Index # 10966
Will Count Towards Anthropology MAJOR
Will Count Towards Anthropology MINOR
Global health is one of the fastest growing interdisciplinary fields of academic scholarship, and it has been instrumental in informing transnational interventions across the globe. Proponents of global health have highlighted the active ties between individuals and communities across geographies, as well as the enduring inequalities and inequities existing within and between nations. This course introduces students to a range of health, disease, and healthcare problems worldwide and transnational efforts to address them under the banner of global health. While exploring the historical, environmental social, political and economic factors that have shaped the development of such problems, more importantly the course critically interrogates actors, institutions, practices and forms of knowledge production that have come to shape “global health” as an emerging field of study and intervention.
Some key themes addressed in this course are: genealogies of global health; the politics of development between ‘north’ and ‘south’; global health and biosecurity; global health, rights and citizenship; humanitarianism, triage and the politics of aid; the global life of organs; therapeutic geographies of war and conflict; metrics and values of global health; doctors within and without borders.
About Professor Dewachi
Trained in medicine and anthropology, I work at the intersections of global health, history of medicine and political anthropology. My scholarship focuses on the human and environmental manifestations of decades of conflict and military interventions in Iraq and the broader Middle East. My first book, Ungovernable Life chronicles the rise and fall of state medicine in Iraq and the role of medical doctors in infrastructure making (and unmaking) in the country, dating back from the British Mandate (1920-1932). Arguing against narrow understanding of statecraft, I show the centrality of health, disease and the body to state-making history, as well as to the lived experiences of war, violence, and Empire.