Special Topics in Global Health (390-0-23)

Topic

Clinical Materialities: Artifacts of Modern Health

Instructors

Matilda Stubbs

Meeting Info

Annenberg Hall G28: Wed 9:00AM - 11:50AM

Overview of class

This course engages with the study of clinical material culture. From biometric data, filling out forms and processing paperwork, to photo IDs, even vital records like birth and death certificates, these objects have become artifacts of modern clinical life. However, as new technologies emerge, like the smartphone and phone apps, so changes the materiality of global health care. Readings, podcasts, and films trace the often taken-for-granted artifacts of the everyday in hospitals, clinics, and outpatient care spaces, to explore the sociomaterial contributions of objects to mediate and facilitate global health service delivery. Students will identify and investigate different kinds of objects - physical and digital - to expand understandings of how people produce and use devices to administer or receive treatment, in often very habituated and unnoticed ways. In addition to demonstrating the importance of looking at these features of organizational life, assignments invite students to explore the diverse ways these material practices categorize and sort, but also construct and segregate relationships with providers and recipients of health care cross-culturally.