Care and the Good Life: Exploring End-of-Life Caregiving and Death

Catalog description

What does it mean to live a flourishing life? This is one of the most fundamental questions of human existence. This course will explore this fundamental question through an engagement with the universal human experiences of care, aging, and death. Together, we will dive into the centrality of caregiving to the human experience and identify and explore normative claims around care, aging, and death. Specifically, we will explore issues of avoidance, dependence, and interdependence, as we collectively think about the role of care in our lives across the lifespan—but especially leading up to the final stages of life. In dominant US culture, notions of individualism prevail—often leading to the conceptualization of THE CURRICULUM 144 caregiving as a burden. But who decided that the care of other humans is a burden? Or that an unburdened life is one most worth living? Who is to say that we would prefer or be better off to be “unburdened” from the most important relationships in our lives? Collectively, we will consider more life-affirming, meaningful, and pluralistic ideas about care, as well as consider who is most served by current mainstream normative claims. Finally, the course will look at the ways these ideas are being resisted. Guest speakers will help explore how individuals have replied to questions concerning how one lives life well. Culture and Mental Health PSYC 3151 Deanna Barenboim Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits This interdisciplinary course will address mental health in diverse cultural contexts, drawing upon a range of case studies to illuminate the causes, symptoms, diagnosis, course, and treatment of mental illness across the globe. The course will open by exploring questions of the classification of mental illness to address whether Western psychiatric categories apply across different local contexts. We will explore the globalization…