Issues in Health Humanities

Catalog description

Health Humanities is a growing transdisciplinary field of education, research, and practice that addresses the current crisis in healthcare. We will explore structural injustice in healthcare and the impact of arts and humanities as an approach to addressing health care models and health access disparities, specifically in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. Specifically developing skills in critical thinking and reasoning, we further analyze models that marginalize the patient by privileging professional expertise over lived experience and that partition the human body according to rigid specializations. Students will understand and analyze the “social determinants of “health”–the social conditions informing health conditions and outcomes–and explore the ways constructions of “illness” in Western medicine are related to cultural values like materialism and individualism. We will explore how health humanities perspectives can help formulate and transform models of health and well-being, foregrounding compassion, empathy, critical consciousness and point of view, reflection, and personal and professional identity among students dedicating their lives to the health care professions in ways that contribute to social justice.