Health Humanities Courses Offered Spring 2018

English

ENGL 71H: First-Year Seminar: Doctors and Patients
Jane Thrailkill | MWF 9:05-9:55am
*This course counts towards the LMC minor

When the medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman writes that illness has meaning, he reminds us that the human experience of being sick involves more than just an ailing body. In this course we will analyze a diverse collection of writers who have taken as their topic the human struggle to make sense of suffering and debility. The course is divided into five units that will allow us to explore the personal, ethical, cultural, spiritual, and political facets of illness. Central texts will include Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Alan Shapiro’s Vigil, and Damon Tweedy’s Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor’s Reflections on Race and Medicine. Additional authors will include Rita Charon, Atul Gawande, Paul Kalanithi, Audre Lorde, Rebecca Skloot and Susan Sontag. Students will post to a discussion forum, write short essays, and create a final project that researches an illness or disability. Reading, Writing, and Discussion heavy!

ENGL 264/ANTH 272: Healing in Ethnography and Literature

Jane Thrailkill & Michele Rivkin-Fish | MWF 1:25-2:15pm
*This course counts towards the LMC minor

This course brings together literary and ethnographic methods to explore narratives of illness, suffering, and healing, and medicine’s roles in these processes. Themes include illness narratives, outbreak narratives, collective memory and healing from social trauma, and healers’ memoirs.

ENGL 295H: Frankenstein @ 200

Jeane Moskal | TR 2:00-3:15pm

“You are my creator, but I am your master. Obey!” This ultimatum to scientist Victor Frankenstein from his unnamed Creature has chilled readers, audiences, and trick-or-treaters since Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818. Members of this undergraduate research seminar will scrutinize her novel for insights into its 200-year reign in the Western imagination. Enlisting approaches from museum studies and book history, and in consultation with UNC librarians, we will choose which of the novel’s themes to highlight, select pertinent materials from our Rare Book Collection, study their contexts, compose exhibit labels, and display our final discoveries for the university, friends, family, and the public.

ENGL 695: Research Seminar: Aging and Mental Health
Jordynn Jack | Th 2:00-4:45pm

In this course, students will develop research methods including ethnography, archival research, and oral history. We will begin by focusing on the topic of aging. Students will participate in Interprofessional Education (IPE) activities as ethnographers, observing how faculty and students from various health disciplines at UNC approach problems related to aging. In this part of the course, we will study ethnographic methods as well as various disciplinary approaches to aging (from Occupational Health, medicine, anthropology, etc.). Students will then produce an ethnographic report based on this experience. stories. In the second part of the course, we will turn to the topic of mental health. Students will participate in a public health humanities project to develop public materials for the site of the Dorothea Dix Hospital, Carolina’s first public mental institution, which is now being re-envisioned as a public park in Raleigh. Students will conduct archival research in order to contextualize the history of the site, to study mental health treatment in the 1850s and onward, and to develop case histories of individual patients whose names are available from Dix Hospital ledgers. This research will lead to online content for a public exhibit. Finally, we will practice oral history methods (which will be used later in the Dix project) by interviewing older adults about their experiences with a health topic or issue. 

Anthropology

ANTH 147: Comparative Healing Systems
Peter Redfield | TuTh 2:00-3:15pm
*This course counts towards the LMC minor

In this course we compare a variety of healing beliefs and practices so that students may gain a better understanding of their own society, culture, and medical system.

ANTH 272/ENGL 264: Healing in Ethnography and Literature
Jane Thrailkill & Michele Rivkin-Fish | MWF 1:25-2:15pm
*This course counts towards the LMC minor

This course brings together literary and ethnographic methods to explore narratives of illness, suffering, and healing, and medicine’s roles in these processes. Themes include illness narratives, outbreak narratives, collective memory and healing from social trauma, and healers’ memoirs.

ANTH 319: Global Health
Amanda Thompson | MW 10:10-11:00am
*This course counts towards the LMC minor

This class explores some of the historical, biological, economic, medical, and social issues surrounding globalization and health consequences

ANTH 442: Health and Gender After Socialism
Michele Rivkin-Fish | MWF 9:05-9:55am
*This course counts towards the LMC minor

This course examines postsocialist experiences of the relationship between political, economic, social, and cultural transitions, and challenges in public health and gender relations.

ANTH 445: Migration and Health
Jocelyn Chua | TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

This course examines the intersections between migration processes and the political, economic, and social dimensions of health and well-being among migrants, their families, and their communities.

ANTH 446: Poverty, Inequality, and Health
Mark Sorenson | MWF 11:15-12:05pm

This course examines poverty, inequalities, and health from a global and historical perspective. We will study the role of sociopolitical context, individual behavior, and human biology, and will pay particular attention to the roles of psychosocial stress, material conditions, and policy in shaping health differences within and between populations.

ANTH 470: Medicine and Anthropology
Martha King | TuTh 9:30-10:45am
*This course counts towards the LMC minor

This course examines cultural understandings of health, illness, and medical systems from an anthropological perspective with a special focus on Western medicine.

ANTH 538: Disease and Discrimination in Colonial Atlantic America
Dale Hutchinson | TuTh 9:30-10:45am

Colonization of Atlantic America between 1500 and 1900, through landscape change, agriculture, poverty, labor discrimination, and slavery differentially placed subsets of the general population at risk for infectious disease and other insults to their health. Lecture and discussion using archaeological and bioarchaeological studies, modern disease studies, and historic documents.

ANTH 585: Anthropology of Science
Martha King | TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

Cultural perspectives on science and technology at a global scale, including research settings and social contexts, knowledge claims and material practice, and relations between scientific worldviews, social institutions, and popular imagination.

ANTH 623: Human Disease Ecology
Mark Sorenson | W 12:20-2:50pm

This seminar considers cultural ecologies of disease by examining how social, cultural, and historical factors shape disease patterns. We examine how ecosystems are shaped by disease, how disease shapes ecosystems, and how cultural processes (e.g., population movements, transportation, economic shifts, landscape modifications, and built environments) contribute to emerging infectious disease.

Geography

GEOG 541: GIS in Public Health
Paul Delamter | MWF 9:05-9:55am

Explores theory and application of geographic information systems (GIS) for public health. The course includes an overview of the principles of GIS in public health and practical experience in its use. (GISci)

History

HIST 329H: An Introduction to the History of Medicine
Raul Necochea | TR 9:30-10:45am
*This course counts towards the LMC minor

This course underscores the ways in which Western medicine has become a global political and cultural phenomenon in history, and discusses evidence of how different social actors have parsed the distinction between sickness and health over time.

Media & Journalism

MEJO 560: Environmental and Science Journalism
Thomas Linden | MW 9:30-10:45am
*This course counts towards the LMC minor

Prepare students to work as environmental and science journalists. The course emphasizes writing skills in all delivery formats and interpreting environmental, science, and medical information for consumers.

Philosophy

PHIL 150: Philosophy of Science
Daniel Kokotajlo | MWF 9:05-9:55am

What is distinctive about the kind of knowledge called “science”? What is scientific explanation? How are scientific theories related to empirical evidence? Honors version available

PHIL 165: Bioethics
Christopher Blake-Turner | TuTh 8:00-9:15am
Eric Sampson | MWF 10:10-11:00am

An examination of ethical issues in the life sciences and technologies, medicine, public health, and/or human interaction with nonhuman animals or the living environment.

Public Policy

PLCY 565: Global Health Policy
Benjamin Meier | TuTh 11:00-12:15pm
*This course counts towards the LMC minor

Coursework will focus on public policy approaches to global health, employing interdisciplinary methodologies to understand selected public health policies, programs, and interventions. For students who have a basic understanding of public health.

Religion

REL 368H.001: Race, Sexuality, and Disability in the History of Western Christianity
Jessica Boon | TR 2:00-3:15pm

Over time, Christian institutions and traditions have helped constitute contemporary narratives of race, sexuality, and disability in society. This course examines shifting definitions and specific case studies from the premodern area through to contemporary discourses and polemics in America.

Sociology

SOCI 422: Sociology of Health and Mental Illness
Moira Johnson | MWF 8:00-8:50am
*This course counts towards the LMC minor

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 469: Health and Society
Liana Richardson | MWF 11:15-12:05pm

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.