Time Schedule:
Matthew Sparke
SIS 575
Seattle Campus
Provides resources for theorizing how politics shapes and is shaped by geographical relationships. Examines how politics are situated in complex material and discursive geographies that are partly reproduced through political negotiations. Examines interrelationships of contemporary capitalism with other complex systems of social and political power relations. Offered: jointly with GEOG 575.
Class description
The focus of the seminar this year is with the ways in which geopolitics and biopolitics overdetermine the multiple meanings and uneven material embodiments of global health and disease. We will be exploring how political geographies of domination, exploitation, and imagination shape global health inequalities, but we will also be considering the ways in which such shaping is itself mediated by the biopolitics of what Nikolas Rose calls ‘life itself’. We will begin by reading Rose’s analysis of biopolitics, juxtaposing his micrological focus on the construction of self-managing biomedical subjectivity under neoliberalism with Paul Farmer’s macrological critique of structural violence under structural adjustment and other forms of neoliberal governance. We will then examine how a range of theorists from across the social sciences and humanities have sought to make sense of such conjunctures by exploring global health inequalities in terms of neoliberal reforms and biomedical entrepreneurialism as well as in relation to longer geo-histories of colonial and post-colonial violence. Other readings include work by Catherine Waldy, Robert Mitchell, Vinh-Kim Nguyen, Bruce Braun, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Alan Ingram, and Nicholas King.
Readings 1. Paul Farmer, 2005: Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, Berkeley: University of California Press; and Ilona Kickbusch, “Mapping the Future of Public Health: Action on Global Health,” Canadian Journal of Public Health, Jan/Feb 2006; 97, 1; Health Module: pg 6 2. Edward O Neil, 2006, Awakening Hippocrates: A Primer on Health, Poverty and Global Service, American Medical Association. 3. Chapters from Jim Yong Kim et al., 2000, Dying for growth: global inequality and the health of the poor, Monroe, Me. : Common Courage Press, and, Fort, M. Mercer, M. A. and Gish, O. eds. 2004, Sickness and wealth: the corporate assault on global health, Cambridge, Mass. : South End Press. 4. Vinh-Kim Nguyen and Karine Peschard, 2003: Anthropology, Inequality, and Disease: A Review, Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 32:447–74. Spencer Moore, Teixeirab, A.C. Shiell, A. (2006) “The health of nations in a global context: Trade, global stratification, and infant mortality rates,” Social Science & Medicine 63: 165–178. Sapolsky, R. (2005) “Sick of Poverty” Scientific American 293: 92-9; and A J McMichael, 1999, Prisoners of the Proximate: Loosening the Constraints on Epidemiology in an Age of Change,” American Journal of Epidemiology, 149, 10. 5. Vinh-Kim Nguyen, 2005: Antiretroviral globalism, biopolitics, and therapeutic citizenship, in Ong, A. and Collier, S., editors, Global assemblages: technology, politics and ethics as anthropological problems, Oxford: Blackwell, 124 – 144, and Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas, 2005: “Biological Citizenship,” in Ong, A. and Collier, S., editors, Global assemblages: technology, politics and ethics as anthropological problems, Oxford: Blackwell, 439 – 463; and Scheper-Hughes, N. 2005: The last Commodity: Post-Human Ethics and the Global Traffic in ‘Fresh’ Organs, in Ong, A. and Collier, S., editors, Global assemblages: technology, politics and ethics as anthropological problems, Oxford: Blackwell, 145 – 167. 6. Randall Packard, 2000, “Post-colonial Medicine,” in Roger Cooter and John Pickstone eds., Medicine in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Harvard Academic Publishers. Harish Naraindas, 1996: Poisons, putrescence and the weather: A genealogy of the advent of tropical medicine, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 30 (1): 1 – 35; and Livingstone, David, 1999: “Tropical climate and moral hygiene: the anatomy of a Victorian debate,” British Journal for the History of Science, 32: 93 – 110. 7. Warwick Anderson, 2006: Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race and Hygiene in the Philippines, Durham: Duke University Press 8. David P Fidler; Lawrence O Gostin, “The New International Health Regulations: An Historic Development for International Law and Public Health,” The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics; Spring 2006; 34, 1. Tony Blakely; Simon Hales; Charlotte Kieft; Nick Wilson; Alistair Woodward, “The global distribution of risk factors by poverty level, World Health Organization. Bulletin of the World Health Organization; Feb 2005; 83, 2. 9. Priscilla Wald, 2008: Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, Duke University Press. 10. Kaushik Sunder Rajan, 2007: Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life, Duke University Press.
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
Seminar
Recommended preparation
Class assignments and grading
Reading and lots more reading!
Effort
