Anthropology Major: Global Health and Environment

As an anthropology major in the global health and environment track, you will study the most important contemporary issues facing health care and the environment. You will focus on global health, which concerns itself with the broad ways that humans address and cope with issues of health, illness, and well-being in cross-cultural and cross-temporal perspectives.

sample courses:

Transnational Reproductive Health Issues: Meanings, Technologies, Practices

This course covers recent scholarship on gender and reproductive health, including such issues as reproduction and the disciplinary power of the state, contested reproductive relations within families and communities, and the implications of global flows of biotechnology, population, and information for reproductive strategies at the local level. We will also explore how transnational migration and globalization have shaped reproductive health, the diverse meanings associated with reproductive processes, and decisions concerning reproduction. Reproduction will serve as a focus to illuminate the cultural politics of gender, power, and sexuality.

Women and Islam

An anthropological study of the position of women in the contemporary Muslim world, with examples drawn primarily from the Middle East but also from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the United States. Students will examine ethnographic, historical, and literary works, including those written by Muslim women. Topics having a major impact on the construction of gender include Islamic belief and ritual, modest dress (veiling), notions of marriage and the family, modernization, nationalism and the nation-state, politics and protest, legal reform, formal education, work, and westernization. The course includes a visit to a St. Louis mosque, discussions with Muslim women, and films.

our students have gone on to become:

Conservationists

Environmental Health Analysts

Epidemiologists

Health Educators

Non-profit Program Directors

Nutritionists

Occupational Health Specialists

Policy Consultants

Public Health Officers

Research Scientists