Relevant Courses

This course educates students about humanitarian crises and their impact on population health. Humanitarian crises are defined as events that represent critical threats to the health, safety, security or wellbeing of a community or other large group of people, usually over a wide area. Humanitarian crises include natural disasters (earthquakes, tsunamis, droughts, epidemics, etc.) as well as “human-made” emergencies, such as armed conflicts or combination of the two, often referred to as “complex emergencies.” The course also trains the students in developing research proposals in context of humanitarian crises and the methodological and ethical challenges associated with such research endeavors.

Analysis of humanitarian interventions from a variety of social science disciplinary perspectives. Issues related to policy, legal protection, health care, morality, and governance in relation to the moral imperative to save lives in conditions of extreme adversity. Promotion of dialogue between social scientists and humanitarian practitioners.

When a new virus sweeps the globe, how should physicians, governments, and societies respond? What are an individual’s rights and responsibilities in the face of illness, and how do public health organizations prioritize competing claims? How should issues of consent, quarantine, compulsory treatment, and surveillance be managed, and how do these issues change as they transcend geographic borders? This seminar examines critical issues in global health through the method of ethical analysis. The course begins with the foundations for analyzing ethical problems, considering moral and ethical frameworks for health. We examine dilemmas such as quarantines, access to care, and the limits of autonomy, and we delve into critical challenges of vulnerable populations and global inequities. We conclude by analyzing emerging tensions posed by artificial intelligence and digital health technologies. Drawing together global health perspectives and ethical analysis, we consider the principles, tradeoffs, and central tensions that inform global health today.

This hands-on mixed methods seminar explores the historical and contemporary experiences of refugees in New Haven. The course examines the historical contexts that have led to the resettlements of different refugee populations in New Haven as well as contemporary issues concerning these communities. Through workshops, students gain qualitative research skills by exploring oral history, archival research, and ethnographic participant observation as complementary methods to document and study refugee communities in New Haven. The course also attends to questions of representation, ethics, power dynamics, and knowledge production in documenting and studying underrepresented and vulnerable communities.

This multi-disciplinary seminar explores the historical and contemporary experiences of Southeast Asian refugees living in the United States. The course examines the historical contexts that created Southeast Asian refugee diasporas and community formations in the US as well as contemporary social, political, cultural, and economic issues concerning these communities. Organized thematically, this course is comparative in scope as it addresses topics such as: colonialism, imperialism, war, nation-building, global capitalism, migration experiences, resettlement, intergenerational dynamics, interracial/ethnic relations, and knowledge and cultural production.

With a special emphasis on the United States, this course explores how the international community responds to humanitarian crises and military interventions. We examine the roles and responsibilities of members of the diplomatic corps, senior military officials, nongovernmental organizations, and international financial organizations in order to understand the skill sets required for these organizations to be effective. Through readings, discussions, role-play, writing exercises, and other tools, we learn how organizations succeed and sometimes fail in assisting individuals and nations in peril. We examine emerging regional hot spots, with an emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. We explore the challenges facing the governments, civil society organizations, and businesses in the aftermath of crises and the impact on citizens. We review the effectiveness of regional organizations like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), and the African Union (AU) in assisting governments rebuild and stabilize their societies. We have several role-playing simulations during which students play the role of an individual or organization responsible for briefing counterparts on key events.

This course focuses on four conflicts of the 1990s—Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and Kosovo—specifically through the lens of human rights, which are all linked by a common theme: humanitarian intervention. In some cases, it went horribly wrong, Rwanda and Bosnia being prime examples. In other cases—Sierra Leone—the wars were able to end. The 1990s was the era of supposed “humanitarian intervention” and “just” wars, when doctrines such as “The Blair Doctrine” presided and were used to save civilian lives. Can we learn from what happened in that decade given the horror of Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Iraq today? The course uses a mix of video footage from the wars from reputable journalists as well as testimonies, texts, and articles from the time. Students also examine the 1990s conflicts under the Right to Protect doctrine of Kofi Annan and compare how humanitarian intervention was used then—as opposed to now, in the case of the Syrian war. An important dimension of the course is lessons learned. The Blair Doctrine is examined. There are several guest speakers throughout the term who were directly involved in these conflicts.

This course surveys a selection of topics in contemporary human rights law, with attention to broader principles and problems in international law, as well as to cognate fields like international criminal and international humanitarian law. A consistent focus is how the United States relates to the international human rights system—and how, conversely, that system impinges on diverse areas of American law and policy. The course also takes up the ways in which both the international system and the rights jurisprudence of other countries might differ from approaches in American law, as for example in socioeconomic rights adjudication or the regulation of religious practice. Self-scheduled examination. Follows Law School calendar.

This course examines a series of transnational literary texts and films that illuminate how the displaced—migrants, exiles, and refugees— remake home away from their native countries. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have produced massive displacements due to wars, genocides, racial, ethnic and religious conflicts, economic and climate change, among other factors. Our course focuses on several texts that explore questions of home, nation, and self in the context of specific historical events such as the Holocaust, civil rights movements in the U.S., internment, the Indian partition, African decolonization, and Middle Eastern/Arab ethno-religious conflicts and wars. We examine these events alongside the shifting legal and political policies and categories related to asylum, humanitarian parole, refugee, and illegal alien status. Exploring themes such as nostalgia, longing, trauma, and memory, we look at the possibilities and limitations of creating, contesting, and imagining home in the diaspora. Our objective is to debate and develop the ethical, political, geographic, and imaginative articulations of home in an era of mass displacements and geo-political crises. We examine how notions of home are imagined alongside and against categories of race, gender, and sexuality.

This course focuses on operational aspects of planning and response to domestic and international public health and medical emergencies. Under the National Response Framework, public health and medical components of emergency response are grouped in Emergency Support Function #8 (ESF 8). Many states and local jurisdictions organize their responses similarly. ESF 8 encompasses seventeen core functions. The course primarily emphasizes U.S. domestic scenarios and familiarity with U.S. government guidance documents, but international response analogies and distinctions are included for illustration of some concepts.

Ever since the UN declared shelter a “human right” in 1951, the number of refugee camps has escalated. Across the globe, NGOs, humanitarian organizations, and architects have been involved in designing provisional housing for refugees—a term that covers peoples displaced by ethnic, political, economic, and environmental reasons, both within and beyond their countries. Initially designed as temporary solutions, many are now the size of cities, in some cases with populations that have soared to half a million people. The number of refugees worldwide, currently set at about sixty-five million, is expected to grow rapidly, given the accelerating climate crisis. The camps themselves fall into different typologies. News organizations frequently report on the more recent ones—in Kenya, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Pakistan. Older camps such as the Palestinian ones or Dadaab (Kenya), have become a permanent home to several generations of residents who, though born in the host country, are nevertheless stateless and thus extremely vulnerable. Less visible, but equally ubiquitous, are detention and internment facilities established by liberal democracies in Europe and Australia and at the U.S./Mexico border. This seminar analyzes refugee camps and detention centers from a transnational perspective, probing the limits and problems evident in different cases, as well as the state of exception and extraterritoriality that applies to all of them. It also studies disaster relief housing around the globe, sometimes built with the help of refugees. What metrics should we use to judge successful design?

This clinical application course for students in the global health track provides opportunities to develop advanced nursing skills with a range of global populations within the students’ areas of specialization. While in clinical settings, students develop skills in assessment and management of acute and chronic conditions using evidence-based patient management strategies in accordance with the cultural beliefs and practices of populations of immigrants, refugees, American Indians, and Alaskan native and rural residents. These experiences may take place in YSN-approved U.S. or international settings. Additional experiences with local resettlement organizations such as Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS) and Connecticut Institute for Refugees and Immigrants (CIRI) are also available. These experiences may include developing and presenting education programs to groups of refugees, immigrants, or asylum seekers; creating training materials for the resettlement agencies; or serving as a cultural companion or health navigator for newly arrived families. Required of all students pursuing the global health track during the spring term of their first specialty year. Thirty hours of face-to-face interactions either in a health care setting or in an alternative setting, and one hour per week of clinical conference. Taken before NURS 6

This clinical application course for students in the global health track provides opportunities to develop advanced nursing skills with a range of global populations within the students’ areas of specialization. While in clinical settings, students develop skills in assessment and management of acute and chronic conditions using evidence-based patient management strategies in accordance with the cultural beliefs and practices of populations of immigrants, refugees, American Indians, and Alaskan native and rural residents. These experiences may take place in YSN-approved U.S. or international settings. Additional experiences with local resettlement organizations such as Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS) and Connecticut Institute for Refugees and Immigrants (CIRI) are also available. These experiences may include developing and presenting education programs to groups of refugees, immigrants, or asylum seekers; creating training materials for the resettlement agencies; or serving as a cultural companion or health navigator for newly arrived families. Required of all students pursuing the global health track during the fall term of their second specialty year. Thirty hours of face-to-face interactions either in a health care setting or in an alternative setting, and one hour per week of clinical conference. Taken after NURS 6230.