Social Hierarchies and Health: Race, Ethnicity, Tribal Affiliation and Caste

3 credits · School of Public Policy

This course utilizes transnational comparisons to examine health inequities by socially constructed categories of human distinction, stratified hierarchies of differential human valuation and institutionalized social bias. The course opens by examining US specific racial and SES health disadvantage. It then addresses health inequity for a diverse range of international social systems. A central thesis of the course holds that health inequity is a manifestation of physically embodied stress from differences in lived experience that impact health beyond the effects of SES, individual behavior, health insurance, and medical care.