SOCI3997: Gender, Health and Medicine

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• To provide students with conceptual frameworks for understanding the relationship between gender, health outcomes and medical practice.
• To develop students skills in applying conceptual tools to the analysis of medical approaches to sex and gender, inequalities in health outcomes, gendered health technologies, and sexual health.
• To enable students to link contemporary health and gender issues to wider social, cultural and political changes.

• In the module we will focus on key concepts and issues:
• Medicine and the sex/gender binary
• The inclusion of women and minorities in clinical research
• Women's health activism
• Power and control in patient/physician interactions
• Contraception and medicalisation
• Social understandings of menstruation and menopause
• Gender inequality in morbidity and mortality
• Masculinity and health behaviours
• Sexual health

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• Upon successful completion of this module, students will have demonstrated:
• An understanding of the relationships between social gendered processes, health outcomes and medical practices.
• The application of sociological concepts and theories to critically analyse issues related to gender, health and medicine in contemporary society.
• Competence in argumentation informed by scholarly literature and critical appraisal of the role of power, expertise and culture in academic and public debates about gender and health.

Subject-specific Skills:

• Upon successful completion of this module, students will have demonstrated the ability to:
• Evaluate sociological arguments and evidence about the relationship between gender, health and medical institutions.
• Undertake and present work within the subject in a scholarly fashion.
• Apply theoretical and empirical knowledge to an appropriate sociological question in the field of gender, health and medicine.
• Convey, both orally and in writing, the meaning of abstract methodological concepts with relevance to the issues identified.
• Perceive the relevance of, and relate their sociological knowledge to issues related to gender, inequality and health in contemporary society.

Key Skills:

• An ability to communicate ideas and arguments in a clear and well-structured way in written work.
• An ability to take effective notes and synthesise information efficiently from diverse sources.
• An ability to work well both independently in self-directed study and collaboratively with colleagues.
• An ability to successful manage workload and time commitments.

• Lectures provide students with broad introductions to key concepts, theoretical frameworks and empirical examples related to contemporary issues in gender and health. Lectures indicate the main issues that students should consider when undertaking independent learning and when participating in seminar discussions.
• Seminars are structured around designated readings and a series of themes and/or questions related to both the reading and the lecture content. Seminars encourage students to develop skills in the evaluation and use of sociological theories and concepts. Seminars also provide the space for students to engage in critical debates around gender and health issues.
• Formative: an essay plan indicating topic, scholarly literature of interest, argument, and structure (500 words). The assessment requires students to demonstrate their subject-specific knowledge and encourages students to demonstrate their subject-specific skills in the formulation of sociological arguments and the identification and evaluation of appropriate sociological evidence. The optional formative essay plan provides an opportunity for students to receive feedback on their understanding and approach to a substantial topic in gender and health prior to completing their summative work.
• Summative: a summative essay requires students to demonstrate more detailed and extended knowledge of a module topic of interest. The essay aims to assess students ability to frame and conduct secondary literature research on a sociological problem in the domain of gender and health.

An essay plan in which students outline the topic of their assessment, scholarly sources of interest, and give an indication of structure content and argument (500 words, optional).

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