Professors: Alison A. Geist (Director) and Dr. S. Khady Ndao-Brumblay
The Community and Global Health (CGHL) interdisciplinary concentration enables students to explore the determinants and consequences of individual and community health, critically examine relevant global, national, and local policies and programs, and learn theories, methodologies, and program practices important to the study of public health and “the modern plagues.” Students use social determinants of health and social justice frameworks to analyze the structures and systems that shape health, disease, and disability, and the disparities and inequities that characterize their disproportionate distribution between and among people, communities, and nations. The concentration requires students to complete an experiential component (see below) approved by the program director in advance, through which they gain and apply practical skills.
Emphasizing our collective and individual responsibility to advance health equity, the concentration prepares students, as educated and engaged members of their communities, to identify, investigate, and articulate the broad spectrum of contemporary global health issues, and to exercise intellectual and practical skills in response. The concentration also prepares students for graduate and professional schoolin public health or human, dental, or veterinary medicine and the allied health professions.
The CGHL Concentration
Required core:
- CGHL 210 Contemporary Issues in Public Health: An Introduction
- CGHL 220 Epidemiology
- Four additional electives, at least one chosen from each of the following three categories below.
Please note that while we make every attempt to compile a list that is comprehensive and accurate, not every course is offered every year, and new courses may be added from time to time without enough notice to be included here. Students should check with the Registrar, individual departments, and their advisor as they plan to complete the concentration.
Natural sciences and quantitative reasoning
- ANSO 212 Quantitative Analysis
- BIOL 322 General and Medical Microbiology
- BIOL 360 Immunology and Human Health
- MATH 105 Quantitative Reasoning & Statistical Analysis
- MATH 260 or 261 Applied Statistics or Biostatistics (preferred)
- MATH 360 Applied Statistics II
Social and cultural determinants of health
- ANSO 210 Medicine and Society
- ANSO 225 Sex and Sexualities
- ANSO 232 Nature and Society: Introduction to Political Ecology*
- ANSO 236 Race and Racism
- ANSO 245 Qualitative Methods
- ANSO/SEMN 255 You Are What You Eat
- ANSO 310 Social Research for Social Change
- ANSO 320 Special Topics (check with the Director; this course may be related to CGHL, for example, “Water, Environment and Society”
- ANSO 322 Prisoners and Detainees
- ANSO 350 Political History of Western Environmental Thought*
- ANSO/ENVS 365 Humans and Non-Humans
- ANSO 422 Anticolonialist and Antiracist Theory
- ANSO 424 Border Epistemologies
- CES 300 Body, Land, and Labor
- HIST/SEMN 231 The Plague
- HIST 232 History of Science and Magic
- HIST 238 Sexuality in Pre-Modern Europe
- HIST 246 Gender and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Europe
- HIST 292 WGS in Latin America
- PHIL 305 Biomedical Ethics
- PSYC 211 Adolescent Development
- PSYC 220 Health Psychology
- PSYC 270 Feminist Psychology of Women
- PSYC 411 Psychology and the Law (when it has a service-learning component)
- PSYC 424 Psychopharmacology
- PSYC 465 Advanced Psychology of Sexuality
- SEMN 408 Slow Farming
- SPAN 205 Linguistics in Health Care
* These courses are more broadly about environmental health, and about nature as an historical, intellectual and social construct. Students wishing to make them more relevant to community and global health may speak with the professor to craft paper topics that explore these issues within the course’s theoretical frameworks.
Public policy
- ECON 221 Health Economics
ECON 225 Economics of Development and Growth - ECON 235 Environmental and Resource Economics
- ECON 265 Issues in Urban Economics
- POLS/WGS 265 Feminist Political Theories (cannot count towards both social/cultural determinants & public policy elective)
- POLS 270 The European Union: Institutions, Actors, Aliens, and Outcomes
- POLS 310 Women, States, and NGO’s
- POLS 330 Politics of the Holocaust
- POLS 380 Drugs, Democracy, and Human Rights
Students may also take one course at a Kalamazoo College study abroad site as an elective, with advance permission from a CGHL Director.
Experiential requirement
CGHL requires students to incorporate at least one immersive public health experience into their concentration. When CGHL 210 is offered as a “service-learning” or community-based seminar, it fulfills this requirement. Otherwise, students must seek community-based learning experiences, approved in advance by the director/s that will count towards this requirement. Examples that may be approved include health-related service-learning courses, ICRPs abroad, SIPS, internships and community-based research with an explicit public health focus, employment within a public health field; and/or certain Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) programs at K. Clinical experiences –e.g. working in a doctor’s office or hospital — may or may not count, depending on context. The CCE has built many health-related community partnerships in Kalamazoo, and offers a limited number of paid, six-week summer Community Building Internships with local organizations, many of them in health fields.
To fulfill this requirement, students are required to write a three-to-five pageessay that combines reflection on their experience with a scholarly literature review to explicitly demonstrate connections to and learning about community and global health, in particular the social determinants of health.