Topic & Text Assignments
Textbook: Guest, Greg, ed. Globalization, Health, and the Environment: An Integrated Perspective. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2005. (denoted in the syllabus as GHE)
Topic 1: Intro to Environmental History and Public Health
Week 1: 8/30 – Guest & Jones, “Globalization, Health, and the Environment: An Introduction” (GHE)
Week 2: 9/4 – Barnes, Chapter 2: “The Sanitarians Legacy, or How Health Became Public,” from The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008; 9/6 – Armelagos & Harper, “Disease Globalization and the Third Epidemiological Transition” (GHE)
Topic 2: Weather
Week 3: 9/11 – Cairncross & Alvarinho, “The Mozambique Floods of 2000: Health Impact and Response,” from Few & Matthies. Flood Hazards and Health: Responding to Present and Future Risks. London: Earthscan, 2006; 9/13 – Tran & Few, “Coping with Floods in the Mekong Delta, Viet Nam,” from Few & Matthies, Flood Hazards and Health: Responding to Present and Future Risks. London: Earthscan, 2006.
Week 4: 9/18 – “The Urban Inferno” and “The City of Extremes,” from Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A social autopsy of disaster in Chicago (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015; 9/20 – “Race, Place, and Vulnerability: Urban Neighborhoods and the Ecology of Support,” from Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A social autopsy of disaster in Chicago (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Topic 3: Food
Week 5: 9/25 – Leatherman, “Poverty and Violence, Hunger and Health: A Political Ecology” (GHE); 9/27 – McElroy, “Health Ecology in Nunavut: Inuit Elders’ Concepts of Nutrition, Health, and Political Change” (GHE)
Week 6: 10/2 – Joseph, “Globalization, Demography, and Nutrition: A Bekaa Bedouin Case Study” (GHE)
Week 7: 10/9 – Luber, “Globalization, Dietary Change, and ‘Second Hair’ Illness in Two Mesoamerican Cultures” (GHE); 10/11 – Etheridge, “Pellagra: An Unappreciated Reminder of Southern Distinctiveness,” from Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South, edited by Savitt and Young. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988.
Topic 4: Health in the (Mega)City
Week 8: 10/16 – Paneth & Vinten-Johansen, Chapter 7, “Cholera Theories: Controversy and Confusion,” from Cholera, Chloroform, and the Science of Medicine: A Life of John Snow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003 (OC); 10/18 – Chapter 8, “Snow’s Cholera Theory,” from Cholera, Chloroform, and the Science of Medicine (OC)
Week 9: 10/23 – Alabanza Akers & Akers, “Urbanization, Land Use, and Health in Baguio City, Philippines” (GHE); 10/25 – Rahman, Rabbani, and Tooheen, “Slums, Pollution, and Ill Health: The Case of Dhaka, Bangladesh,” from Megacities and Global Health, edited by Omar Khan, and Gregory Pappas, APHA Press, 2011.
Topic 5: Bugs!
Week 10: 10/30 – McNeill, Chapter 1: “The Argument (and Its Limits) In Brief,” Chapter 2: “Atlantic Empires and Caribbean Ecology,” and “Conclusion: Vector and Virus Vanquished,” from Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War In the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010; 11/1 – McNeill, Chapter 7: “Revolutionary Fevers, 1790-1898: Haiti, New Granada, and Cuba,” from Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War In the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914.
Week 11: 11/6 – Whiteford & Hill, “The Political Ecology of Dengue in Cuba and the Dominican Republic” (GHE); 11/8 – Wilson, “Megacities and Emerging Infections: Case Study of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,” from Megacities and Global Health.
Topic 6: Pollution
Week 12: 11/13 – “Introduction: What We Hope to Do” and “Asthma, Allergy, and Air Pollution” from Goldstein & Goldstein, How Much Risk: A Guide to Understanding Environmental Health Hazards. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002; 11/15 – Murthy, “Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster: Impact on Health and Mental Health,” from Toxic Turmoil: Psychological and Societal Consequences of Ecological Disasters, edited by Havenaar, Cwikel, and Bromet. New York: Kluwer Academic / Plenum Publishers, 2002.
Week 13: 11/20 – Dawson, S. E. (1992). Navajo uranium workers and the effects of occupational illnesses: A case study. Human Organization, 51(4), 389; “Locally Grown,” from Fox, Downwind: A people’s history of the nuclear West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.
Week 14: 11/27 – Allen, “The Popular Geography of Illness in the Industrial Corridor,” from Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs, edited by Craig E. Colten. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000; 11/29 – Tompkins, “Cancer Valley, California: Pesticides, Politics, and Childhood Disease in the Central Valley,” from Natural Protest: Essays on the History of American Environmentalism, edited by Egan & Crane. New York: Routledge, 2009
Topic 7: Responses to Environmental Challenges
Week 15: 12/4 – Douglas, Gordon. Them! 1954; 12/6 – Epstein & Guest, “International Architecture for Sustainable Development and Global Health” (GHE)