Diagnosis/Med Pwr/Glbl Prspctv

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course examines the social and political dimensions of medical diagnoses. We will investigate how diseases like AIDS, malaria, cancer, and schizophrenia are defined, imagined, and distributed across an uneven global landscape. Reading anthropologists, historians, and literary works on places ranging from contemporary Botswana to late imperial China, we will explore how diagnoses both reveal and impose forms of power in the body. Course material will cover a range of issues with respect to politics and medicine in a global setting and expand students’ conceptual toolbox in the social sciences.