Sociology of Health/Illness

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course will provide an introduction to central topics in the sociology of health and illness. While the social is often thought to be at odds with the biological, the sociology of health and illness inevitably has to grapple with the relationship between the two. As a subdiscipline it is a broad field, the boundaries of which have proven difficult to define, but that reaches across an expansive range of disciplines relating to medicine and health. In this course, we will aim to understand how sociologists approach research in the areas of health and illness, while also exploring how sociology interacts with the variety of disciplines that cover these same topics such as science and technology studies, social epidemiology, medicine, public health, demography, health psychology, medical anthropology, and bioethics, as well as sociology of the body/knowledge.