Students Confront Social Problems Through a Multidiscipline Lens
By Rachel Peter Students learn about important social issues through the Danz Courses in the Humanities |
What are the connections between power and health? What difficulties arise in trying to implement solutions to global health disparities? These are some of the questions to be discussed in Justice and Global Health, a lower-level course in the humanities (HUM 211) that explores social contexts for problems of global health.
The course, enrolling up to 150 students, will be team taught by Matthew Sparke, professor of geography, and Janelle Taylor, professor of anthropology, during spring quarter. Students will identify a problem of global health and injustice, research efforts to address that problem, and present their findings in a poster fair at the end of the quarter.
“Particularly in this moment, there is a rethinking of medicine and global health,” says Sparke, reflecting on the course material. “Seattle is becoming a center globally for thinking about what global health should look like.”
Drawing upon philosophical, anthropological, geographical, and political-economic perspectives on global health, this course will evaluate how health embodies differences in culture, power, and wealth. “Part of the tradition of medicine since 1848 is social medicine, which insists that scientific medicine also has to attend to social contexts in which bodies live, die, get sick, and injured,” says Taylor. “These problems are things that students are connected to, and they can take a proactive role in trying to make them better.”
The first run of the course, titled Diagnosing Injustice: Ethics, Power, and Global Health, was team taught by Taylor and Sara Goering, professor of philosophy, in 2006. From the student course evaluations, it was apparent that the topic was a success.
“Probably my favorite class and I’m a fifth year senior,” wrote one student. “This is the first class where I left and was constantly thinking and talking about it with friends.”
The course is part of the Danz Courses in the Humanities, administered by the Simpson Center for the Humanities and made possible by the generous financial support of Fredric Danz. These team taught courses are a not only beneficial to undergraduates but are also a rare chance for graduate students to experience interdisciplinary teaching. Each Danz Course has three teaching assistants, funded by the gift from Mr. Danz and the Graduate School. For the past seven years these large-scale cross-disciplinary courses have been offered, often under a general theme. This year, the theme is science, justice, and knowledge.
Also in this year’s series is Science and Its Critics, offered winter quarter.It examines several controversial debates, including intelligent design, global warming, and animal rights. The course is team taught by Phillip Thurtle, professor of comparative history of ideas, and Maynard Olson, professor of medicine and genome science. A third course, Ethics and Climate Change, taught by Stephen Gardiner, professor of philosophy, and Mike Wallace, professor of atmospheric sciences, will be offered spring quarter.
The Danz Courses epitomize an intellectual foundation for a liberal arts education through the study of human thought, values, beliefs, creativity, and culture. Having the courses team taught by talented faculty from diverse disciplines encourages students to become active and creative learners within the university community.
“You have to work collectively to change collective phenomena,” Taylor says of the importance of the interdisciplinary courses.