SOCIOLOGY/L 87
FRESHMAN SEMINAR: “The Politics of Illness”
Tuesdays, 2:00-3:20 pm, from Jan 4 through Feb 8, in SSB 101
Prof. Steven Epstein
Department of Sociology
University of
California, San Diego
Contact info:
Office phone: 858-534-0489
E-mail:
sepstein@ucsd.edu
Home page:
http://sociology.ucsd.edu/~sepstein
Drop-in office hours: Mon 2:30-3:30 pm and
Thu 5:00-6:00 pm in SSB 476
Summary:
This seminar will seek to understand why illness is so often a topic of political controversy. Through readings, films, and discussions, we will explore debates over what counts as illness and how societies should respond. We will analyze the cultural meanings associated with illnesses; the relation between lay and expert ways of understanding illnesses; the making of health inequalities; the new politics of bioterrorism; and the intertwining of the politics of illness with the politics of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation.
Course
Mechanics:
¨ Each week we will discuss an article or articles. (We also will watch portions of two films.) All course readings are available for download via e-reserves (http://reserves.ucsd.edu/). Please note that you will be responsible for downloading and printing each item. You can access the files from any campus computer, and you can print them with an ACS laser printing account (see http://sdacs.ucsd.edu/~icc/laser.php). You can also download and print the files from off-campus, but in order to do so you need to specify a proxy in your web browser (an easy process; see http://www-ono.ucsd.edu/documentation/squid/). In the case of any problems accessing e-reserves, library staff are available to help you.
¨ I expect all participants in the seminar to do the reading before coming to class, and to arrive prepared to participate. Please note that there is a reading assigned for the first course meeting!
¨ The seminar is graded pass/not pass. To pass the course, you must come to class, do the reading, participate in discussion, and complete a very short weekly writing assignment (less than a page).
Schedule:
Tue, Jan 4: What Counts as Illness?
Jerome Groopman, “Hurting All Over,” The New Yorker, 13 November 2000, 78-92.
Tue, Jan 11: Allergic to Society?
Video in class: [Safe], by Todd Haynes (1995)
Steve Kroll-Smith and H. Hugh Floyd, Bodies in Protest: Environmental Illness and the Struggle over Medical Knowledge (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 17-42.
Tue, Jan 18: Technology and Medicalization
Video in class: Breast Implants on Trial (Frontline, 1996).
Marcia Angell, “Evaluating the Health Risks of Breast Implants,” New England Journal of Medicine 334, no. 23 (6 June 1996): 1513-1518.
Stuart S. Blume, “Histories of Cochlear Implantation,” Social Science & Medicine 49 (1999): 1257-1268.
Tue,
Jan 25: The Patient as Expert?
Steven Epstein, “Democracy, Expertise, and AIDS Treatment Activism.” Chapter in Science, Technology, and Democracy, ed. Daniel Kleinman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 15-32.
Diane E. Goldstein, “Communities of Suffering and the Internet,” in Emerging Illnesses and Society, ed. Randall M. Packard et al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2004), 121-38.
Tue, Feb 1: Who Gets Sick?
Paul Farmer, Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plague (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1999), 37-58 and 184-210.
Tue, Feb 8: Illness,
Security, and Bioterrorism
Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Buckets for Bioterrorism, but Less for Catalog of Ills,” New York Times, 5 February 2002, A20.
Lawrence K. Altman, William J. Broad and Denise Grady, “White House Debate on Smallpox Slows Plan for Wide Vaccination,” New York Times, 13 October 2002, A20.
Denise Grady, “Big Question About Smallpox: What if . . . ?,” New York Times, 15 October 2002, F6.
Thomas Mack, “A Different View of Smallpox and Vaccination,” New England Journal of Medicine 348 (30 January 2003): 460-63.