Course descriptions

Questions in global justice centrally concern whether actors in the international arena have rights, duties, and obligations towards one another. Here are some facts: Europe faces an economic crisis, Saudi Arabia is ruled by a king and no women have the right to vote, the United States has troops around the globe, and famine and violence have ravaged Darfur and Somalia. These are big issues with potentially dire humanitarian consequences, sometimes marked by radical disagreements about rights and entitlements. One dominant framework for answering these questions, Realism, rejects the idea of rights in the global arena and basically asserts that the best approach to international relations boils down to power. In this class, we will explore the viability of an alternative framework that tries to place rules on international actors: Liberalism. Reading works by Kok-Chor Tan and John Rawls, students will take a stand on issues by writing and revising papers using reasoned arguments.

In most of the world, multiple therapeutic traditions co-exist, sometimes symbiotically and at others competitively. Many societies have radically different ideas and practices concerning health, the body and disease than in the US. And these ideas and practices are contested both within these societies and between different societies in an emerging global world. In this writing seminar, we will examine several contested topics within the field of medical anthropology in Haiti, Ghana, Eastern Europe, Japan, India, Southern Africa and the US: holistic versus ontological approaches towards disease, the politics of suffering, religious healing and contestation, the meaning(s) of organ donation, biomedicine under conditions of poverty, female circumcision, the ethics of clinical trials in the developing world, and finally, HIV/AIDS. This course is designed to improve students? writing skills via peer review, multiple drafts and revisions of essays, and midterm and final portfolios.

Through online communities, social networking, blogs, and its other uses, the internet has unsettled many of our means of social connection. Concerns that life ?online? has replaced ?real? life, that online connections are inauthentic, or that digital technology is endangering privacy are all common. In this writing seminar, rather than separating the online from the off-, we will consider how people integrate digital technologies into their daily lives and relationship practices. Moving beyond optimism and despair, we will sort through how our relationships are both disrupted and enhanced by the digital: How are people using new media to create new forms of community? What are the consequences of internet-mediated communication for the development and maintenance of relationships? Using scholarship in critical information theory and internet studies, the goal of this course is to help you develop as a writer by improving your knowledge of rhetoric, reasoning, research, and synthesis.

Writers, teachers, and pundits often question the impact of digital technologies on our language and literacy skills. Pessimists go online and see the decline of the written word, a gradual weakening of standards that threatens the knowledge and understanding produced through written exchange. Optimistic observers suggest we are witnessing the emergence of new kinds of literacy and knowledge production: collaborative writing and crowdsourcing supplant single authorship and expert opinion, reputation systems and ?likes? usurp the role of publishers and peer reviewers. In this class, we will explore the cultural impact of digital technology as our uses of the written word evolve and change. Are text messages and status updates writing? Have our definitions of authorship and credibility changed? Is it still possible, or even desirable, to ?own our words,? or has the notion been forever altered by a world of tweets, wikis, downloads, and the <FWD> button?

Many diseases once considered a death sentence have become manageable thanks to groundbreaking research and development by the global pharmaceutical industry. Yet as the power of this industry grows, new questions arise about the scientific and business ethics of manufacturing and selling medicines. This seminar will explore current debates about drug development and marketing in the US and abroad. What are the ethical issues involved in human subjects research? What are the key concerns with the global growth of the use of psychotropic drugs? What is the impact of exporting American-style marketing practices to other cultures? What conflict of interest issues arise in drug marketing, both here and internationally? Exploring the controversies regarding the practices of the global pharmaceutical industry will give students ample opportunity to practice persuasive reasoning and through weekly writing and peer review. The course culminates in a research paper written in stages.

This course focuses on the ways in which markets are embedded within cultures. It presents a genealogy of the concept of ?the economy? and the market, as well as alternative models of how cultures have allocated their resources historically. Theories of the individual, exchange, markets, states and cultural practices are examined, including questioning the rational actor model and developing complex pictures of human economic behaviors based on ethnography. Through synthesizing abstract economic models with everyday practices, students consider how societies allocate resources, and how individuals make economic choices from a wide range of perspectives.