Instructor: Amira Noeuv
Instructor Email: amnoeuv@ucsd.edu
Prequisites: None
Schedule: Mondays & Wednesdays 10am-1pm
Office hours (optional): Thursdays 10am-12pm
Critical Global Health is a course that takes an ethnic studies approach to understanding and critically examining the practices and discourses in the global health field. In line with globalization and post-Cold War era, the rapidly emerging area of global health aims to improve health and achieve equity through its research and practice in addressing illnesses, health, and wellness. In recent decades, “global health” has served as the dominant blueprint in healthcare interventions and discourses worldwide. While implementations increasingly emphasize cultural sensitivity and community-based approaches, the global interventions and policies is inherently Westernized and maintains a (settler) colonial logic in efforts towards universality and modernization. Applying an ethnic studies lens to the field of global health allows for race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, ableism, geopolitics, and other structures of power to be in critical conversation with medicine and health.
Students will examine historical and present health inequalities related to legacies of (settler) colonialism that are complicit in the marginalization of vulnerable communities and contributing to various health challenges. This course aims to critique the power structures in medical knowledge production and the institutionalization of systemic inequalities of global health apparatuses by examining it through interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches. Furthermore, this course also works with students to begin (re)imagining how we can decolonize the literature and practice of medicine, health, and wellness.
*Courses vary by experience and exposure to content. Instructors have the ability to change content and pace to serve the needs of students. Courses have been modified for online teaching.