Digital Health Humanities Teaching Modules

Northeastern’s Digital Health Humanities Teaching Modules introduce students to the cultural and ethical challenges posed by the data-heavy medicine of the future to privacy, the appropriate collection of medical data, and the ways that patients and healthcare workers alike think about health. Building on what Kirsten Ostherr has called the “digital health humanities,” these modules teach students how to parse the ethics of digital technologies and big-data approaches to healthcare, how to analyze narratives that structure contemporary healthcare, and how to use historical and contemporary data about health disparities to forecast social and cultural challenges posed by new technologies. In short, these modules use the humanities and social sciences to evaluate social and cultural aspects of a healthcare system shaped by emerging technologies and the data they produce.

These modules were made possible with the generous support of a Humanities Connections grant from the National Endowment Humanities.

The creators of these modules are six faculty members at Northeastern University: Sari Altschuler (English), John Basl (Philosophy and Religion), Sara Jensen Carr (Architecture), Matthew Goodwin (Computer Science and Health Sciences), Chris Parsons (History), and Laura Senier (Sociology and Health Sciences).

Pandemic Teaching Initiative Modules

The Pandemic Teaching Initiative is a library of publicly accessible educational modules that explore the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic funded and organized by the Northeastern Humanities Center. Explore sample modules below.

Writing and Responding to Trauma in a Time of Pandemic