Semester:
Fall
Offered:
2017
Technical remedies alone seldom address the complex challenges of global health. Fear or humiliation may interfere with diagnosis and available treatments. Stigma or ignorance of causes and cures can create escalating epidemics. So innovative health providers have learned to rely on creative interventions through the arts and, by extension, through creative education.
Inspired by The Global Health Education and Learning Incubator at Harvard University, our course considers the dynamic between health conditions and conditions for health, as well as responses to those conditions, both medical and non-medical. Resources for significant non-medical responses often come from cultural interventions, including traditional and contemporary arts. The interconnectedness of conditions and the far-reaching effects of creative responses are explored through cases of arts intervention in health care and through theories of why art works. What is therapeutic about making art and about thinking through the process? Readings and discussion engage a tradition of aesthetic philosophy that begins in the European Enlightenment to promote broad-based art-making as a response to conflict (Schiller) and to stimulate freedom of thought by starting with beauty (Kant). Surprising expectations and inviting us to think about the effects, “Rx: Arts for Global Health” offers basic training in the enlightened tradition of aesthetic judgment while it tracks some cases of arts that support global health.
In lectures by instructors and guest speakers, the course considers how change and growth in global health can benefit from an aesthetic approach to technical and social challenges. Theoretical readings (Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Arendt, Schiller, Dewey, Freire, Gramsci, Rancière, Mockus, Boal, Nussbaum, inter alia) accompany concrete cases of treating malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, depression. The final project will be a “case study,” of a particular health challenge, including a proposal for a creative intervention.
Inspired by The Global Health Education and Learning Incubator at Harvard University, our course considers the dynamic between health conditions and conditions for health, as well as responses to those conditions, both medical and non-medical. Resources for significant non-medical responses often come from cultural interventions, including traditional and contemporary arts. The interconnectedness of conditions and the far-reaching effects of creative responses are explored through cases of arts intervention in health care and through theories of why art works. What is therapeutic about making art and about thinking through the process? Readings and discussion engage a tradition of aesthetic philosophy that begins in the European Enlightenment to promote broad-based art-making as a response to conflict (Schiller) and to stimulate freedom of thought by starting with beauty (Kant). Surprising expectations and inviting us to think about the effects, “Rx: Arts for Global Health” offers basic training in the enlightened tradition of aesthetic judgment while it tracks some cases of arts that support global health.
In lectures by instructors and guest speakers, the course considers how change and growth in global health can benefit from an aesthetic approach to technical and social challenges. Theoretical readings (Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Arendt, Schiller, Dewey, Freire, Gramsci, Rancière, Mockus, Boal, Nussbaum, inter alia) accompany concrete cases of treating malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, depression. The final project will be a “case study,” of a particular health challenge, including a proposal for a creative intervention.