This course explores the concept of "profession" in the context of health care work. It examines the role of the state, patriarchy and corporate interests in encouraging medical dominance, and in excluding other healers from the attainment of full professional status. It discusses how inequalities of class, gender and race are played out in health […]
This course explores people’s conceptions of health, their experiences of disease, illness and disease, focusing on North America from the time of contact between Europeans and Aboriginal peoples to the present. The course draws on several disciplines, including history, anthropology and sociology, as well as medicine and allied sciences. However, particular emphasis is placed on […]
This introductory course in arts and medicine will explore the role of comics, graphic novels and memoir within the larger project of narrative medicine and its relationship to healthcare and healing. These visual narratives effectively relate patient experience, as well as that of doctors, nurses and allied healthcare workers, and are uniquely situated to engender […]
Sleep matters to our health, to our social interactions, and to our medical and biological knowledges. This course treats sleep as a Res publica – a "public affair" – by introducing students to the historical and sociopolitical "republics of sleep" and showing how these contemporary republics are built upon a complex set of interactions between […]
This course examines the ways environmental factors intersect with social and economic inequalities to produce significant health disparities, particularly for low-income, racial, and Indigenous communities. Specifically, the course focuses on contemporary themes in the environmental justice literature, namely environmental racism, gender and class disparities associated with climate change and environmental degradation, the politics of toxic […]
This course explores Health Systems from a comparative and international perspective. It analyses health changes, health technology and their impact on health care delivery, medical practice, health care funding and discusses the targets and the challenges for health in a global world. It covers also the health reforms in the public and in private Health […]
This course applies academic knowledge of health, health advocacy, and health care systems to experience in community settings through classroom study and the application of social science research methods in student placements in health-related organizations and agencies. Prerequisites: AP/SOSC 3993 3.00 and AP/SOSC 2110 6.00 or AP/SOSC 2150 9.00, and the completion of 84 credits, […]
This research seminar examines theoretical and applied problems in health and society. It introduces students to a variety of research methods and evaluative skills, which they apply in their own analysis of a particular problem. Prerequisites: the completion of at least 84 credits, including AP/SOSC 2110 6.00 or AP/SOSC 2150 9.00, or written permission of […]
This is a course in critical social science methodology and is designed to improve students' abilities to read and evaluate social research. The major research methods will be studied using exemplary texts and hands on assignments. The methods considered and compared are: quasi-experiments, surveys, ethnography, historical method, case studies, text analysis, and action research. The […]
In this course, students gain a critical understanding of the values and the beliefs that inform how health is conceptualized and experienced, and how these concepts are negotiated and change over time. Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary and disciplinary fields, such as anthropology, sociology, history, gender and sexuality studies, and critical race and disability […]