Honors

Home Praxis Lab Alzheimer’s and Aging
Health & Society

Alzheimer’s and Aging

This Praxis Lab is designed to link our current scientific understanding of Alzheimer’s disease with social and public policy issues facing patients, families, and society at large. The course will concentrate on knowledge, communication, inclusion, and dignity by studying the intersections of science, philosophy, emotion, ethics, and public policy. It will ask students to consider these questions: What does it mean to be old in America? To be dependent? To have Alzheimer’s Disease? What do you think your community needs to know about the disease? How will you communicate what you have discovered?

Participating students will develop a basic scientific understanding of Alzheimer’s disease and will explore the medical, ethical, philosophical, and public policy issues that accompany it. They will be able to apply their own interests and expertise to address this emerging problem. Students will recognize how the humanities inform the medical and scientific and also how the medical and scientific approach to disease is inadequate and must draw upon the social sciences and public policy to be fully successful and be informed by the humanities to best understand the ramification of disease. At the end of this course, students will better understand how society chooses to frame disease can affect policy, knowledge and stigma.

Instructors:

Vicky Newman

Phillip Bimstein

More Praxis Labs

Infectious Disease on the Run
Health & Society

Infectious Disease on the Run

Margaret P. Battin, PhD
Wendy Hobson-Rohrer, MD

This Praxis Lab examined the history, science, and ethical implications of pandemics, from the Black Plague to COVID-19. Students analyzed how diseases spread, the social and political responses to outbreaks, and the ethical considerations of public health interventions.

More Info2021-2022
How We Die
Health & Society

How We Die

Margaret P. Battin, PhD

This Praxis Lab explored the evolving landscape of death and dying in the modern world, examining the shift from infectious disease mortality to prolonged battles with degenerative illnesses like cancer, heart failure, and dementia.

More Info2016-2017
Education, Incarceration & Justice: Punishment and Opportunity in an Era of Mass Imprisonment
Policy & Social Justice

Education, Incarceration & Justice: Punishment and Opportunity in an Era of Mass Imprisonment

Erin Castro
Roberto Garcia

This Praxis Lab examined the deep connections between education, incarceration, and justice in the United States, a country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. Students explored the historical and systemic forces that have expanded the carceral state, disproportionately affecting low-income communities and communities of color.

More Info2016-2017