- Spring 2022
Syllabus Description:
English 198 is a writing workshop linked to Global Health 101 (which is also listed in Geography and International Studies). In it, we will use the topics introduced in GH 101 to structure writing assignments that will allow students to explore the social side of the biosocial in further depth. It will complement GH 101, allowing students further space to explore the course texts, recommended readings, and texts selected by me. We will consider the power of narrative in the context of health. We will also examine some of the philosophical underpinnings of global health. Our investigations will take place against the backdrop of our times--the ongoing global pandemic will be a topic for discussion and consideration!
As Paul Farmer explains in the introduction of Reimagining Global Health:
Combining anthropology, sociology, history, political economy, and other "resocializing disciplines" with fields like epidemiology, demography, clinical practice, molecular biology, and economics allows us to build a coherent new field that might better be termed "global health equity." It is this multidisciplinary approach, which leads us from the large-scale to the local and from the social to the molecular, that permits us to take a properly biosocial approach to what are, without exception, biosocial problems. Such is the central thesis of this book. (xiv)
English 198 gives you a chance to engage the interdisciplinary nature of global health through writing. The process outlined in the quote from the textbook illustrates how important writing skills will be to global health practitioners. You may know that a problem is local, but how will you interpret it as part of the large scale? How can you clearly bridge the social and the molecular? These and other questions will structure our course from a humanities perspective, giving students further chances to examine biosocial global health equity.