Bioethics in Film

Bioethics is an amorphous field that draws on disciplines including anthropology, philosophy, political science, and law. Using readings from across these arenas, students will examine issues in health and medicine as represented in global narrative cinema. The course uses film as both a tool for and object of analysis – pairing films with scholarly writing as we examine topics surfaced the ways they are depicted. The course engages with the ethics of representing sexual and other types of violence; some material in the course may be triggering. We will examine such topics as surrogacy, euthanasia, human research, healthcare worker burnout, and the imbrication of money and medicine, with films such as Lingui, Sound of Metal, Pinky, XXY, and Color of Paradise. The course will include oral exams. It is suitable for graduate students in the professional schools, social sciences, and humanities, as well as other students (advanced undergraduates, science grad students) who have completed at least three university-level courses in the social sciences.