Veidlapa Nr. M-3 (8)
Study Course Description
Wellbeing, Ethics, and Care Systems
Course Code
SZF_263
Branch of Science
Social Anthropology; Sociology and social work
ECTS
3.00
Target Audience
Social Anthropology
LQF
Level 7
Study Type And Form
Full-Time
Study Course Implementer
Course Supervisor
Anna Žabicka
Structure Unit Manager
Ieva Puzo
Structural Unit
Faculty of Social Sciences
Contacts
SZF, Kuldigas Street 9C, szf@rsu.lv
About Study Course
Objective
The objective of the study course is to equip students with theoretical knowledge and analytical skills to understand how health, wellbeing, disease, and medicine are differently defined, practiced, and experienced within diverse socio-cultural, economic, and political contexts.
Preliminary Knowledge
Preferred prior knowledge in classical and modern theories of anthropology.
Learning Outcomes
Knowledge
1.Students are familiar with diverse subfields of medical anthropology and understand how anthropology provides methodological and conceptual frameworks beyond biomedicine that helps assess the experience of diseases, disorders, illnesses, and wellbeing, as well as the epistemological dimensions of disease categories.
Individual work and tests
Active participation in the course • Final Essay
2.Students understand the impact of inequalities on health and wellbeing, colonial development of anthropology and biomedicine, and current relations between medicine and politics.
Individual work and tests
Final Essay • Active participation in the course
3.Students know and are familiar with issues such as health inequalities, the social nature of diseases, equity in health care, biological citizenship, and biopolitics. Students are familiar with ethical challenges in medical anthropology.
Individual work and tests
Active participation in the course
Skills
1.Students can explain how health and disease are affected by the individual, social, political, and cultural dimensions, comparing and contrasting specific cases, based on the literature read and reviewed in the course.
Individual work and tests
Active participation in the course • Final Essay
2.Describe specific contexts and situations in which concepts such as embodiment, social suffering, adequacy/resistance, and resistance can help us to understand the experience and course of illness. and treatment.
Individual work and tests
Reflection papers
3.Formulate the ways in which medical knowledge and practice work on different scales (individual, family, local, global).
Individual work and tests
Final Essay
4.Analytically read high-quality academic social science literature, which covers topics such as health, medicine, disease, inequality, wellbeing, ethics, and political economy.
Individual work and tests
Reflection papers
5.Verbally and in writing express a reasoned, example-based view of issues related to health, medicine, and political economy.
Individual work and tests
Reflection papers
Competences
1.Students can competently judge and discuss the social, cultural, global/local political and economic processes that affect and shape health and disease.
2.Students are competent to discuss the relationship among health, medicine, and political economy, understand the impact of inequality and discrimination on health, and recognise the controversial historical development of biomedicine.
Assessment
Individual work
|
Title
|
% from total grade
|
Grade
|
|---|---|---|
|
1.
Active participation in the course |
25.00% from total grade
|
10 points
|
|
Active participation in class discussions by engaging in debate on the literature of the course, the topics and the concepts learnt. |
||
|
2.
Reflection papers |
15.00% from total grade
|
10 points
|
|
Three reflection papers on the seminar literature. |
||
Examination
|
Title
|
% from total grade
|
Grade
|
|---|---|---|
|
1.
Final Essay |
60.00% from total grade
|
10 points
|
Study Course Theme Plan
FULL-TIME
1. part
-
Lecture
|
Modality
|
Location
|
Contact hours
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|---|---|---|
|
On site
|
Study room
|
2
|
Topics
|
Introduction to medical anthropology
|
-
Class/Seminar
|
Modality
|
Location
|
Contact hours
|
|---|---|---|
|
On site
|
Study room
|
2
|
Topics
|
Defining and constructing normal/abnormal, rational/irrational
|
-
Lecture
|
Modality
|
Location
|
Contact hours
|
|---|---|---|
|
On site
|
Study room
|
2
|
Topics
|
Disease, illness, and body
|
-
Class/Seminar
|
Modality
|
Location
|
Contact hours
|
|---|---|---|
|
On site
|
Study room
|
2
|
Topics
|
Biological citizenship and biopolitics
|
-
Lecture
|
Modality
|
Location
|
Contact hours
|
|---|---|---|
|
On site
|
Study room
|
2
|
Topics
|
Bodies, illness, and the state
|
-
Class/Seminar
|
Modality
|
Location
|
Contact hours
|
|---|---|---|
|
On site
|
Study room
|
2
|
Topics
|
The production of medical and pharmaceutical knowledge
|
-
Lecture
|
Modality
|
Location
|
Contact hours
|
|---|---|---|
|
On site
|
Study room
|
2
|
Topics
|
Health inequities: beyond culture
|
-
Class/Seminar
|
Modality
|
Location
|
Contact hours
|
|---|---|---|
|
On site
|
Study room
|
2
|
Topics
|
Addiction and care
|
-
Lecture
|
Modality
|
Location
|
Contact hours
|
|---|---|---|
|
On site
|
Study room
|
2
|
Topics
|
The experience of mental health
|
-
Class/Seminar
|
Modality
|
Location
|
Contact hours
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|---|---|---|
|
On site
|
Study room
|
2
|
Topics
|
Experience of disability
|
-
Lecture
|
Modality
|
Location
|
Contact hours
|
|---|---|---|
|
On site
|
Study room
|
2
|
Topics
|
Zoonosis and one health
|
-
Class/Seminar
|
Modality
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Location
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Contact hours
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|---|---|---|
|
On site
|
Study room
|
2
|
Topics
|
Stigma and social abandonment
|
Total ECTS (Creditpoints):
3.00
Contact hours:
24 Academic Hours
Final Examination:
Exam
Bibliography
Required Reading
1.
Singer, M. and Baer, H. ([1995] 2018). “Medical Anthropology and its Transformation” in Critical Medical Anthropology. Routledge, pp. 11-59 (hrestomātisks avots)
2.
Benedict, Ruth. 1934. “Anthropology and the Abnormal.” The Journal of general psychology, 1934, Vol.10 (1), p.59-8 (hrestomātisks avots)
3.
Kleinman, A., Eisenberg, L., & Good, B. (1978). Culture, illness, and care: clinical lessons from anthropologic and cross-cultural research. Annals of internal medicine, 88(2), 251-258. (hrestomātisks avots)Suitable for English stream
4.
Petryna, A. (2002). Life exposed: biological citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton University Press (hrestomātisks avots)
5.
Fassin, D. (2011). The trace: Violence, truth, and the politics of the body. Social Research: An International Quarterly, 78(2), 281-298. (hrestomātisks avots)
6.
Pollock, A. (2014). Places of pharmaceutical knowledge-making: Global health, postcolonial science, and hope in South African drug discovery. Social Studies of Science, 44(6), 848-873. (hrestomātisks avots)Suitable for English stream
7.
Farmer, P. (2001). “Immodest Claims of Causality: Social Scientists and the “New” Tuberculosis” in Infections and inequalities. The Modern Plagues. University of California Press: 229-262., Chapter 9. (hrestomātisks avots)Suitable for English stream
8.
Garcia, A. (2010). The pastoral clinic: Addiction and dispossession along the Rio Grande. Univ of California Press. (hrestomātisks avots)
9.
Luhrmann, Tanya M. 2016. Our Most Troubling Madness: Case Studies in Schizophrenia across Cultures. Introduction, Chapters 6 and 7.
10.
Ginsburg, F., & Rapp, R. (2020). Disability/anthropology: rethinking the parameters of the human: an introduction to supplement 21. Current Anthropology, 61(S21), S4-S15.Suitable for English stream
11.
Nadal, Deborah. “Can Camaraderie Help Us Do Better than Compassion and Love for Nonhuman Health? Some Musings on One Health Inspired by the Case of Rabies in India.” In More-than-one health: humans, animals, and the environment post-COVID, edited by Irus Braverman, 2023.
12.
Biehl, J. (2013). Vita: Life in a zone of social abandonment. Univ of California Press. (hrestomātisks avots)
Additional Reading
1.
Mol, A. (2002). “Doing disease” in The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice. Duke University Press, 1-27.Suitable for English stream
2.
Anderson, W. (2012). Racial hybridity, physical anthropology, and human biology in the colonial laboratories of the United States. Current Anthropology, 53(S5), S95-S107.
3.
Sodikoff, Genese Marie. 2019. “Zoonotic Semiotics: Plague Narratives and Vanishing Signs in Madagascar.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 1: 42-59.Suitable for English stream
4.
Livingston, J. (2013). “Pain and the Politics of Relief in Botswana’s Cancer Ward” in When People Come First: Critical Studies in Global Health. Joao Biehl and Adriana Petryna eds., Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 182-206.