Science Fiction & Public Health
Course site for PHE 510: Science Fiction & Public Health, Winter 2024
OHSU-PSU School of Public Health
Mondays 16:00-18:30, Fariborz Maseeh Hall | Room 416
Office Hours Tuesdays & Thursdays 12:00-13:30, Vanport | 610R
Course Description
Public health is a problem-solving, future-thinking field tasked with anticipating, preventing and responding to various types of crises, and the field engages with “what-if” scenarios and forecasting in many different ways, including epidemiological modeling, policy creation, and community organizing. As such, it is critical that public health professionals have many different tools to exercise what could be referred to as the “public health imagination,” particularly when facing complex, daunting, and novel crises such as many in the field’s recent history. Science fiction literature – including subgenres of speculative fiction, dystopic fiction, climate fiction, afro-futurism, etc. – very often depicts issues that are within the realm of public health, such as climate crisis, government collaboration, infectious disease spread, and transformations of social conditions under which health and disease are embodied. However, similar to other forms of art and media, science fiction is scarcely utilized or appreciated routinely by public health professionals despite its capacity to inspire, warn, educate, communicate, and contribute broadly to imagining different futures. Science fiction can fertilize public health professionals’ imaginations in support of diverse forms of public health practice.
This course will explore what public health professionals can get out of deeper engagement with science fiction. Students will read science-fiction texts alongside transdisciplinary literature that help inform potential roles for science fiction and offer tools for public health interpretations. Throughout the course, students will contribute to building a collaborative, emergent understanding of the value of science fiction in a public health context.
Learning goals
Upon completing this course, students should be able to do the following:
· Interpret science fiction texts through a public health lens.
· Connect science fiction to historical and current public health crises and events.
· Explore the concept of the “public health imagination” and how it can contribute to the field of public health.
· Describe the role that science fiction can play in public health education, communication, and practice through “using” and “doing” science fiction.
· Apply principles and theory from public health specialties (e.g., epidemiology, policy, programming, etc.) to an analysis of a science fiction text.
Interested in taking this course or nerding out with Nell and Alexis but not a student in the OHSU-PSU SPH? Listen to this podcast we're making about the course as we teach it or reach out to us to chat!