This semester I am teaching Politics of Health and Theories of the Body. Here are brief descriptions of the courses along with links to the books that I have used or currently use.

Politics of Health, MHS 1920.03

The purpose of this course to develop an understanding of concepts and theories that will help you deconstruct prevailing ideas of “health,” learn about the myriad ways health can be measured, and understand the role of the nation in conceptions of health. To truly learn in this class will require a willingness to have your ideas about health challenged and to consider alternate perspectives on health. Together, we will address the following questions:

• What is health and why do we believe in a particular definition of health?
• Who and what institutions define health and how do they do so?
• How does the definition of health impact people’s day-to-day lives?
• How does what the definition of health change over time?

To help engage in these questions, the semester is organized into four units.

• Unit 1: Laying the Groundwork introduces the foundations of the course: “medicalization,” “pharmceuticalization,” racial formations, whiteness as a capacity, biopower, structural violence, and the history of American healthcare.
• Unit 2: Rethinking Health we learn about how to theorize the body and challenge ourselves to question what health is, drawing on case examples from the present day.
• Unit 3: Citizenship & Nation examines multiple kinds of citizenship (legal, biological, pharmaceutical, therapeutic) and how those help us understand how people receive care for their bodies. In this section, we also address the situation of people who do not have legal status in a nation and need health-care.

Unit 4: Who/What Produces Health?:Individuals? Families? Institutions? examines the history of how medical care has been institutionalized, organized by the law,  and how families are increasingly taking on caregiving roles.

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Theories of the Body, MHS 1950

This course is centered around questioning our taken-for-granted assumptions about the human body and learning to think about the human body in new, creative, and surprising ways. To do that, this course is organized into four sections. In a sense, each section is a “short story” that tells a particular tale about human bodies, focusing on how they are experienced and how they come to be known.

• The first unit, “Learning to use the Body” challenges us to think critically about how we learn to move our bodies in relation to other people, in relation to institutions, and in relation to social ideas about gender, race, and class.
• The second unit, “Learning to Know the Body in Medicine” investigates the history of how we have come to think about the human body as we do in the United States, particularly in medicine, and how surgeons and medical students are taught about the human body. In this section, we also examine how surgery impacts the social lives of people who experience it.
• The third unit, “Learning to Know the Body in Public” examines how the idea of “normal” and “disabled” bodies circulates in public and how bodies in public space has been used as a political strategy.
• The fourth unit, “Learning Sex & Gender” invites us to rethink the commonplace idea (in the United States) that “sex” equals biology and “gender” equals social construction.