Courses and Class Schedules

Interdisciplinary introduction to global and community health. It provides students with the foundational knowledge, vocabulary, and analytical tools to enter global health. It emphasizes the wide-ranging community meanings and contextual conditions shaping health from local to global scales. Co-taught by faculty from the natural sciences and social sciences, the course also introduces students to global and community health, highlighting opportunities for learning that involve collaboration and conversation between natural scientists and social scientists. (Formerly offered as POLI/ANTH/BIOL 89). . (General Education Code(s): SI.)

Takes as its topic the still-unfolding story of COVID-19, its historical precursors, evolving scientific and policy questions, and present global challenges. It invites students from across disciplines to examine the medical, cultural, and public health concepts necessary in a post-pandemic world, and to explore the vital importance of rhetoric, representation, and narrative in the cultural politics of COVID more generally. A project-based, collaborative approach guides hands-on investigations to help students become audiences and advocates for health initiatives worldwide.

We live in a rapidly changing world with the climate crisis and interrelated global crises (“the polycrisis”). Students gain invaluable personal and social resilience skills including mindfulness and collaborative high-impact projects to navigate and build a meaningful future. To help students build transformational resilience, students learn through both educational content as online video lectures and reading, and experiential classroom sessions. (Formerly Psychosocial and Planetary Resilience in the Age of the Climate Crisis.) (Also offered as Computational Media 20. Students cannot receive credit for both courses.)

The WHO estimates that more than 280 million people today are migrants, with more than 30 percent of those forced migrants. Migration is an important social determinant for health, with holistic health shaped by experiences in the country of origin, the migration journey, and reception and integration in the destination country. Course examines the interconnections between migration and health to engage with holistic health issues experienced by the most vulnerable groups of migrants. Examines the underlying contextual factors for forced displacement, including climate change, conflict, political instability, economic insecurity, and persecution. Also explores community and global responses to migrant health and assess strategies for improving health outcomes. . (General Education Code(s): CC.)

Practical, skill-building course that starts from the premise that while all communities value health, different communities develop distinctive understandings of what health means to them and how best to achieve it given their specific environments and economies. Course focuses on health justice from a political economy perspective, analyzing how health is shaped by the interaction of multiple societal forces, including who holds power and what steps marginalized groups have taken to achieve more just distributions of resources. By studying community health, across multiple communities in a variety of locations, students learn how to be effective agents of global health equity. . (Also offered as Community Studies 165. Students cannot receive credit for both courses.)

Students engage topics in health research, including ethics and research design. They learn to describe, identify, and evaluate an array of data collection methods used in global health research including randomized control trials (RCTs), interviews, focus groups, and surveys. By engaging with qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method approaches, students understand, discuss, and use a wide array of methodologies and evaluate “fit” between selected methods and research questions.

Explores how Latinx communities experience and shape their natural and modified environments, and how this intersects with their health conditions, cultural practices, and political activism. Students learn about the health and social impacts of environmental degradation, extractivist policies, and the role that climate change is playing in exacerbating health inequalities among Latinx communities across the United States and Latin America. Students examine the importance of grassroots activism and community engagement in pursuing environmental justice and sustainability. (Also offered as Latin American&Latino Studies 174. Students cannot receive credit for both courses.) (General Education Code(s): PE-E.)

Examines the politics surrounding both global health problems and policy responses. Traces the evolving interrelationships between these problems and policies from colonial health to the impacts of austerity on postcolonial health systems to today’s globally targeted responses. (Formerly POLI 186.)

Students conduct rigorous research on real world health challenges with a view to describing the associated problems accurately and recommending responses. All the work of research and writing is highly collaborative and interdisciplinary. Task Force members are comprised of seniors from both the B.A. and B.S. degrees in GCH. They work closely together under the guidance of the instructor who prepares them to collaborate effectively. The final report always includes writing from all the students in the team. Students are responsible for all of the associated editing, as well as a final presentation of the report to an external evaluator. Prerequisite(s): GCH 1, and satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing and Composition requirements. Enrollment is restricted to seniors majoring in global and community health. (General Education Code(s): PR-E.)

Focuses on enabling students to assess and communicate their learning in global and community health (GCH) using an iterative process of writing, review, and website development. The e-portfolio webpages students complete by the end of the course will together comprise their capstone ”GCH e-Record” designed to communicate their disciplinary and interdisciplinary learning in their degree to a specific audience beyond the university. These written reflections, in turn, involve meta-learning about how expert knowledge moves between different communities, and about how audience expectations and writing conventions condition communications about health expertise in particular. Prerequisite(s): GCH 1, and satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing and Composition requirements. Enrollment is restricted to seniors majoring in global and community health. May be repeated for credit.