HES9280 Medical Anthropology: Current themes and theories

University of Oslo, Faculty of Medicine

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

Teaching

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

Examination

Individual written assignment. 

Admission to the course

Applicants admitted to a PhD programme at UiO apply to this course in StudentWeb.

Applicants who are not admitted to a PhD programme at UiO must apply for a right to study before they can apply to this course. See information here:  How to apply for a right to study and admission to elective PhD courses in medicine and health sciences.

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