Course Schedule and Catalog

Long Title: ILLNESS NARRATIVES: RE-WRITING HEALTH INEQUALITIES

Department: Anthropology

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Language of Instruction: Taught in English

Course Type: Lecture

Distribution Group: Distribution Group II

Credit Hours: 3

Description: This course will examine how narratives become a powerful tool for evaluating the social, political, economic, historical, and environmental conditions that shape our understanding of illness. By focusing on the gap between biomedical diagnosis and lived experience, the course will explore how larger social meanings (from colonialism, racism, sexism, ableism, and class) become embodied by patients, and the intimate and structural dynamics that shape the possibilities of care. However, by drawing on different narrative forms — from memoir, fiction writing, film, and poetry, in addition to ethnography — the course will enable students to experiment with narrative forms to reass whether and how the body becomes the source of sickness. By considering the relationship between narrative form and the metaphors of illness it enables, students will develop their own illness narrative projects to reimagine and re-write our understanding of health inequalities today.