Discourses of Health in American Culture

elective courses
proseminars

Classroom

The course has two main goals: inspiring students to problematize and research topics of body and medicine in American culture; and to give them insight into the growing fields of medical humanities, medical anthropology and Science and Technologies Studies. This proseminar will be focused on developing students’ research skills and delving into case studies in six main areas / discourses of health in American culture: hormones (eg. dopamine) and their role in everyday life; medicalized understanding of mental health and neuro-atypical conditions such as ADHD and autism spectrum; psychological and psychiatric-inspired discourse in everyday life and pop-culture (“therapy speak”); discourses around fitness, wellness, thinness and fatness; the use of over-the-counter medication; Big Pharma and the opioid crisis. Final assignment will require individual research on a chosen case study, combining materials from social sciences and medical humanities.

The course has two main goals: inspiring students to problematize and research topics of body and medicine in American culture; and to give them insight into the growing fields of medical humanities, medical anthropology and Science and Technologies Studies. This proseminar will be focused on developing students’ research skills and delving into case studies in six main areas / discourses of health in American culture:

1. hormones (eg. dopamine) and their perceived role in everyday life;

2. the changing understanding of mental health and neuro-atypical conditions such as ADHD and autism spectrum and specific cultural production (eg. memes) contributing to a new popular understanding of neurodiversity;

3. psychological and psychiatric-inspired discourse in everyday life and pop-culture (“therapy speak”), its uses and political relevance;

4. discourses around fitness, wellness, thinness and fatness, intersecting with discourses of virtue, spirituality and citizenship;

5. the evolving use of medication (over-the-counter and prescription medication, such as Ozempic);

6. Big Pharma and the opioid crisis (discourses around drug use, race, criminalization and its intersections with medicalization, public health and discourses of morality).

Since the proseminar is focused as much on content as on research methods and skills, students will choose a research area and conduct a small case study, and write a 10 - 15 page research paper, in addition to several other course requirements. This will require composing a literature review, forming a thesis and analyzing a selected health-related discourse to show its cultural relevance.

• A Reader in Medical Anthropology: Theoretical Trajectories, Emergent Realities, ed. B.J. Good, M. J. Fischer, S. Willen, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, 2010

• The Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology, ed. L. Manderson, E. Cartwright, A. Hardon, Routledge, 2012

• Michel Foucault: The History of Sexuality vol. 1, Vintage books ed., New York, 1990

• Michel Foucault: The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

• Kimberly Sue: Getting Wrecked: Women, Incarceration, and the American Opioid Crisis (Volume 46) (California Series in Public Anthropology), University of California Press, 2019.

• Brodkin, K. (2001). Comments on “Discourses of Whiteness.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 11(1), 147-150.

• Hansen, H. (2017). Assisted technologies of social reproduction: Pharmaceutical prosthesis for gender, race, and class in the White opioid “crisis.” Contemporary Drug Problems, 44(4), 321-338.

• Hansen, H. & Skinner, M. (2012). From white bullet to black markets and greened medicine: The neuroeconomics and neuroracial politics of opioid pharmaceuticals. Annals of Anthropological Practice 36(1), 167-182.

• Levine-Rasky (2016). Whiteness fractured. New York: Routledge.

• Mendoza, S., Rivera, A., & Hansen, H. (2018). Re-racialization of addiction and the re-distribution of blame in the white opioid epidemic. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 00(0), 1-21.

• Netherland, J. & Hansen, H. (2016). The war on drugs that wasn’t: Wasted whiteness, ‘dirty doctors,’ and race in media coverage of prescription opioid misuse. Culture, Medicine, & Psychiatry 40, 664-686.

• The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies, ed. Amy Erdman Farrell, Routledge, 2023.

• The Fat Studies Reader, Edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay, New York University Press, New York, 2009.

• Catherine Liu: Virtue Hoarding. The case against professional managerial class. University of Minnesota Press, 2021.

The readings may be subject to change.

The most important effect of learning in this course is acquiring the skills planning and conducting research, and writing a research paper of 10 - 15 pages.

Main skills from the course:

- searching for primary and secondary sources, source evaluation

- presentation of complicated research results in a clear and coherent way

- ability to form a convincing argument

- ability to form a bilbiography and quote sources correctly, to avoid plagiarism

- ability to work independently

- writing a first draft of research paper and editing it, accordingto teacher's notes, to form a final version of a research paper

The final grade will be composed based on the following cirteria:

1. Participation in class - students can miss one class: 5% of final grade ostatecznej oceny

2. Active participation in class discussion or entry tests - 10% of final grade

3. Portfolio: all class exercises, homework exercises, research paper (first version and final version)– 85% of final grade

60% of points is the minimum for passing this course

Grading:

0-60 – 2

61-77 – 3

78-89 – 4

90-100 – 5