The cornerstone of GHJP is a practicum/clinic course. The course fuses didactic and experiential learning on critical topics at the intersection of public health, rights, and justice in the twenty-first century. Students from law, public health, and other disciplines work in teams on projects, typically with outside partners, to address key mediators of health, with particular attention to concerns about equity. Readings and project approaches draw from legal, public health, historical, anthropological, and other fields to introduce students to the multiple lenses through which health issues can be tackled, and to build their competence to work with colleagues in other disciplines around such interventions. A central goal of the clinic is to equip students with the capacity to engage critically and constructively with the evolving tools of law, policy, and rights in the context of health and human rights.
Please note that in the fall, only the Advanced Global Health Justice Practicum is offered (2 or 3 credits for YLS students; 1 credit generally for YSPH). The Advanced Practicum is open to both new and continuing students and is primarily focused on experiential project work. While there is not a weekly didactic seminar, students will participate in onboarding sessions at the start of the semester, project-oriented discussion sessions throughout the semester, and weekly team supervision meetings.
Advanced Global Health Justice Practicum Project Overview:
For the past several years, the GHJP has been engaged in global, national and local work to support the health and rights of people involved in the sex sector. Since 2017, we have been working in collaborative partnership with the Sex Workers and Allies Network (SWAN) of New Haven, a grassroots advocacy and direct service organization rooted in harm reduction principles and led by and for people with lived experience in street-based sex work. Our projects evolve each semester according to our partners’ interests and needs as well as in response to changes at local, state and national levels in policies and programs affecting sex workers. Collectively, our work with SWAN and allied groups seeks to remove or minimize the harms of policing and criminal legal regulation on people in street economies, while simultaneously advocating for power and resources to be redirected to community-led, non-penal services and programs. Our work has expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic, as local and national exigencies around policing marginalized communities and state failures to enact socio-economic supports for appropriate public health interventions has exacerbated long-standing injustices that impact health in the U.S.
Health Justice Seminars
Health Justice: Theory to Practice, Spring 2021 This course was offered in Spring 2021 as a theoretical and experiential course with a distinctive structure. The first half of the course provided an intensive introduction to the social, economic, political, and legal determinants of health, developed through readings and classroom discussion. The seminar focused on the politics of care and COVID-19 in the U.S and used a health justice lens to explore the historical structures and policy choices that have shaped the pandemic. The course evaluated the role of race, class, and gender in structuring vulnerability and explored the ability of technical versus power-building approaches to advance health justice and health equity. In the second half of the course, students worked in teams to put their learning into practice.
Health Justice: Politics of Care, Spring 2022 This course explores questions of health justice, with a focus on how care is marginalized in our existing political economy and on what a new "politics of care" might require and enable. Students will gain an intensive introduction to the social, economic, political, and legal determinants of health, and also to literature on social reproduction and care work. We will explore the historical structures and policy choices that have shaped health equity, primarily in the U.S. We will evaluate the role of race, class, and gender in structuring vulnerability and explore the ability of technical versus power-building approaches to advance health justice and a politics of care. The course is designed as an accompaniment to the Health Justice Practicum, but students are not required to enroll in the practicum.
