Health Humanities & Society Minor

The Health Humanities & Society Minor at TU offers students an opportunity to learn about the intersection of health, medicine, disability, and bioethics with disciplines housed in the arts and sciences. Our goal is to serve students across the university who wish to think critically and creatively about the way we define and pursue health within and beyond institutions built to provide medical care. How do first-person narratives grant unique insight into the experience of illness and injury? How does media shape our experience of our bodies and wellbeing? How have ideas of health care and access changed over time? How do these values vary across cultures? What changes when we recognize the powerful role that human psychology plays in medical environments? What societal and economic barriers impede access to health care for marginalized communities? And how have disabled communities empowered collective struggles for equity and justice? These are some of the questions students will have the opportunity to investigate in this minor.  

In speaking to an array of interdisciplinary subjects, many courses offered in conjunction with the minor will consider how people record and reimagine health in literature, media, artistic practice, and historical documents. Many will investigate how social, political, and economic factors either improve health outcomes or lead to structural inequity across diverse societies, cultures, time periods, and geographies. Courses will ask how the humanities and social sciences bring skills and competencies to bear on health care in ways that promote empathy and equal access. Our curriculum will open opportunities to reorient health paradigms by prioritizing the embodied knowledge of people living with disabilities and chronic illness. Courses will also consider the way we develop bioethical foundations for education in the health sciences and ensure access for vulnerable communities.  

This minor accentuates specific skills and competencies central to the social sciences and humanities. These include sociological and anthropological study, psychological experiment, quantitative and qualitative analysis, contemporary media literacy, archival research, fluency in ethics and philosophy, critical theorization, artistic practice and performance, narrative expression, close reading, and creative problem solving. By combining these competencies across an array of interdisciplinary syllabi, we hope to foster innovative student work poised to make positive contributions to an array of challenges facing both providers and people seeking sustainable forms of health and care consistent with their own needs, beliefs, and cultural values.