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This module contests biomedical understandings of the body by exploring power and context in health science, policy, and culture. We will explore health (and its absence, or antithesis) as a product of systemic forces, a site of contested meaning and vested interests, entangled with the ‘natural’ world, and implicated in all sorts of political struggles.

After laying some groundwork, the module proceeds through a series of ‘visits’ to contemporary issues in health, medicine, and wellness. Questions for consideration include: Are racial disparities in health adequately addressed by claims that race is socially constructed? How does the production of knowledge about illness in the Global North and the Global South differ? Is ‘biosecurity’ the best approach to emerging infectious diseases like Covid-19? How do borders shape the commodification of the body in global surrogacy and tissue markets? What is at stake in the claim that medical research is constructed and partial? How are climate change and environmental toxicity shifting the racial and sexual politics of health? How could mental health be(come) part of anti-racist, decolonial, or feminist action?

We will historicise and engage with each of these matters using tools from geography, anthropology, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, science studies, and feminist theory.

At the heart of these struggles is the body, which, with its varied links to race, gender, sex, dis/ability, work, the nation-state, and the environment, is a site of intense political debate. This module does not stop at unravelling the human body as social and historical instead of genetic or natural—though that is certainly one of our principal tasks. We also try to understand how racial, gender, and colonial violence may in fact register on the body biologically.