Contemporary Issues in Medical Anthropology

Education facts

Code: 5KA425

Health, illness and medicine are ubiquitous in contemporary public debates but are rarely investigated critically. Today, medical anthropology faces novel and fruitful challenges in its relation to biomedicine, public health and international health policy, whether as fields of investigation or as areas of collaboration. How, specifically, can medical anthropology contribute to research on health and wellbeing in the global north and the global south? We will examine the challenges medical anthropologists face in research collaborations with public health, international health organisations, and medical professionals, by for example investigating how biomedicine's authoritative knowledge silences patients' experience, especially when these belong to marginalised or underrepresented groups. Or by investigating how economic power of pharmaceutical companies impact the access to care of deprived citizens and eschew geopolitical dimensions of health for people in the global south. An important field is also to engage and give prominence to local epistemologies and practices, whether they are presented as alternative or complementary to hegemonic biomedical structures. This course lets you examine issues such as 'the body', digital health, mental health, hospital ethnography, pharmaceuticals, anatomy, and technologies for assisted reproduction.

Entry requirements

A Bachelor's degree, equivalent to a Swedish Kandidatexamen, from an internationally recognised university

Education offerings

Each offering has its own dates and conditions. Closed offerings are retained as history and do not mean that a new application is open.

• Contemporary Issues in Medical Anthropology

  Uppsala University

  Uppsala

  Start date: 18 January 2027

  End date: 24 March 2027

  Pace of study: 50 %