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, disability studies, 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.

Winter quarter, the program will focus on epidemiology, the history of infectious disease, and political advocacy with the aim of developing a complex understanding of health disparities and public health solutions. We will learn basic epidemiologic tools that allow us to quantify disease and answer questions of causation of disease states. Historical cases may include considerations of neolithic health and disease, plague in Europe, colonialism and tropical infections, and the contemporary emergence of global pandemics. Through studies of applied anthropology, we will consider the structural conditions of migrant farm labor in Washington State and other local experiences of sickness, health, and disability. In addition, students will contribute to several ongoing accessibility and advocacy projects on the Evergreen Campus.

Fall Anticipated Credit Equivalencies
4 - Medical Anthropology
4 - Public Health
4 - Critical Disability Studies
2 - Social Science Research

Winter Anticipated Credit Equivalencies
4 - Epidemiology

4 - History of Infectious Disease

4 - Applied Anthropology

4 - Health Advocacy