STS 370
Campus and Community Health in Disruptive Times Spring 2024
Division II Writing Skills Difference, Power, and Equity
Cross-listed WGSS 371 / ANTH 371
This is not the current course catalog

We study and seek “campuses where students feel enabled to develop their life projects, building a sense of self-efficacy and respecting others, in community spaces that work to diminish rather than augment power asymmetries.” —Sexual Citizens (Hirsch and Khan, 2020). Students will design and pursue innovative ethnographic projects that explore campus or community health. We will learn ethnographic techniques such as observant participation, interviewing, focus groups, qualitative surveys, as well as design thinking and data visualization skills. We use and critique the methods of medical anthropology and medical sociology in order to hone our skills in participatory research. Every week, we collaborate with and share our research with our participants and peers both inside and outside class through a variety of innovative exercises. We attend to the parallel roles of narrative and listening in both medicine and ethnography, as we contrast the discourse of providers & patients along with researchers & participants. We aim to understand the strengths and limits of ethnographic inquiry while privileging marginalized voices and attending to power and identity within our participatory research framework. We recognize that our campus health projects are always already shaped by power and privilege, as we examine the ways that daily life, individual practices, and collective institutions shape health on and off campus. Our ethnographic case studies explore how systemic inequalities of wealth, race, gender, sex, ethnicity, and citizenship shape landscapes of pediatric care, mental health, maternity care, and campus sexual assault in the US and elsewhere. We consider how lived practices shape health access & outcomes as well as well-being in our communities and on our campus.