Performance and Healing: The Politics of Health Representation

3 units

The purpose of this course is to bridge the disciplines of medical anthropology, global public health, and medical humanities through deep consideration of how variegated knowledge about health, healing, and illness is produced and performed in a variety of public forums. Students will explore the ways in which knowledge is produced about particular global health topics through representation in text, image, sound, film/television, and live performance art. Using interdisciplinary theory and methods, this course answers the following questions: why are these representation modalities important, and how do we analyze them in practice? Drawing on the fields of medical anthropology, media studies, global public health, and performance studies, this course elucidates the relationships between knowledge production, representation, discourse, health, and power through three case studies. Case study topics include: HIV/AIDS, Heroin Injection Use, and Domestic and Sexual Violence. Although the course provides an interdisciplinary perspective for understanding and analyzing different ways of representing illness and healing, it is also deeply grounded within the political-economy of health framework of critical medical anthropology. The following topics will be central to our analyses in this class: gender, sexuality, the body, class, ethnicity, and language.