UMass Boston

Course Overview

Description

The social environment is widely recognized to play a critical role in shaping patterns of health and disease within and across populations. Understanding the processes through which the social environment "gets under the skin" to influence health has become an important question across medical and social science fields, including anthropology. This course will explore key social determinants of health being explored by medical and bio-cultural anthropologists, including: socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, neighborhood environments, social relationships, and political economy. Mechanisms through which these factors are hypothesized to influence health, such as stress and access to health resources and constraints, will be discussed, as well as the ways in which these mechanisms operate within communities and across the life-course. An overarching theme of the course will be how social factors that adversely affect health are inequitably distributed, contributing to marked health disparities.