Health, Culture, and Social Justice Minor

The minor in Health, Culture, and Social Justice provides a social science-grounded curriculum focused on health and well-being. The program provides training for students in how health is shaped by biology, society, and history - as well as how it is distributed unequally across gender, race, class, disability, and other forms of social difference. Through opportunities for experiential learning in and outside of the classroom, students develop tools for bringing about a social world more fully and equitably characterized by health and well-being.     

The minor is designed to give students a perspective on health that includes but goes beyond the biomedical. It is a useful credential for students interested in medical training, social work, counseling, human resources, public health, health administration, and health policy.

Learning outcomes for the Health, Culture, and Social Justice minor

1. Understand how to approach “health” and “healing” from social, critical, temporal/historical, and biological perspectives. 
2. Critically examine how human biology shapes health, mental health, and reproduction.
3. Describe “biomedicine” as a cultural or ideological system that reflects and sustains inequities in health and well-being. 
4. Identify inequities in health across race, class, disability/ableism, gender, and sexuality, particularly as they are shaped by histories of marginalization and exclusion.

Course requirements

Students are required to take HDAA 250 Health, Social Justice, and the Life Course (4 units). They also take courses from the following broad categories (for a minimum of 19 units): 

            Social justice approaches to health (take one)

HDAA 379: Culture and Language of Biomedicine

HDAA 354: Difference and Domination

Biological approaches to health (take one)

HDAA 355WIC: Health and Disease in the Past

HDAA 325: Embodied Identities in the Past

HDAA 378: Human Development in Evolutionary Perspective 

            Social and cultural approaches to health (take two)

HDAA 382: Foundations in Critical Medical Anthropology

GEP 325: Global Food Systems: Scarcity and Sustainability

GEP 371: Social Geography of the American City

HDAA 380: Mental Health in Culture

POLS 455: Comparative Reproductive Politics 

SOCI 332: Death and American Culture 

SOCI 417: Sociology of Mental Health and Illness

SOCI 452: Health Care, Illness, and Society

SOCI 440: Sociology of Reproduction 

Students should reach out to Prof. Ben Smith (smithbe@sonoma.edu) in HDAA about the Health, Culture, and Social Justice minor. 

To pursue this minor, please fill out this form.