Postgraduate Course: Health and gender, rights and justice (SCPL11032)
Course Outline
| School | School of Social and Political Science |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course will provide students with an understanding of the unjust ways in which people across the world experience unequal opportunities to be healthy because of gender, intersecting systems of social disadvantage and marginalisation, and rights violations. Though gender and rights have found new resonance among global health actors, these approaches are debated and generate dilemmas, contradictions and exclusions. The course will enable students to apply scholarly perspectives on gender and rights to the practice of global health, as well as critically assess those perspectives. |
| Course description |
This course will examine key principles, concepts and instruments from scholarship on gender and rights and discuss their application to contemporary challenges in global health. The course will explore four modalities of addressing health injustice at varying levels and through different structures of accountability: health policy and system-level mainstreaming; community-level organising, participation and empowerment; individual pursuit of legal entitlements via litigation; and medical humanitarianism.
Based on this foundation, the course will then explore how these modalities for redressing health injustice come together in case studies of contemporary global health challenges, considering womens rights to bodily autonomy and freedom from violence, pandemics and access to medicines, HIV/AIDS and the criminalisation ofhigh-risk groups, disability, global mental health, migration and refugeehood, and environmental and climate justice. Through this series of case studies, the course will critically evaluate global health approaches to gender and rights, exploring the dilemmas, contradictions and exclusions of this work, and the necessity of taking action to address the wider enabling conditions to achieve rights.
The course will be structured around 10 teaching units taught as a single 2.5 hour class involving lecture content, small group discussion and role play, whole-class debates and use of participatory and creative/arts-based learning tools. Students will engage in self-study involving academic articles, documentary films, podcasts and literary sources. They will be assessed on the basis of a public-facing academic blog, and an academic essay.
|
Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
|
Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- demonstrate a critical understanding of how gender, intersecting systems of social disadvantage and marginalisation, and rights violations create unequal opportunities to be healthy
- critically assess how gender and rights-based approaches and instruments have been used to influence health policy, organise and empower communities, seek legal entitlements for individuals, and respond through medical humanitarianism
- critically assess the dilemmas, contradictions and exclusions in applying gender and rights-based approaches to contemporary global health challenges
- demonstrate a critical understanding of the relationships between gender, rights and justice in relation to health, and the necessity of taking action on the enabling conditions
|
Reading List
Baxi, U. (2010). The place of the human right to health and contemporary approaches to global justice: some impertinent interrogations. 22-37 in Global Health and Human Rights.
Kapilashrami, A., Quinn, N., & Das, A. (2025). Advancing health rights and tackling inequalities: Interrogating community development and participatory praxis. Policy Press.
Ravindran, T. S., & Kelkar-Khambete, A. (2008) Gender mainstreaming in health: looking back, looking forward, Global Public Health, 3 (S1), 121-142.
Unnithan, M., & Pigg, S. L. (2014) Sexual and reproductive health rights and justice tracking the relationship, Culture, Health & Sexuality, 16 (10), 1181-1187.
Venkatapuram, S. (2013). Health justice. John Wiley & Sons.
Yamin, A. E. (2020). When misfortune becomes injustice. Stanford University Press. |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Class discussions and debate on controversial topics will develop skills of personal effectiveness such as verbal communication, negotiation, sensitivity and integrity.
The course assessments develop attributes of research and enquiry, personal and intellectual autonomy and different forms of written communication, via a public-facing academic blog and an academic social sciences essay.
The class discussions and course assessments require students to articulate their own conception of core challenges confronting global health, encouraging students personal development, cultivating enquiry and lifelong learning, and an engaged outlook. |
| Keywords | Global health,gender,rights,justice,mainstreaming,participation,empowerment,litigation |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Kaveri Qureshi
Tel: (0131 6)51 1637
Email: kqureshi@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | |
|
|
University Homepage