MEDFL5280 – Medical Anthropology: Current themes and theories
Course description
Schedule, syllabus and examination date
Course content
Course content
This course focusses 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
The course is restricted to students at the Medical Student Research Programme at the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Dentistry, UiO.
Students apply in StudentWeb.
The courses MEDFL5280 and HES9280 – Medical Anthropology: Current themes and theories have common admission.
Prerequisites
Formal prerequisite knowledge
No obligatory prerequisites beyond the minimum requirements for entrance to higher education in Norway.
Overlapping courses
5 credits overlap with HES9280 – 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.
Language of examination
You may write your examination paper in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish or English.
Explanations and appeals
Withdrawal from an examination
It is possible to take the exam up to 3 times. If you withdraw from the exam after the deadline or during the exam, this will be counted as an examination attempt.
Special examination arrangements
Application form, deadline and requirements for special examination arrangements.