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Helen Hazen |
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GEOG 256: Medical GeographyThis course surveys medical geography, a subdiscipline which encompasses a broad range of geographical work on health and health care. What distinguishes medical geography from the discipline of geography as a whole is simply its thematic focus, not its methods or theoretical grounding. This course uses medical geographical examples to explore three groups of theoretical approaches within geography: ecological approaches, which systematically analyze relationships between people and their environments; social approaches, including political economy and recent humanist approaches; and spatial approaches, which employ maps and spatial statistics to identify patterns of single and associated variables. Students are encouraged continually to consider relationships among research questions, philosophical assumptions, and appropriate methods, as well as to question the complementarity and inherent tensions among these different theoretical approaches. Two sub-themes—environment and international perspectives—are emphasized throughout the course. The goals of this course structure are several. First, health and health care are revealed to be complex phenomena that can be understood only through a judicious combination of theoretical frameworks, questions, and techniques. One has to decide which questions are worth pursuing and how to proceed most productively to address them. Second, students have a chance to assess critically the strengths and shortcomings of different ways of “doing geography.” For some this entails a reconsideration of what they already know of geography; for others it is an introduction to the discipline. Third, students are encouraged to recognize the ways in which people adapt to and change their environments which in turn shape human health. Fourth, international comparisons and attention to links among places and across scales (from the global to the local) demonstrate that geography (spatial arrangements and place) matters.
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