregiving, epidemics, the distinction between normal and pathological. Our reflections on ethics will feature stories and storytelling as an entry point. Why do doctors and patients need stories? How does storytelling illuminate medicine as a system of representation? What rhetorical devices are embedded in the way we conceive of sickness, well-being, and the medical institutions? We will address these questions and will explore the overlaps between medicine and storytelling within texts from all over the world.