19 courses with the subject HLTH H, 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 H115INTRODUCTION 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 the ethics of health as a human right.
Primarily a study of recent memoirs written by those living with disabilities and their familial caregivers, this seminar will also consider other first-person representations, such as essays, graphic memoirs, films, and videos. We will view these stories through the lens of scholarship in disability studies and inquire about the generative potential of disability as a creative response to perceiving and inhabiting the world. Prerequisite(s): First-Year Writing Seminar
HLTH H215SACRIFICE ZONES: EMPIRES, EPIDEMICS, AND CLIMATE CHANGES1.0
In this big picture course, we explore how humanity’s diverse imperial projects have interacted with specific ecologies and climate changes to shape the changing spatial distribution and concentration of human experiences with hunger, famines, droughts, floods, and diseases from pre-historical times to the present. In the process, we reflect upon and question commonsensical (and often mutually reinforcing) historical and presentist logics — of environmental determinism; historical inevitability; Eurocentrism; national becoming; development and growth; modernization and conservation; technological salvation; and of futility, doom and despair. In turn, we consider how fresh perspectives on the past can significantly (re)shape our assessments of contemporary global health and existential challenges, including what we make of the ongoing green growth vs de-growth debate and calls to cultivate “indigenous” understandings and approaches to life. Pre-requisite(s): Intro to Health Studies (HLTH H115/HLTH B115) or permission of instructor. Lottery Preference: (1) Declared Health Studies minors, (2) Environmental Studies and/or History majors/minors
HLTH H219BREATHING TOGETHER: AIR, CAPITALISM, AND HEALTH1.0
This course explores the history of public health approaches to the properties, pathogenic potential, and politics of shared air. We ask what it means to breathe together—as humans in a global economic system—at multiple scales, from interpersonal to institutional, industrial, and imperial. Topics include miasma, tuberculosis, industrial pollution, occupational health and gendered labor, household fuels, secondhand smoke, incinerators, megacities. Texts are drawn from history, public health, science and technology studies, geography, and anthropology. Pre-requisite(s): HLTH H/B115, a health-related writing seminar, or at least one course in the humanities or social sciences Lottery Preference: In descending order: 1. declared Health Studies minors 2. Sophomores 3. Anthropology majors and minors 4. Environmental Studies majors and minors
This course will be offered in conjunction with 2025-26 thematic programming in the Kim Institute for Ethical Inquiry and Leadership on the subject of heat. The climate crisis is an existential threat that demands technical, political, financial, legal, and cultural responses. Hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and droughts capture popular attention, and heatwaves occasionally make the headlines–particularly when they turn deadly. But framing heat waves as events, as an episodic rather than chronic threat, misses the relentlessness with which heat impacts physical and mental health, learning and cognition, productivity, public safety, social cohesion, energy consumption, and infrastructure. The lived experience of heat is highly stratified: its effects are felt most acutely by the poor. The burden of heat is an injustice that, in the words of social epidemiologist Nancy Krieger, “structures chances” for surviving and thriving, for social and financial mobility, for engaged citizenship and political participation, and for collective flourishing. Making sense of heat–its uneven effects and the activities that contribute to warming–requires ethical frameworks to motivate and guide individual, institutional, and collective action. Philadelphia’s built environment, vibrant artist communities, and dynamic civil society afford Haverford students a unique opportunity to learn about the drivers and consequences of extreme heat and to engage in collaborative design for ethical action. This transdisciplinary and community-engaged course focuses on challenges of responding to extreme heat in Philadelphia. Site visits, guest speakers, readings, and community-driven research will deepen students’ understanding of the intertwined social, economic, health, and environmental challenges facing Philadelphia in a warming world. Central to the course is a collaboration between artists, community partners, students, and faculty to generate “social practice art” that motivates individual and collective action in response to the health impacts of extreme heat and the historical roots of heat-related inequities. This course will be taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program. Prerequisites: Priority in registration will be given to students participating in the Tri-Co Philly Program (https://www.haverford.edu/philly-program), Kim Institute Student Fellows; HLTH minors and ENVS majors and minors; and Anthropology majors and minors. Remaining seats are available to other Tri-Co students, by lottery, if demand exceeds remaining spaces in the course. If you are interested in the program, you must fill out the application, which is due on Friday, April 4 by 11:59 pm. This program includes registering for two of three of the program’s courses, which include this course or Contemporary Art & Film in Philadelphia (HART B334) or Philadelphia the Global City: the Italian Legacy across Time (ITAL B240). Those not participating in the Philly program do not need to complete the application and can simply pre-register for the class
HLTH H229CONTAGION NARRATIVES IN AMERICAN CULTURE1.0
This course will examine depictions of contagions in American literature and film including yellow fever, HIV/AIDS, COVID-19, and fictional outbreaks. We will focus on how these narratives illuminate the politics of infection, inoculation, quarantine, transmission, treatment, survival, and loss. How do these narratives reflect and exacerbate inequalities? How do writers and artists document collective care? How do stories shape how we remember a past crisis and influence our response to the next one? Crosslisted: HLTH, ENGL Pre-requisite(s): HLTHH115 Introduction to Health Studies
What does it mean to attempt a critical anthropology of the body, illness experience, disease etiology, healing practices, and the epistemology of contemporary biomedicine across a diverse group of cultures and traditions? This course seeks to begin to answer this and other questions by examining the historical development of the field of medical anthropology, exploring the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of the debates that have shaped the field, and examining the methodological concerns and ethnographic investigations that have broadened the scope of its inquiry. Readings range from classical ethnographic writings, philosophical treatises, anthropological theory, indigenous philosophers, and first person accounts of illness and health.
HLTH H304CRITICAL DISABILITY STUDIES: THEORY AND PRACTICE1.0
An examination of work in critical disability studies across a range of humanistic disciplines and an exploration of how disability theory and engaged community practice inform and shape one another. The course includes a weekly praxis partnership with the Center for Creative Works, a community artspace for artists with intellectual disabilities.
HLTH H305THE LOGIC AND POLITICS OF GLOBAL HEALTH1.0
This course engages critically with changing intervention paradigms in global health from the late colonial period to the present. Topics include colonial and missionary medicine; sanitation and segregation; medicalization of reproduction; eradication campaigns; family planning; labor hierarchies; postcolonial technoscience; medical research. Prerequisite(s): HLTH 115 OR at least one course in anthropology or history OR permission of the instructor
HLTH H313MEDICAL RECORDS: LITERATURE, HEALTH, AND THE ARCHIVE1.0
In clinical contexts, “medical records” contain information including symptoms, treatments, test results, and diagnoses. But these are not the only forms through which histories of health are recorded. In this course, we will examine literature about health that draws on archives including the history of medicine, personal records, and prior works of art. As we examine how power shapes clinical and historical narratives, we will explore literature’s capacity to illuminate and challenge such paradigms.
In this course, we explore malignant, “self-devouring growth”: a global pandemic condition afflicting both the human and planetary body. We start by studying scientific models of oncogenesis — including infectious, genetic, behavioral and metabolic — and the kinds of connections each makes with climate changes. We then turn to probing the social determinants of rising cancer incidence and mortality during our present era of global warming, including social inequality; biodiversity loss; changing food systems and entitlements; novel and expanding pandemics of infectious disease and industrial air, soil and water pollution. In the final section, we read cancer memoirs that reflect on the deeply human experience of making meaning of existential threats, and the possibilities that exist for hope, caregiving, transformation and healing. Throughout the course, we engage with our own greater Philadelphia/Delaware river “cancer center”, as well as consider the many “cancer villages” and “cancer alleys” with which we are interconnected around the world. Pre-requisite(s): Any previous course in Health Studies
HLTH H316MAKING AND MISTAKING RACE IN AMERICAN MEDICINE1.0
This course examines the origins and development of American medical and scientific thinking about race. Drawing on histories of medicine, critical race theory, science and technology studies, sociology, and medical anthropology, we trouble the idea of race-as-biological-difference and explore the social construction of (pseudo)scientific knowledge about race, bodies, genes, and health. Students learn to historicize genomic and post-genomic discourses of racial difference, and develop communication strategies for confronting racial essentialism in medicine and public discourse. Pre-requisite(s): HLTH H115 or a 100-level course in Anthropology, Sociology, or History Lottery Preference: Senior Health Studies minors Junior Health Studies minors Africana Studies minors and concentrators Anthropology majors and minors
HLTH H318TRADITIONAL MEDICINE: HISTORIES AND ETHNOGRAPHIES1.0
What is “traditional medicine” and why is it simultaneously revered, reviled and suppressed? How does traditional medicine relate to “antique” senses and sensibilities of an enchanted cosmos, seasonality and stewardship? How have people translated and transformed traditional medicine for a “modern” world? Does traditional medicine have relevance for the climate crisis and billionaires’ efforts to conjure transhumanism? Readings include TCM; Kampo; Talmudic Medicine; Ayurveda; Unani-tibb; Homeopathy; Sufi, Saint and Goddess cults; Yoga; and Nature Cure. Pre-requisite(s): HLTH 115, or any course in History, Anthropology or Religion, or permission of the instructor Lottery Preference: (1) Declared Health Studies seniors; (2) Declared Health Studies juniors; (3) History, Anthropology, Environmental studies, or Religion majors; (4) Everyone else.
Life and death are animated by metabolism — the biochemical conversion of gases and matter into energy, and the reverse. We learn the current biochemistry of metabolism, and how social scientists draw upon scientific models of metabolism to explain how societies power production and exchange in ways that generate collective life, growth, disease and death. We then study pandemics of “metabolic disorders”, including diabetes, cardiac disease, cancer, IBD, autism, ADHD, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and infertility. Pre-requisite(s): HLTH H115 or at least one course in the humanities or social sciences Lottery Preference: 1) Health Studies minors — seniors; 2) Health studies minors — juniors; 3) students with health-related independent majors; 4) Environmental studies majors; 5) Environmental studies minors
This course traces the relationship between scientific knowledge production, notions of technological "progress," and political, economic, and institutional power through the disciplinary histories of anthropology and Science and Technology Studies. Texts will include STS classics that frame contemporary science and medicine as the products of political and economic history, as well as work in anthropology and STS that center non-western and indigenous traditions of knowledge and the voices of BIPOC and feminist scholars. Crosslisted: HLTH. Pre-requisite(s): Introductory level coursework in anthropology (sociocultural or medical) or health studies Lottery Preference: Anthropology, health studies, history, political science
HLTH H338THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF ADDICTION: SUBSTANCE, COMMUNITY, AND THE PROBLEM OF CARE1.0
This course explores the conceptual, methodological, and ethical complexities of marking “addiction” as an object of anthropological inquiry. Together we will investigate what anthropologists, medical doctors, public health scholars, and people living with addiction can gain from ethnographic research. We will ask: how can ethnography help us to better understand the degree to which the phenomenon of addiction is socially, culturally, and scientifically constructed but also experienced in intimate and often deeply painful ways? Crosslisted: HLTH.
HLTH H370ANTHROPOLOGY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: THE ETHNOGRAPHIC AFTERLIFE OF A METAPSYCHOLOGY1.0
This course explores the long and complicated relationship between the theory and practice of anthropology and the discourse of psychoanalysis—a relationship historically characterized by both contention and cooperation. Together we will interrogate the conceptual stakes of each of these respective disciplines as they attempt to observe, to formalize, and to write about the tangled relationship between the psyche and the social. By pairing readings in both classical and contemporary anthropology with a wide range of psychoanalytic texts, we will ask what it means to consider the dream, the symptom, and the psychopathology of everyday life as inherently dual phenomena, both artifacts and agents of a shared cultural world.
HLTH H398SENIOR SEMINAR IN HEALTH STUDIES,SENIOR SEMINAR HEALTH STUDIES1.0
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. Prerequisite(s): HLTH 115; students must be in their senior year and be declared Health Studies minors in good standing
