HES9280 – Medical Anthropology: Current themes and theories
Course description
Schedule, syllabus and examination date
Course content
This course focuses on anthropological perspectives on health, illness, bodies and medicine. It presents current ethnographic research on the interactions between biology, culture, society, and environments. Working with cases from across the world, we aim to place health-related issues within contemporary debates in the field of medical anthropology.
The course will proceed through ethnographic case studies and theoretical interventions to provide critical and comparative perspectives on emerging themes in biomedicine and other medical traditions as they grapple with key challenges of our times. You will closely engage with one book-length ethnography during the course. Each year the course will focus on a selection of the following themes:
- Biomedicine, culture and ethnography
- Gender and sexuality
- Body, mind, embodiment
- Health and/as ecology
- Health, pollution and toxicity
- Health systems, infrastructures and governance
- Health Interventions, epidemic control and medical humanitarianism
- Health and climate crisis
- Medicines, drugs and drug use
- Plural medical landscapes
- Biopolitics, postcolonialism and care
- Biotechnologies and emergent futures of life
- Health, neoliberalism and capitalism
Learning outcome
Knowledge
This course will provide you with knowledge about:
- theoretical debates on health, illness, bodies, and medicine
- current ethnographic research on the interactions between biology, culture, society, and environments
- the impact of structural and socio-economic inequalities on bodily and mental wellbeing, the pursuit of health, and access to treatment
- the globalization of biomedicine as science and practice and the emergence of medical pluralism
- global health and postcolonial medicine
- ethnographic methodology and how it can be used in health research
- key theoretical and analytical concepts such as embodiment, structural violence, biopower, biosociality, care, ontological multiplicity, more-than-human health, material semiotics, decoloniality
Skills
This course will give you the skills to:
- understand and reflect on current theoretical positions in medical anthropology
- engage with health, illness, bodies and medicine in a cross-cultural perspective
- situate health and medicine in the contexts of globalization, environmental changes and ecological crisis
- critically read and review ethnographic writing
- engage with biomedicine as cultural and social institution
- discuss complex ethical and theoretical issues at the interface of biology, culture, society, and environments
General competence
This course will provide you with general competence to:
- situate your own research in the landscape of current social science debates
- improve academic writing
- raise critical questions to concepts included in your research
Admission
- PhD candidates and students on the Medical Student Research Programme at UiO will get first priority admission to the course.
- The principle of the first come, first served applies if there are more applicants than seats.
- Maximum number of participants is 10.
- Applicants who are admitted to a PhD programme or the Medical Student Research Programme at UiO apply for PhD courses in medicine and health sciences in StudentWeb
- Applicants who are not admitted to a PhD programme or the Medical Student Research Programme at UiO must apply for a right to study in S?knadsWeb before they can apply for PhD courses in medicine and health sciences. External applicants should apply for a right to study 3 weeks before the course application deadline.
- Important: In autumn 2023 this course will be held at the Finse Alpine Research Center. In addition to apply for the course in Studentweb, you need to fill in this form confirming that you will be able to attend the course at Finse from Monday to Friday. Accommodation and food will be covered by the university. However, you need to book the travel and cover the travel costs to Finse stasjon by yourself.
- Studentweb and form (nettskjema) opens for application on June 1st. Deadline for application is on August 1st.
- Applicants will be notified by email 1 - 2 weeks after the final date for registration.
Overlapping courses
5 credits overlap with MEDFL5280 – Medical Anthropology: Current themes and theories
Teaching
Lectures followed by group work, including group assignments.
You have to participate in at least 80 % of the teaching to be allowed to take the exam. Attendance at lectures will be registered.
Examination
The course participants will be evaluated as pass/fail, based on one written assignment during the class, active participation during seminars, oral presentation of an ethnography, and a take home essay after the course, to be submitted two weeks after course completion..