Medical Anthropology in the Anthropocene

1 Course Unit

Ongoing climate crises, militarization, racial injustice, and mass migration have torn apart social fabrics and have further exposed the unequal structures of power that have defined health, how it is realized, and for whom. The massive human toll of COVID-19 and demands for reparations from communities around the world confront health institutions and expose their colonial, scientific, and epistemic underpinnings. From colonial histories of medicine to movements to decolonize global and planetary health, this seminar charts how anthropological and trans- disciplinary forms of research can help shift knowledge claims about injury and vulnerability away from hegemonic centers to frontline communities. This shift implies tracking the lived aspects of health both in and beyond clinical spaces and into multiple environments (from low- wage work to toxic exposures and militarized zones) that perpetuate human/nonhuman vulnerabilities and unequal exposures to disease. As we consider multi-faceted efforts (including traditions of mutual aid and care, de-occupation and, more recently, abolition medicine) to reverse such trends, we probe innovations, forms of resistance, and ethical and political potentials unleashed by diverse justice struggles, and through which diverse planetary futures are imagined and realized. Not Offered Every Year 1 Course Unit