Spring 2016 Course Offerings
Below is a tentative list of Spring 2016 courses at UNC Chapel Hill relating to the heath humanities and to the English M.A. concentration in Literature, Medicine and Culture. More courses will be added to the semester during registration season; please check back for updates.
As with every course available on our general catalog, enrollment may be limited and permission of the instructor may be required. Candidates are encouraged to contact instructors at their earliest opportunity to learn about these courses and obtain permission to register.
| Course | Title | Instructor(s) | Days and Time | Location | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ANTH 750 | Graduate Seminar in Medical Anthropology | Jocelyn Chua | TBA | TBA | This graduate seminar serves as an advanced introduction to sociocultural approaches to the sub-discipline of medical anthropology. Through the careful scrutiny of selected, acclaimed monographs and articles, we will explore major theoretical concerns taken up by medical anthropologists to make sense of and account for health, disease, and treatment in diverse settings. Rather than setting out sections on theory, methods, and substantive topics, this course is organized around several of the most important analytical frames that have shaped and continue to shape medical anthropology. We consider these analytical frames as they have developed alongside the emergent realities of contemporary life that medical anthropologists endeavor to make sense of: new biotechnologies, expanding markets, new epidemics, and changing forms of subjectivity in our globalizing world. We will be concerned throughout this course with the linkages among approaches, and the dialogues, debates, collaborations, and divergences that have developed interactively in light of and in response to the others. The course seeks to plunge us into the life of a discipline, into the medley of discussions, trajectories, and the choreography of interactions that together comprise theory and practice in sociocultural approaches to medical anthropology. |
| COMM 850 | Technology, Culture, and Power | Torin Monahan | Monday: 5:45 – 8:35pm | TBA | This graduate seminar will serve as an advanced introduction to critical studies of modern technological systems. Drawing upon the fields of communication studies, science and technology studies, geography, anthropology, and gender studies, seminar participants will investigate the role of technologies in shaping social worlds and producing political orders. Attention will be given to the social construction of technological systems, the politics of mediation and resistance, and the encodings of power relationships within particular cultural contexts. Possible areas of inquiry include reproductive technologies, social media, environmental imaging, ubiquitous computing, surveillance, and universal design. Seminar participants will be expected to conduct close readings of theoretical texts and work to connect those texts to their own research projects. |
| ENGL 447 | Memory and Literature | Minrose Gwin | TuTh 12:30PM-1:45PM | Greenlaw RM 0302 | This course brings together theories of collective and individual memory with questions of aesthetics and narrative while exploring global connections between memory and literature. |
| ENGL 611 | Narrative, Literature and Medicine | Danielewicz | MoWe 2:30PM - 3:45PM | Murphey Rm 0202 | Sociologist Arthur Frank asserts that "whether ill people want to tell stories or not, illness calls for stories." This seminar explores narrative approaches to suffering, healing, and medicine's roles in these processes. Students learn literary and anthropological approaches to examine medically themed works from a range of genres. |
| ENGL 690 | Health and Humanities | Thrailkill/Jack | TBA | TBA | This course is an experiment in health and humanities teaching and research. In this course, you will become a researcher in the HHIVE Laboratory – a new interdisciplinary laboratory that is currently beginning two research studies. Our initial inquiries focus on Aging and Diabetes, but you are welcome to explore other topics that interest you. You will learn to generate a research question, locate and apply for sources of funding, and implement a research study. Together, we will develop core skills for health and humanities researchers, such as submitting an IRB application, developing a study protocol, recruiting participants, and obtaining informed consent. |
| HNRS 650 | Medicine & the Humanities | Staff | TBA | TBA | TBA |
| SOCI 422 | Sociological of Health and Mental Illness | Robert Hummer/Courtney Boen | Various times | TBA | Course examines uniqueness of the sociological perspective in understanding mental health and illness. It draws upon various fields to explain mental illness in as broad a social context as possible. Attention focuses on how social factors influence definitions and perceptions of illness. |
| SOCI 429 | Health and Society | Richardson | TuTh 9:30AM-10:45AM | Phillips RM 0206 | The primary objective of the course is to explain how and why particular social arrangements affect the types and distribution of diseases, as well as the types of health promotion and disease prevention practices that societies promote. |
| JOMC 561 | Medical and Science Video Storytelling | Tom Linden | M 2:20-5:05 | TBA | The course will teach skills to shoot, edit and report video stories for broadcast on the student-produced television news program, Carolina Week. Students will work in teams to prepare medical/science/environmental reports for the weekly student newscast. By the end of the course you'll be skilled in all aspects of television reporting, both in front of and behind the camera. There are no prerequisites for this course |