STS 370
Campus and Community Health in Disruptive Times Fall 2022
Division II Writing Skills Difference, Power, and Equity
Cross-listed WGSS 371 / ANTH 371
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

This class engages with the methods of medical anthropology & medical sociology to help students design and implement ethnographic projects that explore health on campus or our wider community. Along the way we consider how disruptive moments like COVID-19 can reveal underlying social inequalities of healthcare access, health outcomes, and well-being; for which we propose innovative and student-focussed solutions. Students will learn and use design thinking, data visualization, and participatory ethnography while engaging with a variety of qualitative methods such as semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and qualitative surveys. We situate and explore our ethnographic projects within a campus and wider communities that are always already structured by power, privilege, and intersectional identities that shape health and well-being. We explore the field of narrative medicine and medical anthropology by developing and practicing skills in active listening, open dialogue, mindfulness, empathy, and curiosity that can profoundly shape ethnographic as well as the patient/provider encounters. For context, we read ethnographic case studies that explore a variety of topics including how structural racism and implicit bias shape clinical medicine & medical education in the US, how concepts of sexual citizenship can reshape our understanding of campus sexual assault, how the spread of US psychiatry has shaped a global landscape of mental health, and how queer activism responded to the HIV/AIDS crisis in the US. Our goals are to create participatory research projects that both explore and alter our habitual practices and individual ways of seeing the world around us.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 20
Expected: 20
Class#: 1635
Grading: yes pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: Weekly attendance, 3 written fieldnotes (3000 words), weekly writing & fieldwork exercises in class and out of class, a final presentation that includes data visualizations and analysis of research findings.
Prerequisites: A course in Anthropology, Sociology, STS or in DIV II is strongly recommended
Enrollment Preferences: Majors in Anthropology, Sociology, WGSS; Concentrators in PH, STS, ASIA, ENVI
Distributions: Division II Writing Skills Difference, Power, and Equity
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
WGSS 371 Division II ANTH 371 Division II STS 370 Division II
WS Notes: This class assignments includes over 9,000 words of essay assignments, and will help students develop critical writing skills, including use of rhetoric, evidence, argument, synthesizing data, logic, and anticipating counter-arguments.
DPE Notes: This class uses experiential learning to examine the intersectionality of race, class, gender, & sexuality in impacting healthcare and health outcomes. It explores the ways that intersectionality and implicit bias shapes health and well-being in patient/provider encounters as well as ethnographic research. It engages with and critiques efforts to 'improve' community and individual health outcomes in the US and elsewhere across the globe.
Attributes: ENVI Humanities, Arts + Social Science Electives
EXPE Experiential Education Courses
PHLH Methods in Public Health
WGSS Racial Sexual + Cultural Diversity Courses

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