ANTH 5063: Ethnographic Methods: Principles, Ethics, and Critiques (In Person, CU Denver): This course introduces students to ethnographic methodology—considered the best method for capturing group perspectives, subjective meanings, and collective behavior patterns—while examining its principles, ethics, politics, and critiques.
ANTH 5650: Disability Anthropology (In person, CU Denver): This course explores how communities understand disability across different contexts of inequality, war, and politics, using diverse materials from anthropology and disability studies to examine disability as a form of human diversity through time and space.
BEHH 5010: Foundations of Bioethics & Humanities in Health (required for certificate):
This course combines two essential areas of study: The first eight weeks focus on the foundations of bioethics, examining moral frameworks used in medical and health settings and their application to clinical, organizational, and population-based
cases. The second eight weeks explore the foundations of narrative practice in medicine through engagement with various texts and other materials. Each section maintains its distinct focus while providing students with complementary perspectives on
health and health care.
BEHH 5215: Culture and Health (asynchronous, with in-person/synchronous meeting options): This course bridges diverse scholarly perspectives to investigate the social and cultural practices that contribute to health and disease around
the world. Through interdisciplinary approaches, we examine how universal human phenomena are experienced differently in diverse contexts, exploring the complex interplay between biological, socioeconomic, historical, spatial, and cultural factors
in shaping health experiences.
BEHH 5750: Pain, Its Paradoxes & the Human Condition:
This interdisciplinary graduate course explores pain as a universal yet deeply personal aspect of the human condition, examining its paradoxes and complexities through diverse lenses including history, philosophy, literature, public health,
and medicine. Through a blended learning format combining synchronous and asynchronous sessions, students engage with seven problem-based learning modules to investigate topics ranging from the culture of pain to its inequitable distribution across
social strata, while developing critical understanding of pain's relationship to suffering, stigma, and social justice.
BEHH 5850: Clinical Ethics: This graduate-level clinical ethics course introduces students to key theories, methods, history, and practical applications of medical ethics through monthly discussions and hands-on learning activities.
Through a combination of readings, case analyses, independent projects, in class discussions, and discussion boards, students explore critical topics such as informed consent, confidentiality, end-of-life care, reproductive ethics, and treatment
decision making, while developing practical skills in ethical reasoning and consultation. The course emphasizes active participation and real-world application, with students completing case analyses and an independent research project that allows
them to deeply explore an area of clinical ethics that aligns with their interests.
ANTH 5063: Ethnographic Methods: Principles, Ethics & Critiques (In Person, CU Denver): Ethnography is considered the best method to capture the perspectives of various groups, subjective meanings attached to behaviors and identities, and the reasons for patters of collective behavior. This course will introduce students to the principles of ethnography and will consider the ethics, politics, and critiques of the methodology.
ANTH 5650: Disability Anthropology (In Person, CU Denver): This course explores how communities recognize and make sense of disability globally and locally, examining its relationship to racial, gender, and class inequalities in contexts of war, colonialism, and capitalism, while investigating who claims disability and through what politics. Drawing from anthropology, disability studies, and broader social sciences, the course uses ethnography, novels, films, podcasts, and social media to develop a holistic understanding of disability as a form of human diversity across time and space.
ANTH 5090: Psychedelic Anthropology (In Person and Synchronous Online, CU Denver): Psychotropic drugs, both legal and illicit, are a predominant part of our everyday lives. This course examines their use and meaning within cultures of health and wellness, and the plant medicine, spiritual, social, political and economic issues that surround their production, use and misuse. Course activities focus on ethnographic research strategies and arts-based approaches to public scholarship.
ANTH 5600: Medical Anthropology (In Person, CU Denver): Introduces students to the theories and concepts of medical anthropology, the study of human health and illness. Explores conceptions of the body, modalities of healing, the clinical encounter, and new medical technologies.
ANTH 5230: Fieldwork Methods (In Person, CU Denver): This experiential course explores anthropological critiques, decolonizing approaches, and multi-media strategies to fieldwork methods with a focus on oral histories, visual narratives, community based participatory research, and indigenous ways of knowledge creation. At the end of the course, the student should have the cultural understanding and the methodological skills to complete a team-based fieldwork project successfully.
ANTH 5300: Immigrant Health (In Person, CU Denver): This course examines health issues associated with transnational migration from an anthropological point of view. It provides students the opportunity to engage in hands-on fieldwork projects designed in conjunction with local immigrant and refugee-serving agencies.
ANTH 5660: The Anthropology of Bioethics (In Person, CU Denver): This upper-level seminar approaches bioethics through the lens of cultural anthropology. It does so by exploring how communities around the globe grapple with the moral dilemmas generated by new medical technologies, scientific innovation, environmental degradation, and structural violence. Challenging conventional distinctions between biomedicine and culture, secularism and religion, or philosophy and political economy, readings and films situate the ethical predicaments of health and illness in broader historical and sociopolitical contexts. Utilizing discussion, collaboration, and reflexive writing assignments, this course examines whose voices, expertise, and concerns get recognized in bioethical debates, ultimately connecting bioethics to broader questions of representation and justice. After a general introduction to the anthropology of ethics and bioethics, specific topics covered may include organ donation, cancer treatment, experimentation and research, reproductive technologies, state violence, climate change, and extinction.