Indigenous communities deal with alarming rates of health problems, such as diabetes, compared to non-Indigenous populations, but many of these health issues have proven resistant to conventional biomedical treatments. At the same time, Indigenous cultures across the globe possess understandings of health and healing that differ greatly from dominant Western biomedical views. Indigenous knowledge and […]
Crosslisted: AP/SOSC 3920 This course examines disability as a social identity and as a social construct, exploring how and why experiences and conceptualizations of disability vary historically and trans-culturally, and the intersectionality of disability with “other” categories of social analysis, such as class, gender, race, and sexual orientation/identity. Drawing on the insights and the theoretical […]
This course explores the relationship between work, labour, global markets and health. It draws on political economy, feminist theory and other critical theoretical perspectives to consider how ideas about value, productive, and reproductive work interface with power, economy, society, and health in people’s everyday working lives. The course examines how work environments create conditions that […]
In this course we will examine environmental health from a social science perspective. Our focus will be the sources of conflicts between health professionals, lay people policy makers and others over how environments cause diseases. We will pay particular attention to uncertain knowledge and how this creates problems for stakeholders both in defining the problem, […]
This course examines the interdisciplinary complexity of what constitutes our definition of the “healthy” child. Students examine cross-cultural definitions of “childhood,” and learn that to be “healthy” entails more than a mere absence of disease. Critical inquiry demonstrates that geography, economics, politics, food security, social capital, sexuality, gender, mental health, homelessness, disability and media all […]
This course takes an intersectional approach to examining health. Intersections and interactions of race with other social, political and economic factors such as gender, class and ability are studied as the major determinants of the health of racialized groups, especially racialized women, in Canada and the USA.
Drug production and drug use often bring conflicts between those who enjoy or profit from them and those who deplore their effects. This course examines the forces behind these conflicts, their influence on public policies and some of their social consequences. Public policies regarding drugs have been strangely inconsistent. Some drugs (tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceuticals) are […]
Health is much more than the absence of disease. Health does not lie in the operating room of hospitals or in the laboratories of pharmaceutical companies. Health is the basis for development, but development is, at the same time, the basis for health. This course discusses the burden of diseases in the Third World, health […]
This course will focus on ‘the patient’ – both as a social construction and as an active agent. In the first section of the course, we will consider the ways in which patients are constructed and understood by those who have power over their lives. To do this we will look at the creation of […]
Our ideas about life, death, illness, health, as well as our own identities and experiences, are defined and expressed through stories. Story and storytelling have also been utilized by various groups as a medium through which to educate, persuade, and change people’s health-related ideas and behaviours. Stories matter a great deal: they have the potential […]