Decolonizing the Body

4 credits

This course introduces students to the anthropology of the body through a decolonial lens. Grounding our work in sociocultural and medical anthropological theory, we take the racialized, colonized, and militarized body as a key site of analysis—one where biomedical, colonial, and state power converge and where refusal, repair, and alternative ways of knowing the body also take shape. We ask how colonialism and its afterlives have organized what counts as a body, a person, an illness, or a cure, and how communities have contested and reimagined these categories from within and against imperial medicine. The course is designed for students interested in medicine, global and public health, and medical anthropology.