81951 - Global Health and Suffering (1) (LM)

Learning outcomes

Students will develop a critical understanding of global health policy as a historical, political and moral assemblage to deal with the consequences of global inequalities. They will also gain an appreciation of illness and suffering as the personal embodiment of broader social processes within local moral worlds embedded in historically deep and geographically broad social dynamics.

Course contents

LECTURES WILL BEGIN ON MARCH THE 14TH 2018 WITH THE FOLLOWING TIMETABLE:

WEDNESDAY: 13-15

THURSDAY: 9-11

FRIDAY: 9-11

LECTURES WILL BE IN: AULA SEMINARI 2, PIAZZA SAN GIOVANNI IN MONTE, 2.

 

Some of the key questions considered in this course are:

• What do we mean by suffering and how concepts of ill/health vary in different societies?
• How can we look at the body as a bio-historical product?
• In what sense personal experience of distress can be viewed as the embodiment of broader social processes?
• How such a distress is interpreted and dealt with in institutional (medical) settings?
• What are the cultural dimensions inscribed in our medical categories?
• What can anthropological analysis teach us about the determinants and personal significance of health and illness?
• What are the the scientific and political consequences of such analyses?
• How can we use such analyses in rethinking suffering, health and their care?

Readings/Bibliography

Students not attending lectures will have to choose two volumes, one from each of the the following lists.

List 1

Adams Vincanne (ed.), 2016, Metrics: What Counts in Global Health, Duke University Press Books

Biehl João and Adriana Petryna (eds), 2013, When People Come First: Critical Studies in Global Health. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Farmer Paul, Arthur Kleinman, Jim Kim, Matthew Basilico (eds.) 2013, Reimagining Global Health: An Introduction. Berkeley, University of California Press.

Lock Margaret and Vinh-Kim Nguyen, 2010, An Anthropology of Biomedicine, Wiley-Blackwell

Nichter Mark, 2008, Global Health: Why Cultural Perceptions, Social Representations, and Biopolitics Matter. Tucson, University of Arizona Press.

Packard Randall M., 2016, A History of Global Health, Interventions into the Lives of Other Peoples, Johns Hopkins University Press.

Singer Merrill, Pamela I. Erickson, 2013, Global Health: An Anthropological Perspective. Waveland Pr Inc.

List 2

Antze P., Lambek M. (1996), Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, Routledge

Arnold, D. 1993. Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Baer, Singer, Susser (1997), Medical Anthropology and the World System: a critical perspective. Bergin & Garvey.

Biehl J. (2005), Vita: Life In A Zone Of Social Abandonment, University of California Press

Biehl João, 2009, Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival. Princeton University Press.

Bourgois, Fassin, Heggenhougen, Nordstrom(2009), Global Health in Times of Violence, School for Advanced Research Press.

Briggs C & C Mantini-Briggs 2003. Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling during a Medical Nightmare. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London. University of California Press.

Comaroff, Jean ,1985, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People. University of Chicago Press

Csordas, T.J., (2002), Body/Meaning/Healing. New York: Palgrave.

Del Vecchio Good M.J., Hyde S.T., Pinto S., Good B.J., (2008) Postcolonial Disorders (Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity), University of California Press.

Desjarlais, R., Eisenberg, L., Good, B.J. & Kleinman, A. (Eds.). 1995. World Mental Health: Priorities, Problems, and Responses in Low-Income Countries. New York: Oxford University Press.

Didier Fassin, 2011, Humanitarian Reason. A Moral History of the Present, University of California Press.

Farmer, P. 2003. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Farmer, P., 1992, AIDS and accusation: Haiti and the geography of blame, Berkeley, University of California Press.

Farmer, P., 1999, Infections and inequalities. The modern plagues, Berkeley, University of California Press.

Farmer, P., 2003, Pathologies of power. Health, human rights, and the new war on the poor, Berkeley, University of California Press.

Farmer, Paul, Margaret Connors, and Janie Simmons, 1996, Women, Poverty, and AIDS: Sex, Drugs, and Structural Violence. Monroe: Common Courage Press.

Fassin D. e Pandolfi M. ( a cura) (2010), Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions, Zone Books.

Fassin Didier, 2007, When Bodies Remember. Experiences and Politics of AIDS in South Africa. University of California Press.

Fassin Didier, Richrd Rechtman (2009), The empire of trauma. An inquiry in the condition of victimhood. Princeton University Press.

Feldman I., M. Ticktin (eds.) 2010, In the name of humanity. The government of threat and care, Duke University Press.

Hahn Robert and Marcia Inhorn (editors), 2008, “Anthropology and Public Health: Bridging Differences in Culture and Society”. 2ND EDITION. Oxford University Press

Inhorn Marcia, 2003, “Local Babies, Global Science: Gender, Religion, and In Vitro Fertilization in Egypt”, Routledge.

James Erica, 2010, Democratic Insecurities. Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti. University of California Press.

Keshavjee, Salmaan, 2014, Blind Spot. How Neoliberalism Infiltrated Global Health, University of California Press.

Kleinamn, A. (1980) Patients and healers in the context of culture. University of Califronia Press, Berkeley.

Kleinman, A. (1995) Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kleinman, A. (2007), What Really Matters. Living a moral life amidst uncertainty and danger. Oxford University Press

Kleinman, A., Das, V. e Lock, M., (a cura), (1997), Social suffering, Berkeley, University of California Press.

Lock M., (1995), Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America. University of California Press.

Lock, M. (2001) Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death. University of California Press

Nguyen, Vinh-Kim, 2010, The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa’s Time of AIDS, Duke University Press.

Ong A. (1987) Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline. Factory Women in Malaysia. New York: State University of New York.

Ong A & S Collier (eds) 2005. Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Malden MA, Oxford, Carlton: Blackwell Publishing

Petryna A. (2002), Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl, Princeton University Press.

Petryna A., (2009), When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects, Princeton University Press.

Petryna, Lakoff, Kleinman, (2006), Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices, Duke University Press.

Scheper-Hughes N. (1993) Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, University of California Press.

Ticktin, Miriam, 2011, Casualties of Care. Immigration and the politics of humanitarianism in France. University of California Press.

Wilkinson Iain, Arthur Kleinman, 2016, A Passion for Society. How We Think about Human Suffering. University of California Press.

Young, A. (1995) The Harmony of Illusions. Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Teaching methods

Students attendance to lectures is strongly recommended. Teaching will be mainly based on frontal lectures. Group discussions among students will be organized around central topics of the module.

Assessment methods

Students who regularly attended lectures will be invited to write a paper on a topic agreed upon with the lecturer and to discuss it during an oral evaluation.

Material will be distributed through the following mailing list: ivo.quaranta.Global_Health_and_Suffering.

The grade assigned to the paper will be based on the definition of the topic, its critical analysis, selection of relevant bibliography, clarity in structuring the paper, language proficiency, and on the student's ability to present and defend it during oral presentation.

Students who do not attend lectures will be evaluated through an oral exam focussed on the bibliography of the course. The evaluation will focus on students' knowledge of the themes treated in the program texts. The questions will be aimed at testing the student's ability in exposing with an appropriate language some of the topics tackled by the books, as well as the ability to make connections between different texts in order to build an argument.

Proper language and the ability to critically speak about the books' content will lead to a good/excellent final grade.

Acceptable language and the ability to resume the books' content will lead to a sufficient/fair grade.

Insufficient linguistic proficiency and fragmentary knowledge of the books' content will lead to a failure in passing the exam.

Office hours

See the website of Ivo Quaranta