From Tropical Medicine to Planetary Health: Understanding Global Health

Catalog description

Since the 1990s, the field and practice of “global health” have been key means by which governments, researchers, doctors, organizations, and others have sought to address health and disease at a global scale. Yet in recent years, a flurry of new disciplinary and practice-based formations has emerged as updates or alternatives to longstanding approaches. Including planetary health, climate health, and decolonial approaches, these fields and debates have suggested that global health frameworks and practices are inadequate to the proliferation of diseases, disasters, and displacements that characterize our planet, and our wellbeing, today. This course combines historical and anthropological approaches to global health and its aftermaths to understand: 1) the roots of global health in colonial and tropical medicine; 2) how current debates reflect these historical roots; 3) the diverse actors (including individuals and institutions) who are responding to climate health issues; and 4) the role of humanistic and qualitative research in understanding health and environment today.