Course Schedule and Catalog

Department: Anthropology

Meeting: 1:00PM - 3:30PM R (26-AUG-2024 - 6-DEC-2024) 

Part of Term: Full Term

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Lecture

Language of Instruction: Taught in English

Distribution Group: Distribution Group II

Method of Instruction: Face to Face

Credit Hours: 3

 

Section Max Enrollment: 20

Section Enrolled: 18

Waitlisted: 0 (Max 99) 

Current members of the waitlist have priority for available seats.

Enrollment data as of: 2-MAY-2024 11:50AM

 

 

Final Exam: No Final Exam

 

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.