Who Lives, Who Dies: Reimagining Global Health

MMH 733 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

How can health care systems be restructured to provide high quality care even to the poorest and most vulnerable people on our planet?

Health care should be about standing with the poor and the sick. It is about fighting for those pushed to the margins, whose lives are ground down by poverty, trapped by unjust systems, and devalued by forces that declare some lives worth less than others. This course challenges students to reimagine disease, illness, and injury as biosocial phenomena--shaped as much by poverty, racism, and political violence as by pathogens. From rural Malawi to American prisons, from tuberculosis programs to the overdose crisis, we will trace the roots of global health inequities and examine the ideologies that sustain them. But this course is not only about identifying failures. It is also about how we stand alongside the sick and destitute to fight for a future where health is a human right.