3 courses with the subject HLTH B, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
HLTH B115INTRODUCTION TO HEALTH STUDIES1.0
The multidisciplinary foundation for the health studies minor. Students will be introduced to theories and methods from the life sciences, social sciences, and humanities and will learn to apply them to problems of health and illness. Topics include epidemiological, public health, and biomedical perspectives on health and disease; social, behavioral, and environmental determinants of health; globalization of health issues; cultural representations of illness; health inequalities, social justice, and health as a human right.
Eugenics is usually associated with genocidal and discriminatory theories and policies elaborated in the US (before WWII) and in Nazi Germany (1933-1945). This mainstream narrative implies eugenics belongs to the past, even though some controversial writers have recently been trying to rehabilitate eugenic theories. In this seminar, we will take a closer look at the emergence of eugenics in the Western world and reframe the usual narrative by going back – not to Francis Galton’s invention of the word (1883) – but to the first treatise of modern eugenics, Vandermonde’s Essay on the manner of perfecting the human species (1756). We will also expand the scope of our inquiry by including countries beyond the “usual suspects” (UK, US, and Germany). This reframing will have huge consequences on the way we perceive and interpret the historical significance of eugenics and the current controversy around gene editing.
Required culminating seminar, which integrates the three tracks of the Health Studies minor. Students share and critically assess their own and fellow students’ ongoing work to communicate across disciplines and understand the value and interconnectedness of different disciplinary approaches. Students present and defend their semester-long collaborative projects at the end of the course.
