Health in Times of Crisis
Full course description
In addition to the core courses offered during the first trimester in Maastricht students will have the opportunity to enhance their knowledge about specific topics in the second trimester through a choice of one of eleven elective tracks. These eleven tracks are carefully selected to avoid overlap with the core programme, yet ensuring relevant contribution to the core programme.This course is the second module of the elective track "Implementing innovations on a global scale".The focal point of this course is the way health crisis are context-dependent and have different consequences for people’s health. Rather they are emergent and relational, often as exacerbations of an already lopsided 'normal' rather than a radical disturbance of an otherwise proper and fair equilibrium. People’s vulnerabilities to health (and other) risks are highly mediated by their place in the global picking order, and by how issues are framed, made visible, made known/knowable, are timed, and mapped, by scientists, doctors, politicians, journalists, and 'victims' themselves. With a focus on health issues that occur in times of crisis such as flooding, earthquakes, hurricanes and epidemics, this course critically reflects on current strategies to prevent and to respond to crisis, as well as on the discursive framings that afford such as well as alternative strategies. The course aims to unpack hegemonic framings of health in times of crisis; to critically investigate what kinds of knowledge, and whose bodies, stories, agencies and experiences they tend to make (in)visible; and to look at what kinds of 'disaster management' different rendering tend to propose.
Structure of the course:
- Week 1: Focus on theoretical perspective (framing)
- Week 2: framing, and the construction of blaming and the politics of mapping
- Week 3: a critical reflection on the temporal narrative of beginning, crisis, and end as well as (not) knowing
- Week 4: write final paper
Course objectives
After completion of this course students are able:
- to explain the different perspectives on how health related crises come about, what they are, and how they are (to be) managed.
- to explain relations between hazard, risk, disaster and vulnerabilities.
- to reflect critically on standard dichotomies, divisions and assumptions: concerning the 'nature' of crises, their causes, who they affect, their timing and what comes to (not) be known about them.
- to reflect critically on approaches in crisis management and their underlying assumptions about the problems, the solutions and the contexts in which these interact.
- demonstrate a deep (and critical) understanding of health-related 'crises' as situated, specific and discursively framed, as opposed to objectively given.
- give evidence of a critical perspective on strategies and policies related to health in times of crisis.
- present alternative approaches to understanding and dealing with health related crises.