Spring 2025 Course Offerings

Instructor: Sari Altschuler

CRN: 40124

Days, Time: MW 2:30-4:30PM

Description:

Introduces the challenges posed by the data-heavy medicine of the future to privacy, the appropriate collection of medical data, and the ways that patients and healthcare workers alike think about health. Offers students an opportunity to learn how to use critical and ethical theories, analyze health narratives, and use historical and contemporary data about health disparities to forecast how new technologies might pose social and cultural challenges. Takes a humanities perspective to critically evaluate social and cultural aspects of a healthcare system shaped by emerging technologies and the data they produce.

Instructor: Laurie Edwards

CRN: 39560

Days, Time: WF 11:45AM-1:25PM

Description:

Explores how creative writing can be used as a healing tool. Offers students opportunities to analyze, theorize, and create healing narratives through readings, in-class writing activities, writing workshops, and process journals. Culminates in the creation and revision of written personal narratives as well as a digital storytelling project.

Instructor: Sari Altschuler

CRN: 395563

Days, Time: MR 11:45AM-1:25PM

Description:

Presents the history of public health through firsthand experience working with archival materials. Emphasizes the stories told about public health crises in the past: how individuals experienced crisis; how communities encountered, managed, and responded to the crisis; and what stories public health institutions produced to narrate their own efforts and shape individual behaviors. Offers students an opportunity to gain experience in gathering and analyzing historical narratives and forms of data.

Instructor: six sections

CRN: six sections

Description:

Introduces ethical theories and moral principles, and then uses these theories and principles to analyze the moral problems that arise in the medical context. Topics include euthanasia, medical paternalism, informed consent, patient confidentiality, the right to die, the ethics of medical research, abortion, the right to healthcare, distribution of scarce medical resources, and the ethical implications of health maintenance organizations.

Cross-listed with WMNS and HIST

Instructor: Elizabeth Bucar

CRN: 39535

Days, Time: WF 11:45AM-1:25PM

Description:

Explores approaches to gender, social organization of sexuality and gender, sexual ethics, and marriage in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Explores various sources within each tradition that serve as normative foundations, contemporary cultural and sociological dynamics that challenge those foundations, and psychological/existential considerations for understanding the general nature of human sexuality. Addresses how these traditions understand gender and gender roles, seek to shape and control interactions between men and women, regulate sexual relations outside of and within marriage, view sexuality education, regard homosexuality, and examine historical and contemporary approaches to marriage, divorce, and parenting.

Cross-listed with WMNS 

Instructor:  Margot Abels

CRN: 39538

Days, Time: TF 9:50-11:30AM

Description:

Introduces the social, legal, and economic barriers to accessing reproductive healthcare domestically and internationally. Draws on various theoretical and analytic tools including critical race theory, critical legal theory, sociology of science, human rights, feminist theory, and a range of public health methods. Access to reproductive health services, including abortion, is one of the most contested political, social, cultural, and religious issues today. Covers domestic, regional, and international legal and regulatory frameworks on sexual reproductive health.