This course is not a survey of diseases or the distribution of health and illness around the world. Rather, this course critically interrogates “global health” as a set of historically contingent ideas, systems, and activities carried out across geographic, cultural, and economic difference. We will ask: where, how, and why did paradigmatic global health interventions emerge? What activities have been carried out in the name of health promotion and with what consequences? How have global health actors imagined the people and communities whose health they seek to improve? How do health interventions cultivate subjects and subjectivities, both normative and revolutionary? To answer these questions, we look to histories of empire, colonialism, and globalization; to interactions between citizens, states, civil society, multilateral organizations, and private capital; and to the development ideologies and practices that have shaped global health over the past century. Topics include tropical and missionary medicine; eradication campaigns; sanitation and hygiene; reproduction; family planning; maternal health; infant nutrition; health systems and finance; hospitals and health infrastructures; racialized hierarchies of expertise and labor; primary health care and community-based programs; health education and behavior change communication; international cooperation and bilateral aid; neoliberalism; access to medicine; global health technologies; and partnerships. Readings are drawn from anthropology, social history, sociology, medicine, public health, medical humanities, and science studies.
- المعلم: Anna West
Required culminating seminar, which integrates the three tracks of the Health Studies minor. Students share and critically assess their own and fellow students’ ongoing work to communicate across disciplines and understand the value and interconnectedness of different disciplinary approaches. Students present and defend their semester-long collaborative projects at the end of the course.
Fall 2026 Theme: Lead is a powerful neurotoxin that disproportionately affects children and can have lasting cognitive and behavioral effects. Failures to adequately regulate lead offer a unique window into the politicization of science, debates over the nature of evidence and the locus of responsibility, and the political ecology of health. We will trace the incorporation of lead into industrial processes, the fight to regulate lead in paint and gasoline, ethical and conceptual problems in epidemiological research on lead, and the pathways by which childhood lead poisoning worsens entrenched inequities. We will examine the impact of financialization on public health in Flint, Michigan and the role of citizen science and physician leadership in responses to the city's water crisis. Case studies from the Global South will further locate lead poisoning and mitigation efforts in transnational economic processes.
Fall 2026 Theme: Lead is a powerful neurotoxin that disproportionately affects children and can have lasting cognitive and behavioral effects. Failures to adequately regulate lead offer a unique window into the politicization of science, debates over the nature of evidence and the locus of responsibility, and the political ecology of health. We will trace the incorporation of lead into industrial processes, the fight to regulate lead in paint and gasoline, ethical and conceptual problems in epidemiological research on lead, and the pathways by which childhood lead poisoning worsens entrenched inequities. We will examine the impact of financialization on public health in Flint, Michigan and the role of citizen science and physician leadership in responses to the city's water crisis. Case studies from the Global South will further locate lead poisoning and mitigation efforts in transnational economic processes.
- المعلم: Anna West