Health, Humanities, and Society Minor

The Health, Humanities, and Society minor is designed for students who would like to learn how to think capaciously and creatively about health using the rigorous, precise, and flexible skills trained by the social sciences and the humanities. The social sciences teach students to think about the social, economic, and political factors that structure health conditions and outcomes in particular societies, while the humanities train students to navigate the complexities of interpersonal interaction and their ethical implications, to relate the micro to the macro and texts to contexts, to historicize encounters, to communicate accurately and effectively across a variety of media, and to engage in creative analytical thinking about healthcare. The landscape of healthcare is quickly changing, and this training will equip students well not only for the diverse forms of health work that exist today, but for as yet unimaginable varieties of health-related work in the future. This minor is structured around the particular competencies that the social sciences and humanities train. Those competencies are narrative and historical perspective, attention and observation, ethics and judgment, performance and creativity, and social and structural proficiency. Rather than adopting the more traditional approach of connecting particular skills to particular disciplines (say, narrative to literature and observation to art history), this minor builds from discipline-specific health knowledge while training students to think across disciplines. Thus, it will not be unusual for students to find a single course addressing multiple competencies or to take courses in different disciplines that address the same competency from distinct but complementary perspectives. This minor is housed in the Humanities Center of the College of Social Sciences and Humanities in partnership with the Bouvé College of Health Sciences at Northeastern University.