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How can health care systems be restructured to provide high quality care even to the poorest and most vulnerable people on our planet?
Arthur Kleinman, Anne Becker, and Salmaan Keshavjee
If you are sick or hurt, whether you live or die depends not only on biological factors, but social ones: who you are and where you are, what sort of healthcare system is available to help you survive, what kind of care is available to help you recover, and whether society believes you deserve it. Recent pandemics have illustrated with dramatic urgency the role social forces play in patterning health inequities and determining individual fates. The vulnerabilities of those most likely to get sick and die from a variety of diseases are often linked to large-scale social forces that render health care systems dangerously weak or inaccessible for many communities. These social forces are often intersectional, and include, but are not limited to, the ongoing effects of systemic racism on racialized subjects, sex and gender discrimination, the devaluation of eldercare, the distribution of health care under neoliberal forms of governance, and extractive social relationships linked to colonial-era and post-colonial power structures. Because these forces define how health and care delivery problems are framed and addressed, now, as ever, it is imperative to develop frameworks and methodologies to identify and understand harmful social configurations that cause illness and suffering, and to intervene effectively.
This course goes beyond a narrow focus on the biological basis of disease. Instead, drawing from various social science disciplines, including Anthropology and History of Science, this course takes a novel biosocial approach to reveal how governments, institutions, and histories shape health and well-being. In doing so, this course challenges the conventional assumptions within the field of global health, broadening the understanding of how health inequalities persist over centuries, how the structures of powerful institutions influence the policies they develop, how caregiving and global health are urgent moral practices, and what can be achieved when the needs of patients are put first.