SOC 344 Health, Medicine, and Society

Overview of Course

Access to healthcare is a central issue of our time. The world-wide COVID-19 pandemic revealed how entrenched economic, environmental, cultural, and political disparities could produce profound global health inequalities. Today, those social determinants of health have overlapped and combined in ways unseen in recent world history. Although we believe health and wellness are personal or individual choices; how we actually experience and live health is profoundly social and global.
This course examines how the harms associated with health inequalities are fundamentally shaped by power, inequality, and global interdependence. Semester at Sea offers a unique opportunity to understand how countries design and implement healthcare systems that may mitigate, or exacerbate, health disparities. Using a comparative framework, students will explore these healthcare strategies across the Global South & Global North, which range from health services that are universally accessible to those utilizing for-profit delivery schemes. The political and cultural decisions made by individual countries not only structure access to care but also shape patterns of disease and well-being worldwide.
Importantly, this course forefronts non-Western perspectives on health that challenge dominant Western biomedical models which emphasize dissection and separation rather than connection with one another and the planet. Indigenous, Global South, and alternative health frameworks offer critical insights into community-based care, holistic understandings of health, and collective well-being. Engagement with these perspectives will offer students the opportunity to rethink prevailing assumptions about health and medicine by focusing on approaches that are more equitable, reciprocal, and culturally responsive to challenges faced by global health inequalities.