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WGSS COURSES
WGSS 394.01 (same as INTL 394.01 & ANTH 394.02)
GLOBAL AIDS: HISTORY, POLITICS, and CULTURE
Visiting Instructor Alex Urquhart
MWF - 2:20-3:20 pm
Old Main 010
THE COURSE:
This course begins with the idea that epidemic, and HIV/AIDS in
particular, exists as a “biosocial reality” (Farmer 1999, 5). At the heart of this concept is the idea that cultural and structural relations manifest in disease, how “fundamentally social forces and processes come to be embodied as biological events” (1999, 14). Everywhere we see Framer’s argument manifest. Epidemiologists, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, medical geographers, doctors, and politicians have all made the argument that disease, and HIV in particular, is a product of stigma, inequality and poverty as much as it is a product of a biological virus. Even those who believe that HIV is punishment of vice, and is thus deserved, trace the pathways of poverty, deviance, and difference that AIDS follows. These individuals simply make this argument for a different political purpose and with a different explanation of its root causes. What they share is an imagining of disease as a social process embedded in culture, the economy, and scientific public health discourse. To take it further, Bruno Latour suggests that a virus, like HIV, is only understandable through these social processes.
This course is a critical exploration of the constellation of agents that deploy HIV to translate our political, economic and cultural worlds. The goal, then, is to better understand the precise mechanisms that have proliferated the AIDS Pandemic as well as those that have worked for its eradication. The course begins with foundational critical social science literature on colonial medicine and the state public health apparatus in tandem with historical texts on the scientific discourses of social hygiene, moral prophylaxis, and the first attempts to control sexually transmitted infections around the world. The goal of this unit is to name the state, the economy, scientific knowledge, and social/cultural movements as the major players in making a biosocial reality of disease. We then explore the making of the global AIDS pandemic. Here we see how the emergence of a new biological agent, HIV, acted as a catalyst that transformed—and would continue to transform—political, economic, and social relations. The course relies heavily on case study methodology to further explore this ever-shifting constellation between state formations, the economy, science, and social/cultural movements. These case studies range in scale and geography and are chosen to help the students identify the different and often contradictory ways that state/transnational governing bodies, medical, scientific, and cultural forces align in making and fighting pandemic.
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