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. 

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. 

This course will explore issues of mental health in cross-cultural, international perspective and examine the impact of psychological illness on the global burden of disease. Students explore the following questions: how do cultural systems of meaning and behavior affect the vulnerability of individuals within the population to mental illness and the mental illnesses to which they are vulnerable? How does culture influence the way that mental illness is expressed and experienced and how does this affect our ability to measure psychological illness cross-culturally? How do cultural factors affect the way that mental illnesses are diagnosed and labeled, and the degree to which they are stigmatized? And how do such factors affect our ability to create effective public health interventions? Finally, how do healing practices and the efficacy of particular treatments vary across cultures? By examining these and related questions, in the context of specific mental illnesses including schizophrenia, depression, and PTSD students are exposed to a unique set of ideas otherwise unrepresented in the current global health curriculum. Mental health is crucially linked to physical health, and represents an enormous global health burden in its own right. It is crucial, therefore, that global health students be introduced to central issues related to epidemiology and intervention in this area.

Food is a universal requirement for humans to survive, yet different cultures have developed radically divergent cuisines. In this course, we will use archaeology to explore the diversity of human foodways throughout time, and the role of food in human evolution and culture. You will learn about the origins of cooking over 1 million years ago, the `real' Paleodiet, how the Incas used beer at parties to build social alliances, and how Columbus's discovery of the Americas spurred global scale shifts in food and agriculture. The course begins with an overview of how anthropologists and archaeologists study food, and then moves through time, beginning with our early hominid ancestors and ending with colonialism.

Social justice is often defined as the just and equal access to resources, privileges, and social status, and involves the recognition of persistent social inequalities, and that work toward social justice involves ongoing structural social change.  This course examines social justice as idea and process, in historical perspective and around the world, and through the lens of active social justice movements in Chicago today.  We look in particular at the Black Lives Matter movement, struggles against urban gentrification and displacement, and the immigrant rights movement, as case studies offering new internship opportunities.  Course readings and meetings emphasize reflection, debate, and constructive critique, as we pay attention to the intersections of race, class, gender, citizenship, and sexuality, but focus especially on the discourses and practices of race and racism that frame social justice struggles.

Explores current problems in public and environmental health, such as the worldwide burden of major infectious diseases; the emergence of new pathogens, environmental reservoirs of infectious organisms, transport of microorganisms in the environment, and evaluating the combined effects of land use modification, water abstraction, and global climate change on ecosystems. Prerequisite: 361-1 or consent of department

An exploration of a variety of issues that have arisen in medical practice and biological research and development, focusing particularly on the physician/patient relationship through a focus on a series of clinical cases. A central question involves the nature and objectives of medicine, and how the physician engages with that nature and pursues those objectives.

This reading and discussion intensive course will focus on the sociology of medicine in the contemporary international context. How does biomedicine and health care work at the close of the 20th century? What is the nature of the doctor-patient relationship, and what roles do other players--advocacy groups, drug companies, governments, insurance companies--play in the processes of health care? How does biomedicine compare across countries? How do contemporary globalization processes influence the conduct of biomedicine and health care worldwide? The course will cover major concepts in medical sociology: the social shaping of disease, dynamics of the doctor/patient relationship, gender and race issues in medical care, structures of health care and medical institutions, regulation of biomedicine, patient activism, intellectual property issues, and the conduct of biomedical research--using US and international examples. Each broad theme will be explored through empirically rich case studies, from debates about stem cell research to the globalization of AIDS drugs, the birth of biotechnology to the discovery of the "gay gene".