The health, humanities, and society minor is designed for students who would like to learn how to think capaciously and creatively about health using the rigorous, precise, and flexible skills trained by the social sciences and the humanities. The social sciences teach students to think about the social, economic, and political factors that structure health conditions and outcomes in particular societies, while the humanities train students to navigate the complexities of interpersonal interaction and their ethical implications, to relate the micro to the macro and texts to contexts, to historicize encounters, to communicate accurately and effectively across a variety of media, and to engage in creative analytical thinking about healthcare. The landscape of healthcare is quickly changing, and this training will equip students well not only for the diverse forms of health work that exist today, but for as yet unimaginable varieties of health-related work in the future.
This minor is structured around the particular competencies that the social sciences and humanities train. Those competencies are narrative and historical perspective, critical attention and observation, ethics and judgment, performance and creativity, and social and structural proficiency. Rather than adopting the more traditional approach of connecting particular skills to particular disciplines (say, narrative to literature and observation to art history), this minor builds from discipline-specific health knowledge while training students to think across disciplines. Thus, it will not be unusual for students to find a single course addressing multiple competencies or to take courses in different disciplines that address the same competency from distinct but complementary perspectives.
This minor is housed in the Humanities Center of the College of Social Sciences and Humanities in partnership with the Bouvé College of Health Sciences.
Complete all courses listed below unless otherwise indicated. Also complete any corequisite labs, recitations, clinicals, or tools courses where specified.
Required Courses
No more than two courses, in addition to the introductory course, may be taken under the 2000 level.
Course List | Code | Title | Hours |
| INSH 1300 | Introduction to Health and Humanities | 4 |
| 8 |
| Writing to Heal | |
| The Archives of Public Health | |
| Narrative Medicine | |
| Capstone Seminar | |
| The History of Western Public Health | |
| Culture, Technology, and the Future of Health | |
| Moral and Social Problems in Healthcare | |
| Sex in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam | |
| Bioethics in the Age of Big Data | |
| Gender, Race, and Medicine | |
| 8 |
| Epidemiology of Pandemic Diseases and Health Disparities in the African Diaspora | |
| Community Health, Culture, and Development in Kenya | |
| Special Topics in Anthropology | |
| Mapping and Building Health | |
| Healthcare and Medical Economics | |
| The (in)Visibility of (dis)Ability in Society | |
| Introduction to Global Health | |
| Communication Skills for the Health Professions | |
| Communication Skills for the Health Professions—Global |
| Global Perspectives on Discrimination and Health | |
| Introduction to Epidemiology | |
| Economic Perspectives on Health Policy | |
| Drugs and Society | |
| Gender and Reproductive Justice | |
| Sociology of Health and Illness | |
GPA Requirement
2.000 GPA required in the minor
