MMH 702: Social Medicine Proseminar: Advanced Topics and Applications

MMH 702: Social Medicine Proseminar: Advanced Topics and Applications

(Course Director: Lindsey Zeve, PhD, David S. Jones, MD, PhD)

The Proseminar in Social Medicine is a two-semester course required of all students in the Master’s in Media, Medicine, and Health program. Social medicine uses insights from the social sciences to improve medical theory and healthcare delivery. The second semester of the course will build on methodological and critical analytic foundations established in the first by exploring the field’s diversehistoricalrootsin19th-and 20th-century Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and North America. It will enable students to situate different practical approaches to social medicine in the local contexts in which they developed and help students to understand how history and social exigency shape both continuities and discontinuities across them. Finally, it will examine contemporary case studies of social medicine, allowing students to apply the critical analytic and methodological skills learned in the first semester of the course to urgent and emergent health equity challenges.

Primary Learning Goals: 1. Understand the history of social medicine and the continuities and discontinuities of inquiry from Vichow, Engels, Du Bois, and Allende through Kleinman, Farmer, and Fanon. 2. Appreciate how a historical understanding of the field of social medicine and its diverse traditions can inform practitioners’ choice of methodological and practical approaches to contemporary health equity challenges. 3. Evaluate the role of global and local social forces in determining the burden of risk, morbidity, and mortality, across time and place, especially among the poor and marginalized. 4. Apply critical analytic and methodological approaches learned in the first semester of the course, in combination with deep historical understanding of the field, to original analyses of urgent and emergent social medicine problems.

Prerequisites: There are no formal prerequisites.

Credits: 4 Grading: Ordinal

MMH 705: Storytelling Methods to Promote Health and Well-Being

(Course Directors: Neal Baer, MD, Suzanne Koven, MD, MFA)

There is a growing and influential body of literature showing that promoting positive healthrelated behavior and change can be influenced by drawing on mass media, storytelling, and the arts. This includes traditional public health outreach campaigns, but also newer and more innovative programs in which both nonfictional and dramatized depictions of public health issues create and encourage pro-health related behaviors. This course explores a plethora of storytelling modalities that can be used to promote health and well-being, ranging from blogs, op-eds, and podcasts to theater, graphic novels, and poetry. The semester course will explore the research that can be drawn onto strengthen health communication and will survey the different modalities of messaging, emphasizing which of these modalities is most appropriate for a given audience.

Primary Learning Goals: 1. Discuss different storytelling modalities available for health outreach and determine which are most effective for particular behavioral change goals. 2. Describe the benefits of different forms of entertainment and storytelling modalities as a means of creating pro-health behavior with attention paid to cross-cultural approaches.