Bodies Speaking Out: Critical Studies of Health, Disability, and Community Advocacy

Health and bodies are inseparable from the historical, cultural, economic, racialized, and social conditions in which we live. How have people and communities come to understand and address the complexity of their embodied experiences of health, including individual and collective well-being, sickness, disability, and healing? What social networks, educational resources, and medical practices have communities created to address their concerns? How can we—as students and practitioners of critical health literacy, anthropology, history, and public health—contribute to their ongoing efforts? At the core of these questions lies an ethics of engagement that places us in the role of listeners, collaborators, and facilitators, recasting more conventional relationships between researchers and subjects, adults and youth, health workers and patients, academics and community members.

Fall quarter builds the theoretical and applied foundations of our studies in health, disability, and community advocacy. Through medical anthropology we will emphasize the importance of both cultural competency and structural competency: what health practitioners need to know about how a diversity of peoples understand the body, health, and sickness; and how people experience economic, spatial, and socio-political inequalities, in order to effectively care for them. Through public health, we’ll examine the social determinants of health: how differential access to resources, agency, and institutional power drive economic, racialized, and other health disparities.
Critical disability studies will consider histories of medicalization, stigma, and activism, including ongoing networks of care and mutual aid people with disabilities have established to build community and address needs in the face of institutional limits and discrimination. In this time of social and ecological turbulence, our examination of community resilience and critical hope will provide gateways to explore elements that inspire and sustain resilient transformation, and their connections to action and activism.

Winter quarter will emphasize more intensive scholarship in critical health studies, applied research, and community-based work. For the advanced seminar in medical anthropology, we will read and write about contemporary ethnographies on health disparities and advocacy, developing a grounded, detailed understanding of how peoples’ lives are enmeshed in cultural, social, economic, and political realities. Close, focused consideration of individual illness stories will be central to our work in narrative medicine, furthering our understanding of how people’s experiences are centered culturally, socially, and historically. Drawing on this work, in our studies of applied anthropology, we will research the complexities of local experiences of sickness, health, and disability and consider engaging in forms of advocacy, intervention, and activism.

This program is coordinated with Greener Foundations for first-year students. Greener Foundations is Evergreen’s in-person 2-quarter introductory student success course sequence, which provides first-year students with the skills and knowledge they need to thrive at Evergreen. Students expected to take Greener Foundations should use CRN 10187 to register for a 2-credit Greener Foundations course in addition to this program for 14-credit. 

First-year students who are not expected to take Greener Foundations or have been granted an exemption should use CRN 10186 to register for this program at 16-credits. Find more details about who isn't expected to take Greener Foundations on the Greener Foundations website.

Fall Anticipated Credit Equivalencies
4 - Medical Anthropology
4 - Introduction to Public Health
4 - Critical Disability Studies
2 - Community Resilience Studies
2 - Research and Internship Cornerstone (for students not in Greener Foundations)

Winter Anticipated Credit Equivalencies
4 - Applied Anthropology
4 - Advanced Seminar in Medical Anthropology
4 - Narrative Medicine
2 - Community Based Learning and Action (4 credits for students not in Greener Foundations)