HLTH 17000
Introduction to Health and Society
Paula Martin
M W 1:30 – 2:50 PM
Disability, experiences of illness, categories of disorder, ideals of well-being, and models of medical intervention can all vary between cultural settings and across history. Rapid changes in medicine and biotechnology create new understandings and expectations about illness, health, and well-being. At the same time, inequalities in access to care and in health outcomes across populations, in the United States and globally, have become important to conversations in policy and practice alike. This course introduces students introduces students to the social, political, and economic processes that shape individual and population health, as well as to a range of concepts and methods which social scientists use to study these processes. A requirement for students undertaking the “Health and Society” minor, the class will also serve as an introduction to the faculty researching and teaching on issues of health and society in the Social Sciences Division and beyond.

HLTH 24299 (ANTH 24299, CHDV 24299, GNSE 24299, HIPS 24299)
Troubling Adolescence
Paula Martin
M W 3:00 – 4:20 PM
Many theories of “adolescence” have often emphasized it as a development period of rapid change, risk taking, and experimentation. This course will take on some of key health-related concerns of adolescence, such as mental health (eg. depression, anxiety) and risk behaviors (eg. substance use, sexuality) asking after the phenomenological experience of such concerns as well as exploring their cultural specify. Furthermore, this course will review key historical and development frameworks for understanding “adolescence,” reading them alongside anthropological and queer theories of temporality. Ultimately, the course asks, how do the troubles of adolescence play out in different contexts? And what happens if we trouble the concept of adolescence itself?

CHDV 20655 (HLTH 20655)
Child and Adolescent Development in Context
Leoandra Rogers
T TR 2:00 – 3:20 PM
This course focuses on human development from infancy through adolescence. Students will learn how culture and context influence the development of perception, cognition, language, identity, and social interaction. The course considers perspectives and methods in developmental research. As each new topic is introduced, students are encouraged to think critically about the assumptions and methods that underlie research on particular issues, and how to apply such research to real-world issues. Students will complete multiple applied assignments to demonstrate knowledge of course concepts.

CHDV 22305 (HLTH 22305, HIPS 23305, ANTH 22305)
Who Deserves What? Analyzing Inequalities in Institutional Decision-Making
Anna Prior
T TR 3:30 – 4:50 PM
A key element of societal structuring is producing and reproducing ways to identify ourselves and categorize each other. Ways of differentiating often carry with them implicit or explicit moral assessments – is this difference good or bad, valuable or not? Government institutions and other systems of social organization make decisions and allocate resources based on markers of difference. Therefore, inequalities based on morally loaded categories become embedded in systems that decide who is deserving of earning a diagnosis, health care, a legal status or other resources. This course looks at the ways people become labeled (desirably or not), how these labels impact institutional or systemic decision-making, and how moral assessments are present in justifications of such decisions. Over the quarter we will introduce and apply the analytic of deservingness and investigate decision-making processes (e.g., diagnosis, legal claims, insurance coverage) in various geographic locations and settings with a focus on medical, legal, and bureaucratic institutions. We will explore themes of objectivity, evaluation, expert intervention, inequality, systemic violence and moral justification. Primary course questions include: How do institutions and governments make decisions? How are their decisions justified? What role do experts and expert knowledge play in decision-making? As an analytic tool, what does deservingness make visible about decision-making processes and their impacts?

CHDV 23305 (HLTH 23305, CHDV 33305, ANTH 24333, ANTH 35133, EDSO 23305)
Critical Studies of Mental Health in Higher Education
Eugene Raikhel
M 9:30 AM – 12:20 PM
This course draws on a range of perspectives from across the interpretive, critical, and humanistic social sciences to examine the issues of mental health, illness, and distress in higher education.

CHDV 27250 (HLTH 27250, HIPS 27250, CHDV 37250, ANTH 24321)
Psychological Anthropology
Sevda Numanbayraktaroglu
M W 1:30 – 2:50 PM
This course traces the development of the field of psychological anthropology and critically reviews the various paradigms adopted by psychological anthropologists. In our discussions, we will draw examples from different cultural contexts to critically examine the relationship between culture and psychological functioning. By the end of the quarter, you will develop an insightful understanding of the cultural sources of the self, mind, behavior, and mental health as well as a substantial knowledge of the field of psychological anthropology.

CCTS 32000 (HLTH, CHST, HIPS, HMRT, RLST: 26306)
Religion, Medicine, and Human Flourishing on the South Side of Chicago
John Yoon
F 9:30 AM – 12:20 PM
Modern medicine historically promotes health as central to the good life. The contemporary turn in the medical and social sciences to the more capacious concept of human flourishing, however, presses these disciplines into conversation with longer traditions of inquiry on the nature of the good life for individuals and within community. How might philosophical, cultural, and religious traditions reveal the powers and limits of contemporary views of human flourishing? How does the on-the-ground experience of those pushing to advance human flourishing on the south side of Chicago challenge these categories? Sponsored by the Program on Medicine and Religion, Chicago Studies, InterFaith America, the Hyde Park Institute, the Lumen Christi Institute, and the Chicago Collective on Faith & Flourishing, this course is an innovative experiential course open to undergraduates in the College. This course seeks to expose students to traditional and contemporary perspectives of health and human flourishing, while offering opportunities to engage local faith-based non-profit organizations that seek to promote human flourishing among underserved communities in the South Side of Chicago. Note: Instructor’s prior consent required for course enrollment to ensure students fully appreciate the dimensions of field education and experiential learning expected from this course.

GNSE 13003 (HLTH 20303)
Sex, Power, Culture
Red Tremmel
T TR 3:30 – 4:50 PM
Taking a historical and interdisciplinary approach that focuses primarily on the US context, this course invites students to identify and analyze the cultural, socioeconomic, and political forces that shape and are shaped by sex, sexuality, and the erotic. We will zoom in on a diverse array of topics, including hook-up culture, porn, the feminist sex wars, reproductive justice, liberatory sexual political movements, and an array of relationship formations such as monogamy and relationship anarchy to ask, what might we know about power by studying sex? And what might we know about sex, by studying power?

HIST 29607 (HLTH 29607, HIPS 26207) 
History Colloquium: Epidemics, Public Health, and Cities
Susan Burns
M W 1:30 – 2:50 PM
The ongoing COVID-19 epidemic has brought a new awareness of the devastating impact of epidemic disease, particularly in cities where population density and other factors contribute to high rates of infection. This undergraduate colloquium aims to guide students through the research and writing of an original research paper that explores public health response to epidemic disease in cities around the world. Topics to be examined include defining an appropriate research question, identifying relevant secondary literature, finding primary sources, and constructing a compelling narrative.

HUMA 25207 (HLTH 25207, HIPS 25207, MADD 14207, TAPS 20507)
Mindfulness: Experience and Media
Margot Browning
F 9:30 AM – 12:20 PM
How do we experience media (of all kinds) with (or without) awareness? Methods of mindfulness offer principles and practices of awareness focusing on mind, body, and embodied mind. Mindfulness (a flexible, moment-to-moment, non-judging awareness) is an individual experience and at the same time, practices of mindfulness can be a mode of public health intervention. Mindfulness involves social epistemologies of how we know (or don’t know) collectively, as we interact with immediate sensory experience as well as with mediated communication technologies generating various sorts of virtual realities (from books to VR). In addition to readings and discussions, this course teaches embodied practices of attention and awareness through the curriculum of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.

MSPH 47000 (HLTH 27002, CEGU 27000, CEGU 47000) 
Leveraging Sensors and Mobile Technologies for Population Health Research
Laura A. McGuinn
T TR 2:00 – 3:20 PM
This course explores the use of wearable devices, mobile technologies, and environmental sensors in population and precision health research, with a focus on mental health and well-being. Students will learn how to integrate physiological, behavioral, and environmental data to measure health outcomes and exposures in real-world settings. The course covers key topics such as study design, data collection methods like ecological momentary assessment, data analysis techniques for mobile health data, and challenges related to adherence and health disparities. By the end, students will gain the practical skills to design and analyze studies using these advanced technologies for health research.

PBHS 30910 (HLTH 20910, BIOS 27810, ENST 27400, PPHA 36410, STAT 22810)
Epidemiology and Population Health
Staff
W 5:30 – 6:30 PM
Epidemiology is the basic science of public health. It is the study of how diseases are distributed across populations and how one designs population-based studies to learn about disease causes, with the object of identifying preventive strategies. Epidemiology is a quantitative field and draws on biostatistical methods. Historically, epidemiology’s roots were in the investigation of infectious disease outbreaks and epidemics. Since the mid-twentieth century, the scope of epidemiologic investigations has expanded to a fuller range non-infectious diseases and health problems. This course will introduce classic studies, study designs and analytic methods, with a focus on global health problems.

PBHS 35700 (HLTH 25700, HLTH 35700)
Proseminar on Corporate Power and Capital in the US Health System
Joseph Bruch
T TR 3:30 – 4:50 PM
This course examines the US health system through interdisciplinary perspectives, focusing on the interplay between corporate power, capital, and health. Topics include the emergence of modern corporations, the privatization of health services, the commodification of health products, the monetization of health data, and the consolidation of health care markets. The course also explores key tensions in contemporary health systems, including the balance between innovation and affordability, profit motives and equitable access, and corporate interests and public health priorities. Readings draw from economic sociology, political science, health economics, public health, and the history of economic thought. This course aims to offer fresh perspectives to students interested in public health, medicine, health care management, and policy.

PBHS 31450 (HLTH 27450, CRES 27450)
Social Inequalities in Health: Race/Ethnicity & Class
Seleeke Flingai
M W 3:00 – 4:20 PM 
This course examines how social stratification and social inequality shape racial/ethnic and socioeconomic inequalities in health. In particular, we will explore the production of race and class inequality in the US and draw on the extant theoretical and empirical literature to understand how these social factors influence health behaviors and health outcomes. Finally, we will review both the classic and emerging methodological approaches used by public health and social scientists to measure and test how these features of society get “under the skin” to shape a variety of health outcomes.

PBHS 31900 (HLTH 27905, PBPL 27905)
Global Health Metrics
Kavi Bhalla
T TR 11:00 AM – 12:20 PM
This course provides an overview of the causes of illness and injury in populations across the world and the most important risk factors. We will discuss how population health is measured using summary indicators that combine mortality and non-fatal health outcomes. We will use these indicators to compare and contrast the health of populations across global regions and in time. Sound measurement of the global burden of disease is essential for prioritizing prevention strategies. Therefore, there will be a strong emphasis on understanding how data sources in information-poor settings are used to generate estimates of population health.

PBHS 33900 (HLTH 23900)
Introduction to Urban Health
Seleeke Flingai
T TR 2:00 – 3:20 PM
This seminar course will provide a broad overview of the political, economic, social, and physical conditions that impact the health of populations in urban settings. Using social epidemiological theories and the logics of racial capitalism and neoliberalism as points of departure, this course will take a critical approach to the study of urban health and its determinants. Beginning with a grounding in urban political economy and governance, the rest of the course will explore several fundamental topics in urban health, including the role of neighborhoods, housing, and spatial processes such as segregation, gentrification, and neighborhood redevelopment on health; social cohesion and social capital; the criminal legal system; climate vulnerability and environmental exposures; and accessibility to health-promoting resources such as healthy food, health care facilities, and more. Given the interdisciplinary nature of urban health, we will draw insights from a range of disciplines (e.g., public health, history, political economy, sociology, critical geography, and urban studies); given the constraints of a single course, the material will primarily focus on the U.S. context. The ultimate goal of this course is to have students develop a critical perspective and a set of actionable frameworks to analyze the relationship between urban processes (political, economic, spatial, etc.) and health.

PBHS 35100 (HLTH 29100, PPHA 38010, SSAD 46300)
Health Services Research Methods
Prachi Sangavi
M W 1:30 – 2:50 PM
The purpose of this course is to better acquaint students with the methodological issues of research design and data analysis widely used in empirical health services research. To deal with these methods, the course will use a combination of readings, lectures, problem sets (using STATA), and discussion of applications. The course assumes that students have had a prior course in statistics, including the use of linear regression methods.

PBPL 28925 (HLTH, ARCH, CEGU, ENST: 28925)
Health Impacts of Transportation Policies
Kavi Bhalla
M 4:30 – 7:20 PM
Governments invest in transport infrastructure because it encourages economic growth and mobility of people and goods, which have direct and indirect benefits to health. Yet, an excessive reliance on motorized modes of transport harms population health, the environment, and social well-being. The impact on population health is substantial: Globally, road traffic crashes kill over 1.3 million annually. Air pollution, to which transport is an important contributor, kills another 3.2 million people. Motorized modes of transport are also an important contributor to sedentary lifestyles. Physical inactivity is estimated to cause 3.2 million deaths every year, globally. This course will introduce students to thinking about transportation as a technological system that affects human health and well-being through intended and unintended mechanisms. The course will examine the complex relationship between transportation, land use, urban form, and geography, and explore how decisions in other sectors affect transportation systems, and how these in turn affect human health. Students will learn to recognize how the system level properties of a range of transportation systems (such as limited-access highways, urban mass transit, inter-city rail) affect human health.

PSYC 21750 (HLTH 21750, BIOS 24248, NSCI 21400)
Biological Clocks and Behavior
Brian Prendergast
T TR 12:30 – 1:50 PM
This course will address physiological and molecular biological aspects of circadian and seasonal rhythms in biology and behavior. The course will primarily emphasize biological and molecular mechanisms of CNS function, and will be taught at a molecular level of analysis from the beginning of the quarter. Those students without a strong biology background are unlikely to resonate with the course material.

RDIN 21600 (HLTH 21600, CHDV 21600, GNSE 23181, GNSE 33181, HIST 27810, HIST 37810, RDIN 31600)
Histories of Abortion and Forced Sterilization in the United States
Caine Jordan
T TR 11:00 AM – 12:20 PM
In the United States, the politics of pregnancy and reproductive autonomy have historically been and continue to be categories of significance, meaning, and contention. In this course, we will explore a subsection of these broader categories, examining the relation between abortion and forced sterilization, the state, and women of color. The course will zero in on the experiences of Mexican American and Mexican immigrant women, African American women, Puerto Rican women, and Native American women, considering their struggles against the state and for reproductive justice.

RLST 23300 (HLTH 23300, ANTH 23301, CCTS 23300, COGS 26802) 
Religion and Psychiatry
Owen Joyce-Coughlan
M W 4:30 – 5:50 PM
This course will investigate the many theoretical and practical problems which emerge where the domains of psychiatry and religion overlap. We will explore questions such as: What are the common realities that religious and psychiatric frameworks seek to explain? Are being “divinely inspired” and being “mad” mutually exclusive? How do religious and other cultural categories shape the development of what are called “mental disorders”? Are cognitive behavioral therapists more effective than witchdoctors at restoring people to health? We will begin with a brief overview of the history of psychiatry, before analyzing a famous case of mass demonic possession in 17th century France. We will take several weeks to explore contemporary psychiatric diagnoses, contrasting how psychiatrists and religious authors describe similar symptoms in different ways. We will compare diverse therapeutic methods, modern and traditional, to ask what makes each of them effective or ineffective. Finally, we will survey proposed alternatives to the prevailing diagnostic frameworks within psychiatry, asking which, if any, our study of the overlapping domains of religion and psychiatry might lend support.

SOCI 20611 (HLTH 22132, GNSE 12132, HMRT 28725)
Gender, Sexuality, and Medicine
Theodora Hurley
TR 12:30 – 1:50 PM
How do gender and sexuality shape experiences of medicine? How does medicine shape experiences of gender and sexuality? This course critically examines gender, sexuality, and medicine as intertwined entities whose intersections teach us much about identities, institutions, and inequalities both historical and contemporary. Doubling as an introduction to medical sociology, this course considers medicine as an institution that produces knowledge, regulates bodies, shapes identities, and distributes access to health resources in ways that are uneven across, and significant for, categories of gender, sexuality, and other forms of social difference. We analyze these functions of medicine through some of its most prominent intersections with gender and sexuality in the United States, including the medicalization of homosexuality and gender variance, the medical regulation of reproduction from forced sterilizations to the rise of hospital births, the feminist health movement, intersex and gender-affirming medical practices, and the role of gender and sexual difference in medical research. Course materials consist primarily of ethnographic and popular sources. A major focus of the course is connecting personal experiences and popular sources to scholarly perspectives.

ENST 20224 
Studying Online Cultures:  An Introduction to Digital Ethnographic Methods (Approved HLTH Elective) 
“Virtual worlds are places of imagination that encompass practices of play, performance, creativity and ritual.” – Tom Boellstorff, from Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method This course is designed to provide students in the social sciences with a review of ethnographic research methods in an online environment, exposure to major debates on virtual ethnographic research, and opportunities to try their hand at practicing fieldwork virtually. We will analyze and problematize enduring oppositions associated with ethnographic fieldwork – field/home, insider/outsider, researcher/research subject, expert/novice, ‘being there’/removal-and we will debate epistemological, ethical, and practical matters in online ethnographic research. Mirroring the complexities and opportunities of research in virtual worlds, this course will alternate between in-person and online instruction, and will combine synchronous and asynchronous opportunities for conversation, work, and play.”

SOSC 20112
Introductory Statistical Methods and Applications for the Social Sciences (Methods Course)
This course introduces and applies fundamental statistical concepts, principles, and procedures to the analysis of data in the social and behavioral sciences. Students will learn computation, interpretation, and application of commonly used descriptive and inferential statistical procedures as they relate to social and behavioral research. These include z-test, t-test, bivariate correlation and simple linear regression with an introduction to analysis of variance and multiple regression. The course emphasizes understanding normal distributions, sampling distribution, hypothesis testing, and the relationship among the various techniques covered, and will integrate the use of R as a software tool for these techniques. After the course, the student will be able to (1) differentiate, utilize and apply statistical description and inference to applied research in behavioral sciences or other disciplines, (2) understand and be able to utilize various forms of charts and plots useful for statistical description, (3) understand and utilize the concept of statistical error and sampling distribution, (4) use a statistical program for data analysis, (5) select statistical procedures appropriate for the type of data collected and the research questions hypothesized, (6) distinguish between Type I and Type II errors in statistical hypothesis testing, (7) understand the concepts of statistical power and the influence of sample size on inference, and (8) summarize and write up the results.

ARCH 28702
Introduction to GIS and Spatial Analysis (Methods Course)
This course provides an introduction and overview of how spatial thinking is translated into specific methods to handle geographic information and the statistical analysis of such information. This is not a course to learn a specific GIS software program, but the goal is to learn how to think about spatial aspects of research questions, as they pertain to how the data are collected, organized and transformed, and how these spatial aspects affect statistical methods. The focus is on research questions relevant in the social sciences, which inspires the selection of the particular methods that are covered. Examples include spatial data integration (spatial join), transformations between different spatial scales (overlay), the computation of “spatial” variables (distance, buffer, shortest path), geovisualization, visual analytics, and the assessment of spatial autocorrelation (the lack of independence among spatial variables). The methods will be illustrated by means of open source software such as QGIS and R.

ENST 20550
Computing for the Social Sciences (Methods Course)
This is an applied course for social scientists with little-to-no programming experience who wish to harness growing digital and computational resources. The focus of the course is on learning the basics of programming and on generating reproducible research. Topics include coding concepts (e.g., data structures, control structures, functions, etc.), data visualization, data wrangling and cleaning, version control software, exploratory data analysis, etc. Students will leave the course with basic programming skills for the social sciences and will gain the knowledge of how to adapt and expand these skills as they are presented with new questions, methods, and data. The course is taught in R. Requirements: At least one prior course that made use of a programming language (e.g., Python, R, Stata, SPSS, etc.) in some capacity. If you are unsure or had some informal exposure, email the instructor to see if the course is a good fit.

GISC 20500 
Introduction to Spatial Data Science (Methods Course)
Spatial data science consists of a collection of concepts and methods drawn from both statistics and computer science that deal with accessing, manipulating, visualizing, exploring and reasoning about geographical data. The course introduces the types of spatial data relevant in social science inquiry and reviews a range of methods to explore these data. Topics covered include formal spatial data structures, geovisualization and visual analytics, rate smoothing, spatial autocorrelation, cluster detection and spatial data mining. An important aspect of the course is to learn and apply open source GeoDa software.

MACS 23005 
Introduction to Supervised Machine Learning for Social Scientists (Methods Course)
This course will cover the fundamentals of Supervised Machine Learning (SML). Students will be introduced to key prediction techniques like k-nearest neighbors, naive bayes classifier, regression (linear, logistic, non-linear and regularized regression models), decision trees, random forests and deep neural networks. Besides, students will learn about the importance of parameter optimization and also how to evaluate their SML model predictions using different types of cross-validation (Monte Carlo, leave-k-out, block) and with different metrics for classification problems (e.g. precision, recall, confusion matrices) or regression problems (e.g. Root-Mean Squared Error, Pearson or Spearman’s correlation). The course ends with a brief and conceptual discussion of bias, fairness and trustworthiness in SML and what is the role of interpretable methods, so that students can know where to go next to learn the state-of-the-art discussions on SML. Note that the main focus of the course will be on having the students learn the critical concepts and develop deep intuitions about the techniques. To achieve that, we will cover some of the crucial mathematical foundations, but students will also have the chance to test and play with many techniques using the R programming language (which is assumed to be known already).