Module description
Over the past decade, the concept of “crisis” has become ever more important in the context of social medicine and global health. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the growing fears about the spread of deadly diseases, the dramatic consequences of climate change, and the vulnerability of notoriously underfunded and increasingly privatized health-care systems have produced the sense of a fragile world on the edge of collapse. Important actors in global health and social medicine have frequently pointed out that our health is in crisis. These emergencies, they suggest, require immediate intervention.
Today, we are facing an abundance of crises. In this course, we take a step back and explore what it means to perceive particular situations in terms of “crisis.” We focus on emergency interventions and examine how sustainable these interventions are. We investigate to what extent these intervention shave changed the very meaning of “health.” A particular focus in our discussions will be on the category of crisis itself. How is the category operating today in particular contexts? How is it mobilized and what are its effects? To what extent might the category of crisis enable or disable distinctive forms of intervention? What accounts for the productivity of crisis in contemporary debates about the health and well-being of populations, both in the global North and the global South? What are the analytical and political limits of “crisis” as a category of thought and action in contemporary global health and social medicine?
Assessment details
1 x 1,000 Word Proposal (30%)
1 x 2,000 Word Final Essay (70%)
Educational aims & objectives
- To enable students to develop a sophisticated theoretical understanding of the concept of crisis in global health and social medicine
- To provide them with the skills to identify, compare, and critically examine key health interventions that are constructed as a response to perceived crises
- To provide students with an understanding of the most important actors and institutions as well as discourses and practices that are addressing situations of crisis
- To provide students with an understanding of the social, political and technological forces that are shaping the perception of crises
- To provide students with an understanding of the complex political economy which both produces and frames contemporary crises in global health and social medicine
- To offer students the opportunity to explore how emergency interventions are based on particular understandings of health and disease
- To assess the implications of these approaches through detailed case studies of pandemics, preparedness, biosurveillance and biosecurity
Learning outcomes
By the end of this module students are expected to have acquired:
- Advanced knowledge of the key actors and institutions as well as discourses and practices that seek to address contemporary health crises.
- A detailed understanding of how the concept of crisis is mobilized within the fields of global health and social medicine.
- The ability to identify the key social, economic, political and technological forces that have shaped perceptions of crises in these fields.
- The capacity to critically assess how health interventions are being constructed as a response to perceived crises and how this shapes the nature of these interventions.
- A sophisticated and critical understanding of the role that surveillance technologies and media representations play in the making of crises.
- A sensibility for the changing nature of today’s governance of health and disease as framed by the concept of crisis.
Teaching pattern
One two-hour weekly lecture and one one-hour weekly seminar.