HLEQ 245 Health and Healing Humanities in Latin America and the Latinx World

This course examines health, illness, and healing across Latin America and U.S. Latinx communities through the interdisciplinary frameworks of the medical humanities, bioethics, and health equity. Drawing on literary narratives, testimonial writing, visual culture, ethnography, and public health discourse, students analyze how bodies, suffering, disability, and care are represented, experienced, and contested in diverse cultural and political contexts.

The course foregrounds how histories of colonialism, racialization, structural violence, gender, migration, and economic inequality shape medical knowledge and lived experiences of health and illness. At the same time, it highlights community-based, culturally grounded, and Indigenous healing practices that challenge dominant biomedical paradigms and advance more just and inclusive models of care. Through case studies from Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and U.S. Latinx communities, students engage ethical questions surrounding global health, reproductive justice, mental health, environmental health, medical authority, and the politics of care. Emphasizing close reading, ethical reasoning, reflective writing, and collaborative dialogue, the course centers the human dimensions of illness and care while framing health as a site of struggle, creativity, and resistance.