HES9280 ¨C Medical Anthropology: Current themes and theories

Course content

This course focuses on anthropological perspectives on health, illness, bodies and medicine. It presents current ethnographic research on the interactions between biology, culture, society, and environments. Working with cases from across the world, we aim to place health-related issues within contemporary debates in the field of medical anthropology.

The course will proceed through ethnographic case studies and theoretical interventions to provide critical and comparative perspectives on emerging themes in biomedicine and other medical traditions as they grapple with key challenges of our times. You will closely engage with one book-length ethnography during the course. Each year the course will focus on a selection of the following themes:

• Biomedicine, culture, and ethnography
• Gender and sexuality
• Body, mind, embodiment
• Health and/as ecology
• Health, pollution, and toxicity
• Health systems, infrastructures, and governance
• Health Interventions, epidemic control, and medical humanitarianism
• Health and climate crisis
• Medicines, drugs, and drug use
• Plural medical landscapes
• Biopolitics, postcolonialism, and care
• Biotechnologies and emergent futures of life
• Health, neoliberalism, and capitalism

Learning outcome

Knowledge

This course will provide you with knowledge about:

• theoretical debates on health, illness, bodies, and medicine
• current ethnographic research on the interactions between biology, culture, society, and environments
• the impact of structural and socio-economic inequalities on bodily and mental wellbeing, the pursuit of health, and access to treatment
• the globalization of biomedicine as science and practice, and the emergence of medical pluralism
• global health and postcolonial medicine
• ethnographic methodology and how it can be used in health research
• key theoretical and analytical concepts such as embodiment, structural violence, biopower, biosociality, care, ontological multiplicity, more-than-human health, material semiotics, decoloniality

Skills

This course will give you the skills to:

• understand and reflect on current theoretical positions in medical anthropology
• engage with health, illness, bodies, and medicine in a cross-cultural perspective
• situate health and medicine in the contexts of globalization, environmental changes, and ecological crisis
• critically read and review ethnographic writing
• engage with biomedicine as cultural and social institution
• discuss complex ethical and theoretical issues at the interface of biology, culture, society, and environments

General competence

This course will provide you with general competence to:

• situate your own research in the landscape of current social science debates
• improve academic writing
• raise critical questions to concepts included in your research

Admission to the course

PhD candidates in medicine at UiO will be given priority for admission to the course. If there are more applicants than places, the first-come, first-serve basis applies.

Up to 16 participants are admitted to the course.

Applicants who already have a study right at UiO:

PhD candidates at UiO apply for admission to the course in Studentweb.

Applicants who do not have a study right at UiO:

Applicants who do not have admission to a PhD program at UiO must apply for study rights in S?knadsWeb before they can apply for admission to PhD courses in medicine and health sciences. External applicants should apply for study rights 3 weeks before the application deadline for the course.

Responses to applications for admission to the course are sent by e-mail 1-2 weeks after the application deadline.

Overlapping courses

• 5 credits overlap with MEDFL5280 ¨C Medical Anthropology: Current themes and theories.

Teaching

Lectures followed by seminars and group work, including group assignments.

You have to participate in at least 80 % of the seminars and group work to be allowed to take the exam. Attendance will be registered.

Examination

Individual written assignment.?

You have to participate in at least 80 % of the seminars and group work to be allowed to take the exam.?

Language of examination

The examination text is given in English, and you submit your response in English.

Grading scale

Grades are awarded on a pass/fail scale. Read more about the grading system.

More about examinations at UiO

• Use of sources and citations
• Special exam arrangements due to individual needs
• Withdrawal from an exam
• Illness at exams / postponed exams
• Explanation of grades and appeals
• Resitting an exam
• Cheating/attempted cheating

You will find further guides and resources at the web page on examinations at UiO.