When Africana Studies Meets Public Health

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

What happens when we examine medicine not just as science, but as shaped by the same forces that create interlocking systems of racial dispossession in housing, education, employment, policing, and incarceration? Drawing on accounts from anthropologists, historians, artists, physicians, journalists, philosophers, and epidemiologists, students will learn to use narrative accounts and concepts in Africana Studies and the medical humanities to explore the conditions that create illness and disease. Throughout the semester, our seminar discussions will engage with successful models of community care, grassroots organizations that have developed innovative health practices, and centers led by Black midwives. Central to our investigation is reimagining what medical practice and education might become when approached through a different analytic lens, one that includes the insights of Audre Lorde, Franz Fanon, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, and more. Perhaps in this work of reimagining, we might begin to understand what it takes to build equitable health systems.