Politics of Healing and Wellbeing

(4 Credits)

In this course, we will explore how anthropologists study health and well-being by attending to connections with politics across varying scales - social, institutional, and governmental. Using ethnographies and public health research, we will examine the ideologies and priorities that form national and transnational health programs; how these forces shape and sometimes produce unintended effects on local delivery of care, with in-depth case studies from Sub-Saharan contexts; how the allocation of care and services can play out unequally, organized by colonial, structural, racial, and ethno-religious lines. Some of the topics we will cover include structural inequality, global health, therapy, politics of health, pandemics, health systems, care, risk, and pandemics.