Motivation to Teach Social Action:
Over the past decade, I've taught Medical Sociology at VCU, and before COVID it functioned as a service-learning course with deep community partnerships. Students worked alongside neighborhood organizations, maternal health advocates, and youth arts/food justice collectives, and the course served as a reliable entry point into experiential, community based participatory action research (CBPAR).
Since the pandemic, I've loosened the community-engaged/service learning structure and allow the experiential component to be optional for those students who want it. Even though all students still engage with real-world materials, it hasn't had the coherence, intentionality, or collective momentum of the pre-COVID model. And, I am ready, really ready, to rebuild and formalize that part of the course. In fact, the invitation to apply to the Institute came at exactly the right time as I am actively engaged in a course redesign and focusing social action was the direction I was already going in.
While the course has always focused on community-based challenges and solutions around issues of health, medical mistrust, and the social determinants of health and well-being Since the pandemic, I've been intentionally included modules on medicine as colonialism and an end-of-semester re-imagining project that draws on abolition medicine and critique of racism and bias in medical education (via readings like "Abolition Medicine" and "Misrepresenting Race").
I'm interested in this institute because it gives me a framework, and a community of educators, to deepen the social action components of the class. Much of my recent work across campus and in Richmond is already grounded in CBPAR, reparative land justice, food sovereignty, and maternal health equity. My students routinely participate in projects connected to those efforts; some of that work has even informed policy conversations and legislation on Black maternal health. But I want clearer scaffolding for students to take on meaningful, bounded, achievable campaigns that move from critique to action.
Finally, I've been doing community-engaged teaching long enough to know that the work is better and more sustainable, when it is done in community with other practitioners. The opportunity for two days of intensive design, followed by a year-long community of practice, aligns with exactly where I am in my teaching: I want to bring Medical Sociology back into alignment with my broader CBPAR commitments and redesign it as a rigorous, grounded, justice-centered social action course.
Course Description:
This course designed to introduce the student to the field of medical sociology and the sociology of medicine and health care. The goal of the course is to foster an understanding of health, illness, medicine, and health care as a characteristic of both individuals and societies, and to provide students with a survey of the research on the social origins of the health and illness of individuals and populations. We will first seek to understand basic concepts pertaining to the sociological analysis of health and illness (such as demographic/epidemiological transition) and explore how existing social structures and the social determinants of health influence the meanings and experiences of medicine and health care. We will also look into the health care system and the profession of medicine and their changing forms of organization.
Over the next 15 weeks, we will look at the social, economic, cultural and social psychological factors in health and illness, most specifically, the social/environmental determinants of health; demographic and epidemiological transitions; the sociology of health and medical care organizations/settings; health occupations; and the techniques of research in medical sociology. Finally, as a community of learners, we will move from analysis to action: after examining how inequalities in health emerge, we will consider how ordinary people, policymakers, and communities attempt to address them, and what democratic practices are required to imagine healthier futures.
The sociology of medicine and heath care is a large and historically important sub-discipline in the field, distinctively sociological, while at the same time, inherently interdisciplinary, drawing from not only the social sciences (sociology and psychology) but also importantly the humanities, history, ethics and policy, with important links to public health, epidemiology, health psychology and humanist spaces such as the saliency of narrative and stories and the philosophy of medicine and science. The reading material, lectures, and discussions we will have in class present a broad overview of the social-psychological, social-structural, and cultural factors that shape the individual's experience of health, illness, health care and the consequences that population health has for social institutions.
Taught By:
Susan Bodnar-Deren
Associate Professor and Co-Director Community Engaged Research, Inst. for Women's Health
Sociology
Virginia Commonwealth University
Read profile here.