CHI215 | Health in the age of Policy: (Critical) Perspectives on Global Public Health.

Drawing from medical anthropology, critical perspectives in global public health, post-colonial studies of science and society, and the sociology of health and work, this course will address a range of questions that are significant to the disciplines of health policy, law, medicine and global public health. It offers a critical perspective on social issues pertaining to the history of disease and colonial medicine, gender, disability, labour laws, work, ageing and chronic illness. The course also addresses questions relating to the state and the market through case studies on pharmaceuticals and immunisation schemes in the context of understanding the role of medicine and global market relations.

The course is a stand-alone course designed largely for students of law and public policy who are in the senior years of BA LLB (Hons), LLB (Hons), LLM and the MPP Program. It offers interdisciplinary conversations in law, public policy, medicine, sociology, social anthropology, development studies, and global health. This course is comparative in nature, with ethnographic studies chosen from different parts of the globe, especially from the global south. The course has a significant focus on India, and with a global outlook, which brings public health studies and its legal frameworks within India into conversation with critical perspectives from the third world regions.

By examining diverse ethnographic studies focusing on cultural beliefs and practices surrounding experiences of illness and disease, as well as research articles on critical public health debates, this course will explore socio-economic, political, and cultural contributors to health, illness, and healing.

Focusing on critically analysing one world one health policy frameworks, environmental health and ecology, and understanding the body through pharmaceuticals, foods, metabolism and labour largely from regions of Africa, South Asia and Latin America. The course will be used to explore how health, illness, healing practices and its legal frameworks are culturally constructed and mediated. The key topics to be covered include:

1. Body, Medicine and Society: Looks at the history of global public health and situates the troubled legal histories of colonial medicine and empire. This section offers the theoretical perspectives on the cultural construction of medical reality, legal governance and health governance built on continued power hierarchies in global health studies.

2. Narrating Health and Illness: This module looks at illness narratives, care, and interpersonal relations to equip students with an understanding of how the meaning of health and ill-health is culturally, legally and socially derived and constructed, which obstructs the biologically and medically deterministic ideas of health. This section attempts to study the social, cultural legal and political determinants of health through critical anthropological inquiry, and considers different theoretical orientations and legal paradigms to understanding health, illness and healing practices.

3. State, Capital and Medicine: This module engages human rights and health, vertical and comprehensive health interventions, the politics and economics of health systems and governance, the practice of measuring health, the role of the state, civil society and public- private partnerships in contemporary health care delivery, global health technologies, innovations, public policy research and ethics. It draws from critical literature largely from the global south on power relations, global capital relations and public health.

4. Health and the Labouring Body: This section looks at the symbiotic relationship of health, work and the body. It introduces how gender, age, race, caste and labour relations structure the experience of health and the lack of it. The module places special attention on labour relations and work as it engages students on how the body and work are embedded in each other.

The course will use a combination of pedagogical tools, but will mainly rely on lecture and seminar-style discussions to develop an enabling and informed environment, which engages with students according to their needs. For most classes, depending on the particular module, a few students will be expected to lead the class discussion as discussants based on the reading. The classroom teaching methods involve participating in presentations, setting up debates by identifying different strands of opinion in the class on philosophical or social issues and helping the students negotiate differences while drawing upon the prescribed texts. Drawing from my varied teaching experience, the offered course is an invitation for students to think critically, beyond dichotomies of right and wrong, and critically inquire into the discipline of global health, legal studies and medical education itself, keeping in mind its interactions with the social, cultural and material world we occupy.

Steeped in the understanding of customising academic and cultural resources along with opportunities for exposure to social realities in response to demands evolving out of an ongoing interaction in a non-hierarchical alternation between students and teachers would be of primary importance. This is particularly crucial to model to students, who will be encouraged to develop a person-centered sensibility in their ongoing research while questioning the social and economic factors that shape global experiences.