Amid escalating global environmental and health crises, this upper-level seminar critically considers the diverse relationships humans have with multiple forms of life and their implications for scientific knowledge production, agriculture, companionship, policing, entertainment, and global health and sustainability.
[WUSTL Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022]

How are the problems of environmental stress, pollution, and degradation unevenly borne? Adopting cross-cultural, biosocial, and intersectional approaches, this upper-level course traces how exposures to environmental dangers result in and exacerbate entangled health and social harms. This critical inquiry challenges us to explore possibilities for expansive yet grounded modes of justice.
[WUSTL Spring 2021, Spring 2022]

This first-year seminar explores the evolving relationships between humans, animals, and the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. In examining COVID-19 and other zoonotic disease outbreaks, this course emphasizes that a complex mix of ecological, political, economic, and social factors shape infectious disease emergence and epidemiology. In so doing, we consider the role anthropological research and perspectives might play in understanding and ameliorating global health problems in diverse contexts around the world.
[WUSTL Fall 2020]

This upper-level course uses sports as a lens into social issues of health, fitness, and the body. Exploring a range of case studies across many sports, we draw on cross-cultural and intersectional approaches to consider how race, sex/gender, and other social contrasts shape ableisms, body norms, violences, and hard-driving business interests in sports and society.
[WUSTL Fall 2020, Fall 2021]

Pharmaceuticals profoundly shape how many people understand themselves and others, experience health and illness, and seek medical care. Drawing on medico-scientific scholarship, policy debates, and ethnography, this upper-level seminar explores the social ecologies of medicine, the science and ethics of drug development and testing, the politics of regulation, and the pharmaceuticalization of global health.
[WUSTL Fall 2020, Fall 2021]

This senior / graduate level seminar explores the complex and evolving relationships between society, health, and the environment through a close and critical reading of contemporary ethnographies. Case studies include zoonotic disease and One Health, environmental racism and food insecurity, and asthma and climate change. We will attend to the specific ways particular communities differently experience and/or struggle to promote health and wellness, social justice, and environmental sustainability, while also theorizing across contexts to advance deeper conceptual integrations between medical and environmental anthropology.
[WUSTL Spring 2022]

Recent advances in science and technology are increasingly troubling the boundaries of human life. Drawing on medical anthropology, feminist/queer science studies, science and technology studies, and disability studies, this upper-level course explores how technologies offer many promises, while also posing new scientific, social, and ethical conundrums.
[WUSTL Spring 2021]

What makes a modality of healing efficacious? What cultural, medical, ritual, or religious expertise authorizes different healers and forms of healing? Adopting biosocial, cross-cultural, and intersectional approaches, this course probes entanglements between religion and medicine. Case studies include the placebo effect, Native American Church healing ceremonies, surgical fistula repair in Ethiopia, childbearing in Silicon Valley, and Tibetan medicines.
[WUSTL Fall 2021]

This introductory course surveys the basic concepts, methods, interventions, and theories of the discipline of cultural anthropology, and explores how anthropology contributes to an understanding of human behavior, experience, and diversity.
[WUSTL University College Fall 2018]