PLAGUES AND PEOPLE

Credit Hours: 3 · Undergraduate Lower-Level

This course examines the pandemics as a cultural phenomenon. Designed with the sociology questions on the MCATs in mind, this course focuses what epidemics reveal about how people understand risk and experience inequalities in different societies. To talk about pandemics is to talk about many other things: the cultural understandings of social solidarity, family obligations, the common good, risk, responsibility, authority, and the enforcement of new social norms. In this course, we will learn about how anthropologists, sociologists, and historians have looked at pandemics in different places and times, as a backdrop for a focus on the Covid-19 pandemic.