I am grateful to those who have shared their medical anthropology syllabi here and thought I would add mine to the mix. There is so much one could cover in a med anthro course! I am always concerned with overwhelming my students, especially those not only new to the subdiscipline but also to anthropology and even to social science (ah, …
I am currently an undergraduate student in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s College London. The Department’s UG program offers students the opportunity to study social aspects of health and medicine in a multi-disciplinary context with close collaboration between the social sciences, life sciences and biomedicine. In addition, a great emphasis is put on methods training …
As academics in large public research universities, I am always amazed that when we speak of an ideal pedagogy, we speak about our small intimate seminars where we have the time and resources to experiment with 25 students or less. In my 13 years of teaching, I look forward to those settings when I get to teach one small undergraduate …
In the decade since becoming a full time professor, medical anthropology has been one of my core courses. I have taught it seven times. Although the basic structure of the course remains similar, emphases have shifted over time. Perhaps I can best highlight the evolution of the course through a discussion of readings I use since readings are the backbone …
Nature Culture Now!, an upper division anthropology lecture course at the University of Michigan, traces the trajectory of nature/culture debates in American anthropology through modules on race, sex, and health and disease. The course is co-taught by a biological anthropologist, and myself, a cultural/medical anthropologist. The impetus for Nature/Culture Now! came from a formative experience I had as an undergraduate …
My first experience teaching an ethnographic text to a classroom full of students was rocky. My attempts to draw them out into making connections between the ethnographic materials and our big course questions were met with silence. I, panicked, asked ever more concrete questions about the text, while the silence slowly turned stony until a chatty student desperately regurgitated some …