My current courses on offer are…
Medical Anthropology (second-year undergraduate course)
What is the relationship between culture and human health? How are diseases perceived, expressed, and palliated across cultural contexts? How do sociopolitical conditions shape, and sometimes sicken, certain bodies? And what kind of a political resource is health, in grassroots struggles against states and corporations? Medical anthropology examines the interplay of social, biological, environmental, and technological processes in some of the most intimate spaces of people’s lives. In this course, students will develop an understanding of the history of medical anthropology, its key themes and theoretical perspectives, and its present concerns and orientations. We will pay particular attention to the intersections of race, gender and class in medical contexts both historical and contemporary.
The Politics of Healing: Critical Medical Anthropology (second-year undergraduate course)
At the intersection of health and politics, we see how some bodies are structurally more susceptible to disease and death, and some lives are treated as mattering less. As we examine conflicts around health and healing, social injury, and life and death, we can trace new practices and relationships of care and activism, addressing contemporary social justice struggles in novel and even radical ways. We will address these topics from a critical medical anthropological lens.
Biosocialities: Health Beyond the Human (graduate seminar)
Biosociality, a term that links the works of Paul Rabinow and Donna Haraway, helps us to explore and interrogate technoscientific and post-humanist efforts to sustain human and planetary life in the contemporary environmental catastrophe of the Anthropocene. Across a range of cultural, political, epidemiological and environmental contexts, we will reckon with challenges to the anthropological foundations of nature/culture and human/nonhuman, and rethink relationships between people, animals, plants, bacteria, rocks and rivers.