Course Catalogue

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Most people will experience illness at some point in their life. How this dis-ease of the body is experienced, made sense of and treated varies cross-culturally. This course sets out to examine some of this cross-cultural variation in understanding and treating illness and disease through focusing on health and healing within local settings and within the context of the global reach of biomedicine. The course will highlight the role of narrative in processes of 'sense-making' in order to examine the spaces between narrative, meaning and action.

2 hours per week contact hours. This is a mixture of lectures and seminars. (10 hours of lectures, 10 hours of seminars).

Mandatory Entry Requirements

Entry to Honours Sociology requires a grade point average of 12 (Grade C) over Sociology 2A and Sociology 2B as a first attempt.

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This course will be assessed by a 4000-word essay.

The general aims of the course follow from the our honours programmes aim of developing a sound knowledge and critical understanding of the academic disciplines of Sociology and Anthropology. In keeping with this, the Honours programme as a whole aims to help you develop increasingly advanced conceptual and analytical skills within the disciplines of Sociology and Anthropology. The course aims to allow you to:

■ Provide a sound broad understanding of key issues in contemporary medical anthropology;

■ Enable you to reflect critically on health disparity both globally and nationally;

■ Explore the political implications of contrasting models of health and wellness;

■ Enable you to enhance your transferrable and inter-personal skills, particularly in communication, time management, individual and group research work, critical appraisal of current issues, and the informed use of information technology;

■ Provide you with a wide range of skills that will meet the demands of the modern labour market.

By the end of this course students should be able to:

■ Demonstrate an awareness of global diversity in health systems and practice;

■ Articulate a critical understanding of global and regional health inequalities;

■ Discuss and critically compare anthropological analyses of disease and health management;

■ Effectively analyse ways in which health, illness and disease are constructed cross-culturally;

■ Demonstrate an awareness of the ethical, methodological and policy issues raised by anthropological research on health and illness;

■ Critically evaluate and compare different systems of thought and behaviour;

■ Structure ideas effectively both orally and in written forms, work effectively independently and in groups, and develop effective time management skills.

Students must submit at least 75% by weight of the components (including examinations) of the course's summative assessment.