Admission requirements
Please note: the BA History offers a course with the same name. It is important that BA African Studies students register on the code on this page.
Description
This course examines the medical and epidemiological history of health and healing in Africa from the early nineteenth century (with some ventures into the precolonial past, around the 16th century) to the present and will look at the interconnected histories of climate change, health, tropical medicine, colonialism, industry, disease, population control and technology. We will also critically examine changing ideas about health, climate and their relationship with colonialism, traditional medicine and biomedicine. The course also focuses on toxicity and pollution as part of ongoing extractive industries as the African continent remains a crucial source for oil, gas and minerals demanded by the rest of the world. These are extracted at a terrible cost for the environment and the people living and working there.
Our climate and the environment around us have changed rapidly and significantly over the last two centuries due to human activity, to the extent that it is now forming a global health threat. Climate change and environmental damage are usually attributed to human activity in a general sense. But if we place Africa in a global and historical perspective, the responsibility and impacts of climate change are deeply unevenly distributed. On the African continent, colonialism wrought wide-ranging and destructive socio-ecological transformation, impacting the health of populations through forced labour, exposure to pollution and toxicity, and this has continued to the present-day through capitalism, the ‘green’ energy transition and its underpinning extractive industries.
Western ideas about climate and health in Africa have changed over time, but generally ranged from “the white man’s grave” to fears of “the infectious continent”. Views about warm climates (“the tropics”) and “exotic” diseases in Africa shaped the field of Tropical Medicine and the design and implementation of colonial medical interventions. These interventions were often based on wrong assumptions of local diseases (causation), knowledge and ways of healing. Africa has long formed a scientific and medical laboratory for the development of Western biomedicine, drawing and learning from traditional medicine and practice; yet these histories have been largely forgotten.
The global COVID-19 pandemic response has dramatically shown how negative stereotypes and power differentials continue to shape medical interventions on the continent with devastating consequences. For Africa, which has a relatively young population, it turned out that the pandemic itself did not constitute the biggest health risk. The real health risk for Africa, was in fact the pandemic response imposed on the continent by the WHO, based on Western models and blueprints which were very ill-suited for the African context where the restrictions (and new austerity politics) catapulted millions of people into poverty. Global health as a multidisciplinary field rarely productively incorporates historical knowledge and in times of pandemic crisis, epidemiological histories are generally forgotten or erased. How can a historical understanding of the emergence of global health and histories of disease response inform critique and current medical interventions in Africa?
The course is structured around individual and collaborative critical reading of literature (including digital sources and documentary material) and discussion of case studies prepared by the students themselves. For the final assessment, students write a paper about a historical case study of medical interventions in Africa and present their work in class. Students also give constructive feedback on each other's work, which forms part of the participation grade.
Major themes and concepts that will be covered are:
Ecological imperialism and colonial rule;
The Anthropocene and Africa;
Health, healing, and illness through medical interventions and encounters;
Medical pluralism: navigating biomedical science and ‘traditional’ medicine;
Histories of global health, pandemic response and disease outbreak response;
Industrial development, climate change, pollution and toxicity.
Course objectives
**General Learning Objectives **
The student will be able to:
- Successfully complete a collaborative assignment;
- Design and conduct a research project of limited scope, and in doing so: * search, select, and organize professional literature; * organize and process relatively large amounts of information; * analyse a scientific debate; * place one's own research in the scientific debate
- Reflect on the primary sources on which the literature is based;
- Write a problem-based paper and deliver a talk in the format of the first-year Thematic Lectures, and in doing so;
- employ a realistic schedule;
- formulate a problem statement and sub-questions;
- formulate a reasoned conclusion;
- give and receive feedback;
- incorporate instructions from the instructor.
- Participate in discussions during lectures.
**Learning objectives, specific to the graduate program **
- The student has gained knowledge of the major field(s) to which the BA Work College belongs;
The student has gained an understanding of the historical processes that drove ecological imperialism and the development of ‘Tropical Medicine’ and colonial medical interventions and apply these insights to explore how this has shaped contemporary ideas of climate change, ‘Global Health’ and ‘Planetary Health’ in the Anthropocene era, and what this means for Africa and its global connections today;
- The student has knowledge and understanding of the core concepts, research methods and techniques of the graduate program, with special emphasis;
The student can navigate and make use of the digital environment to find and critically analyse primary and secondary sources and communicate these academic findings in a clear manner.
**Learning objectives, specific to this lecture **
The student will understand what medical history means, and what academic debates are central to the historiography of medical interventions in Africa;
The student will be able to establish the relationship between politics and global health practices and discourses and master the theories discussed;
The student can independently select a case study that will be part of the paper that serves as the final assignment for the course.
Timetable
The timetables are available through My Timetable.
Mode of instruction
Work seminar with mandatory attendance.
This means that students must be present at all the work seminars. If you are unable to attend, you must inform the lecturer in advance. The lecturer will then decide how, and whether, the missed lecture can be made up by a substitute assignment. If there are specific limitations to a class, the instructor will make this known at the beginning. If you do not meet the aforementioned conditions, you will be excluded from participation.
Assessment method
**Written paper **
- (2,5,000-3,000 words based on literature review/ and or research; excluding cover page, table of contents, bibliography, footnotes). Learning targets tested: 2-4, 6-10
Participation.
Learning targets tested: 1, 3-5
Assignment 1: Input roundtable: 1,3, 5-9.
Assignment 2:. Collaborative visual and oral presentation; work with a number of students (4) Learning targets tested: 1,3, & 5
**Weighting **
Workpiece/paper: 60%
Participation: 10%
Assignment 1: 15% (input round table in week 6, see below)
Assignment 2: 15% (Collaborative visual and oral presentation; work with a number of students +/-4)
The final grade is based on the weighted average of the partial grades, with the additional requirement that the workpiece/paper must be satisfactory.
Written paper
- (2,500-3000 words)
Oral presentation
- (individual oral presentation in session 11 or 12). Learning outcomes tested: 2-3, 5-10
Participation
Learning targets tested: 1, 3-5
Assignment 1: Discussion of literature and summary; organizing debate around literature. Learning targets tested: 1-2, 5-9.
Assignment 2: Collaborative visual and oral presentation; work with a number of students (4) on a historical case study of medical interventions/ encounters/ pluralism in Africa. Learning targets tested: 1-3, 6-9
**Weighting **
Workpiece/paper: 50%
Oral presentation: 20%
Participation: 10%
Assignment 1: 10%
Assignment 2: 10%
The final grade is based on the weighted average of the partial grades, with the additional requirement that the workpiece/paper must be satisfactory.
Resit
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Reading list
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Registration
Enrolment through MyStudyMap is mandatory.
General information about course and exam enrolment is available on the website.
#### Registration À la carte education, Contract teaching and Exchange
Information for those interested in taking this course in context of À la carte education (without taking examinations), eg. about costs, registration and conditions.
Information for those interested in taking this course in context of Contract teaching (with taking examinations), eg. about costs, registration and conditions.
For the registration of exchange students contact Humanities International Office.
Contact
- For substantive questions, contact the lecturer listed in the right information bar.
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