Courses
GSA students enroll in four courses. Two courses are taught in India and two in China, for a total of four Duke course credits for the semester. All four courses earn Duke grades and curriculum codes. Duke approvals and codes are listed with the descriptions below.
Course titles are subject to change.
Duke is currently in the process of renumbering courses. The new course numbers listed will be effective in fall 2012. Course numbers in parentheses represent the old Duke course numbers.
Development and Poverty Reduction in India
PUBPOL 390A (101)/POLSCI 290A (100Z)/ICS (SS, CCI, R)
Instructor: Professor Anirudh Krishna, Sanford School of Public Policy Studies
What factors account for the persistence of poverty in developing countries? Is it always going to be the same way – i.e., will poor people remain poor within the foreseeable future – or can something more purposive and effective be done to reduce poverty in the near future? Academics and policymakers have come up with alternative formulations over the last 50 years. This class will provide students with an overview of social and economic development since the early 1950s, with special reference to India.
What problems do ordinary people in India face, what kinds of solutions have been advanced to deal with these problems, how have different solutions fared in practice, and what needs to be done now and in the future? We will trace how development practice has evolved in the theoretical and policy literatures, and we examine the solutions proposed against the reality on the ground.
Assignments will include a combination of in-class tests and on-the-ground investigations. As their final assignment for this class, accounting for 50 per cent of the grade, students will write a research paper that will be developed in three parts, with feedback provided by the instructor. Topics for individual research can include, but are not limited to, microfinance, community organization and social capital, justice and conflict resolution, education and social mobility, health-seeking behaviors, impacts on the environment, agriculture development, gender relations, and migrant families and coping behavior.
Health of the Poor: the Burden and Response in India
PUBPOL 390A (101)/GLHLTH/ICS (SS, CCI) *Global Health Certificate*
Instructors: Sharad D Iyengar, Kirti Iyengar
The burden of ill health is iniquitously greater for the poor, especially in developing countries like India. Rapid industrialization and urbanization have been making an increasing impact on the growing urban population, and have also begun to affect rural agrarian communities. Hence for example, while India’s maternal mortality rate has for long been among the highest for developing countries, more people now die annually from road traffic injuries than from maternal causes. Thus, a new generation of health problems have started affecting poorer communities, even before the older, more traditional conditions have been brought under control. There is an emerging body of information on how the poor and marginalized, especially women, shoulder a greater burden of ill health in a changing world.
While large parts of India have made rapid progress on the crest of an economic boom that has weathered even a global recession, there remain large swathes of the country, especially in the rural north and east, in which people continue to struggle to meet basic needs in the face of chronic poverty and unemployment. These are the communities that have few resources for preventing disease, that delay seeking care and when they eventually do, visit the local unqualified or under-qualified moonlighting practitioner for a quick-fix cure in a bid to return to work as soon as possible, rather than utilize the formal health system. Weak health systems in these underdeveloped areas especially affect sexual and reproductive health and the health of children and newborns.
The course on global health will assess the nature and magnitude of ill health in India, and examine its intersections with poverty and social marginalization. Going beyond determinants of ill health, it will explore changes in lifestyles, care-seeking behavior, and the role of health systems in mitigating or aggravating health problems. Among the questions it will address are, why and how does ill health impoverish some families, what organizational factors influence people’s access to health care and its quality, how do women negotiate better health for themselves and for children, and what role do men play in accessing primary care. Lastly, is there light at the end of the tunnel? How do large interventions such as the multi-billion dollar National Rural Health Mission hope to turn the situation around within a half decade?
The course will combine overviews of the health situation in India and its parts, health care practices and health systems with analyses of how ill health is sustained or alleviated, field visits to communities, health facilities and families coping with specific situations (for example, chronic disease or childbirth), and ground-level case studies of government and NGO health interventions at the primary care level. These would be related to global and national policy and program investments, in a bid to understand what works and what might not. Students will be allotted to communities and within these, to families and/or primary health care facilities willing to share their experience in seeking and sustaining health care. They will relate their findings to analyses of the social-economic conditions, the prevailing policy scenario and how health systems are managed in the state and country.
China Courses
Environment, Health and Development in China
CULANTH 395AS (163BS)/POLSCI 214AS (100GS)/GLHLTH 383AS (173S)/ICS (SS, CCI, EI, STS) *Ethics Certificate & Global Health Certificate*
Instructor: Professor Ralph Litzinger, Department of Cultural Anthropology
In the last thirty years China has embarked on a massive and complex quasi-socialist, quasi-capitalist experiment. As is now well known, this has resulted in some of the most impressive economic growth rates in recent world history, the building of the largest hydroelectric dam in the world, and the historic Beijing Olympics, and the emergence of China as a world leader, among other accomplishments. At the same time, this history of frenetic development has plunged China into the center of global debates about health care and privatization, uneven forms of development, worker’s rights, and environmental catastrophe. While China is rightfully the envy of much of the world, it is also the case that much of the rural countryside is now in shambles, peasants and farmers have swarmed to China’s largest cities in what many have called the largest migration in world history, and urban landscapes have been wildly and irrevocably transformed.
This course will provide an introduction to the culture and politics of development, environment, and health in contemporary China, through the exploration a range of case studies. On the health front, we will study the SARS pandemic of that began in Guangdong province in early 2003 and purportedly spread to some thirty-seven countries, the more recent H1NI flu scare, and the HIV outbreak in 1994 that resulted from poor and desperate peasants selling blood in plasma exchange markets. We will also look at the emergence of drug addition treatment centers and the politics of drug rehab, and study the newly emerging scholarship on the sex work industry. On the environment front, we will examine the transformation of Beijing in the build up to the Olympics; the politics of water transfer schemes and river and lake pollution from industrial runoff; and the conversation movement that has emerged around the Three Gorges dam and other hydroelectric projects in west China. On the development front, we will look at the transformation of the rural countryside; the “floating population” migrant labor issue; and the practices of volunteerism and corporate social responsibility that gained strength and force during and after the Sichuan earthquake in the spring of 2008. Through our explorations of these various case studies, it will be emphasized that struggles over health, environment, and development are not solely Chinese issues. They are world issues. Thus, while we attend to specific histories and case studies within China, we will always have an eye turned toward other countries and contexts, from the United States to Africa and India.
Our weekly meetings will consist of readings across a broad interdisciplinary field. We will draw specifically from work in anthropology, sociology, public policy, and global health, and look as well at novels and other forms of fiction and experimental writing and art. We will entertain and engage university scholars, non-governmental representatives, and activists from the wider Beijing community. Documentary and an occasional feature film will be screened and discussed, and we will examine media from the Internet, popular culture, and governmental agencies. Students will be responsible for weekly reflection pieces on the readings and seminar discussions, and a final team-based research project, which will be led by a collaborating professor or graduate student from the Beijing Health Sciences Center.
Health Policy in Transition: Challenges for China
CULANTH 396AS (163CS)/ICS/GLHLTH (SS, CCI, EI, STS)
Instructor: Professor Guo Yan, School of Public Health, Beijing University Health Science Center
This course introduces students to the dynamics and challenges of health policy in China, from the early twentieth century to the present. The course begins with a broad historical overview of health policy in China, examining the different contexts and challenges of health systems in the pre-revolutionary period, the immediate post-1949 period through the Cultural Revolution, and the more recent period of economic development and reform, in which debates about state responsibility, privatization, and disparities in access to health care between urban and rural population, and the prosperous coastal cities and the inner and western provinces have dominated public policy debate. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from anthropology, public policy, government and multilateral studies (from the World Bank and the WHO, for example), the course examines strategies that have been used by the government and other sectors to implement more equitable and sustainable health policies. The course also provides a close look at contemporary health policy issues, focusing on such issues as regional health planning, community health services, rural health provisions in poverty areas, and developments in public health infrastructure in urban and rural settings.
The course will be organized around a weekly lecture and discussion session. Students will be assigned readings, prepare reading notes, and weekly discussion topics. Students will also have the opportunity to interact with several students from the Beijing University Health Science Center, who will be selected to join the course. A final research paper on a topic related to the course material will be required.
Updated: 7 December 2011
