Community Studies - Spring 1998

This new course is designed for any student interested in the social context of women's health. While all women share biological commonalties, their social positions, occupations, and personal choices create unique situations. This course challenges purely biomedical definitions of women's health through a multi-cultural and feminist approach.

The basic text for this course will be Sheryl Ruzek, Virginia Olesen, and Adele Clarke, Women's Health : Complexities and Differences, Ohio State University, 1997. There will be other readings and weekly media presentations (films) and speakers.

Evaluation will be based on participation, reaction papers to the readings and lecture, and a final research paper.

Some of the questions explored in the course are:

• Is women's health simply the absence of disease?
• What have been the consequences of promoting narrow biomedical models of disease?
• What do pervasive patterns of disease, illness and death tell us about the sources of ill health?
• How do race, gender, class, and culture shape health?
• What roles do sexism, racism, class privilege, and cultural sensitivity (or insensitivity) play in women's health?
• Within the U.S., what are the structural challenges to health for Native , Latina, Asian and African American and how are women and communities of color responding to these challenges?
• What are women's health movements, where do they exist, and how do they differ?

Week 1: What is women's health?

• Social, biomedical, and feminist models

Week 2: What we share and how we differ:

• Structural barriers to access; disability; the impacts of racism and class

Week 3: Creating women's health: Health practices, working and living conditions, and medical care:

• Personal health behavior; women's work in the global and national economy (industry, agriculture, electronics assembly, prostitution); domestic work and health; medical care systems

Week 4: Culture and complexities

• Historical and cultural contexts of Native American health, trauma of cancer and war for Asian/Pacific women; myths, stereotypes, and consequences for pregnant Latinas; the consequences of beauty myths.

Week 5: Intersections of racism, class, and culture

• Disease and chronic life stress for African American women; power and mental health; older women's health

Weeks 6-7 Power and social control

• Lesbian health; women's health in prison;the many forms of violence--rape, battery, sexual harassment--and the movements which combat them.

Week 8: Reproductive rights

• The politics of abortion and contraception; the ethics, economics and legal contexts of new fertility and reproductive technologies.

Week 9: Two cases of feminist organizing: Breast cancer and AIDS

• Breast cancer: Race, class, and environmental perspectives, politics of prevention and care.
• AIDS: International organizing; empowerment theories

Week 10: Policy and organizing challenges for the future

• Predicting women's status and health in the 21st century.

A three-unit course co-taught by James McCloskey, Professor of Linguistics, and David Brundage, Associate Professor of Community Studies.

The course, entitled "Northern Ireland: Communities in Conflict," introduces students to the so-called "troubles" in Northern Ireland, from the 1960s to the present. Through reading, lectures, and seminar discussions, we will examine the historical background to the troubles, the character of the conflict in the 1970s and 1980s, and the dynamics of the on-going peace process of the 1990s.

Revised 7/13/04.