Humans, Health, Technology

Catalog description

You want to be a health care provider. You want to design health technologies. You want to help people and these seem like the best options. Helping people, though, requires understanding those people and the contexts in which those people live, work, and play. This means questioning how socioeconomic, infrastructural, financial, racial, cultural, gendered and political dynamics shape who gets sick, who accesses technology, and who is healthy, the entangling of which manifests in healthcare disparities. In this course we will evaluate how emergent technologies affect human health and healthcare disparities. Evaluating impact requires considering the ethical stakes involved in technological development and application. Our guiding questions will be threefold: How do cultural expectations about health shape the pursuit of technologies and medicine? and What are the impacts of particular technologies on human health? How can we ethically evaluate those impacts? To these ends, we will consider various research forms, including ethnographies, that focus on the intersection of culture, technology, and health. First, we will orient to technology and health through the lens of social construction. Second, we will situate ourselves in feminist approaches to biotechnologies; including critical studies of epigenetics, using core concepts of kinship and gender. We will then explore specific technologies, such as spirometers to oximeters to pharmaceuticals more generally, heeding particular attention to inequalities in areas like race. Finally, we explore the various methodologies available to those designing biotechnologies derived from the social sciences. In each section, we will identify core ethical questions faced by engineers, designers and healthcare providers in their daily work while brainstorming ways that these ethical issues might be resolved to improve human health.