Modules
Courses / Modules / HUMA2025 Health, Culture, and Discrimination

Health, Culture, and Discrimination

When you'll study it
Semester 2
CATS points
15
ECTS points
7.5
Level
Level 5
Module lead
Aude Campmas
Academic year
2025-26

Module overview

Deadly illnesses have frequently been invested with a great deal of symbolic and cultural significance. This interdisciplinary module will introduce you to how various diseases and conditions (AIDS, cancers, obesity, Covid-19, and mental health issues and illnesses) became metaphors for rejection and marginalisation. It analyses the ways in which cultural, medical, political and societal discourses can entwine and impact on the self-representations of the patients. As well as exploring disease-related discrimination and its impact on the self, you will examine anti-discrimination strategies. You will then have the opportunity to put all of this into practice through the development of a socially and politically responsive public engagement project.

This highly innovative module is paired with MEDI1032 : Student Selected Unit 2, option Medicine and Culture. Students in this module will thus work for eight weeks with Medical students in order to create public engagement activities through a variety of forms that might typically include posters, exhibitions, educational material for schools, websites, or videos.