Global Arc

In this course we will examine how the production and consumption of energy are linked to questions of health. We will review how public health scholars, and academics from other disciplines have thought about energy. We will also examine what energy sustainability might mean in the face of repeated infrastructural failure and the concurrent loss of life. Finally, we will look to the past and present of nuclear energy, as a source of hope and a looming threat.

This course will explore health topics from the perspective of population health, politics and policy. Bridging domestic and international health topics and perspectives, the course will focus on controversial and complex health issues. The course will weave examples through various topics to demonstrate how politics and competing stakeholder interests can play a critical role in the public health and public policy response to health problems. The class sessions will be comprised of presentations by the instructors, visiting experts and students. Class discussion and presentation will be core elements of the course.

This course will critically examine the unequal distribution of disease and mortality in the United States along the axes of race, ethnicity, class and place. Through in-depth engagement with case studies, critical historical texts and public health literature we will explore why individuals from some race/ethnicities, class backgrounds, and geographies are more vulnerable to premature death and adverse outcomes than others. Student work will culminate in a policy memo and a presentation, allowing them to hone valuable skillsets for future participation in the research and policy processes.

The course will apply analytical tools in economics to investigate various economic and social consequences of population change and conversely the demographic consequences of economic growth. The course will emphasize both microeconomic and macroeconomic approaches. We will examine the economic determinants of population change and demographic behavior including household decisions, mortality (particularly infant mortality) and key forms of human capital investment including health, schooling and migration.

This seminar will introduce students to the interdisciplinary field of planetary health, which investigates how human activities are transforming the environment in which we live and thereby introducing new challenges to health. Through examining diverse case studies in planetary health -- from areas such as emerging and re-emerging infectious disease, nutrition, and environmental health -- the course will outline major themes and provide students with analytical tools and conceptual frameworks that may help further understanding and innovation in this field.

This course explores how the environment and health are perceived to interact, and how technologies have been designed to mediate that relationship. We will consider the intersection of health, technology, and the environment from colonial medicine in the 19th century, to international health, to present day concepts of global health. We will critically examine the historical actors, institutions, value systems, and policy decisions that led to the present climate crisis and the unequal burden it imposes on some populations relative to others and elaborate on implications of a shift to the idea of planetary health.

What makes a pandemic? COVID-19 has illuminated inequities and unpreparedness of global health mechanisms and national health provision systems, and put ways of predicting and preventing catastrophes under scrutiny. While preventable and treatable diseases such as AIDS remain pandemic and take millions of lives yearly, they no longer mobilize the emergency-based governance responses, financial resources, media attention, and modes of surveillance that COVID-19 does. We will examine frameworks, rationales, values, forms of knowledge, collaboration, governance and surveillance around which pandemics coalesce and are also eventually forgotten.