Topic & Text Assignments
Textbook: When People Come First: Critical Studies in Global Health, edited by João Biehl & Adriana Petryna, Princeton University Press, 2013.
Meleis, Afaf Ibrahim, Eugenie L. Birch, and Susan M. Wachter. Women’s Health and the World’s Cities. Berlin, Boston: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.
Khan, Omar, and Pappas, Gregory, eds. Megacities and Global Health. Washington: APHA Press, 2011.
Topic 1: Introduction – Key Issues in Public Health
Week 1: Introduction to the course; Slovic, P. (2007). "If I look at the mass I will never act": Psychic numbing and genocide. Judgment and Decision Making, 2(2), 79.
Week 2: Glaeser, Edward L. “A World of Cities: The Causes and Consequences of Urbanization in Poorer Countries.” Journal of the European Economic Association 12, no. 5 (October 1, 2014): 1154–99; Rahman, Rabbani, and Tooheen, “Slums, Pollution, and Ill Health: The Case of Dhaka, Bangladesh,” from Megacities and Global Health.
Week 3: Wilson, “Megacities and Emerging Infections: Case Study of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,” from Megacities and Global Health; Frenk & Gόmez-Dantés, “Women’s Health and the City: A Comprehensive Approach for the Developing World,” from Meleis, Afaf Ibrahim, Eugenie L. Birch, and Susan M. Wachter. Women’s Health and the World’s Cities. Berlin, Boston: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.
Topic 2: Who decides?
Week 4: Biehl & Petryna, “Critical Global Health” (WPCF); Biehl & Petryna, “Overview: Evidence” and Cueto, “A Return to the Magic Bullet? Malaria and Global Health in the Twenty-First Century” (WPCF)
Week 5: Adams, “Evidence-Based Global Public Health: Subjects, Profits, Erasures” (WPCF); Amon, “The ‘Right to Know’ or ‘Know Your Rights’? Human Rights and a People-Centered Approach to Health Policy” (WPCF)
Week 6: Fassin, “Children as Victims: The Moral Economy of Childhood in the Times of AIDS” (WPCF)
Topic 3: Megacities 2 – Policy
Week 7: Verma, “Megacity Metrics: Current Systems and Developing a Conceptual Framework,” from Megacities and Global Health; Blackshaw, “Spatial Planning, Noncommunicable Disease, and Health at the Strategic Level in London,” from Megacities and Global Health.
Week 8: Khan & Peterson, “Primary Care in Megacities of the Developing World,” from Megacities and Global Health; Messias, “The Health and Well-Being of Immigrant Women in Urban Areas,” from Women’s Health and the World’s Cities.
Week 9: Castillo-Salgado, “Urban Health Challenges of Megacities: The Case of Mexico City,” from Megacities and Global Health; Biehl & Petryna, “Overview: Interventions” (WPCF)
Topic 5: Intervention case studies
Week 10: Whyte, Whyte, Meinert, & Twebaze, “Therapeutic Clientship: Belonging in Uganda’s Projectified Landscape of AIDS Care” (WPCF); Pfeiffer, “The Struggle for a Public Sector: PEPFAR in Mozambique” (WPCF)
Week 11: Livingston, “The Next Epidemic: Pain and the Politics of Relief in Botswana’s Cancer Ward” (WPCF); Moran-Thomas, “A Salvage Ethnography of the Guinea Worm: Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic in a Disease Eradication Program” (WPCF)
Topic 6: Who pays?
Week 12: Biehl & Petryna, “Overview: Markets” (WPCF); Ecks & Harper, “Public-Private Mixes: The Market for Anti-Tuberculosis Drugs in India” (WPCF)
Week 13: Han, “Labor Instability and Community Mental Health: The Work of Pharmaceuticals in Santiago, Chile” (WPCF)
Week 14: Whitmarsh, “The Ascetic Subject of Compliance: The Turn to Chronic Diseases in Global Health” (WPCF); Biehl & Petryna, “Legal Remedies: Therapeutic Markets and the Judicialization of the Right to Health” (WPCF)
Conclusion: What next?
Week 15: Fischer, “Afterword: The Peopling of Technologies” (WPCF)