TCID 345 Rhetorics of Health, Medicine, and Social Justice

This course is informed by the rhetorics of health and medicine, an interdisciplinary field that attends to how language and symbols are used in public health, medicine, nursing, and communities. Understanding how contemporary language plays a powerful role in healthcare and communities¿especially with regard to health equity, health access, and inclusion¿is the central focus of this course. The language we examine and the power that language enacts includes patient-provider communication, pharmaceutical advertising, government-sponsored communication, and health literacy. We analyze, critique, and design deliverables such as case safety narratives, clinical study reports, patient materials, websites, package inserts, and decision aids. In this course, we attend to reproductive justice, women¿s health, and disability, as well as how racist, transphobic, and homophobic rhetorics manifest in health documents in order to examine and/ or propose alternative rhetorical strategies that move us toward justice, equity, and access.

Prerequisites

• WRIT 131: Writing I
• or WRIT 231: Writing II