With each global health crisis, the interconnectedness of populations around the globe becomes more pronounced. Diseases not only affect the health of communities, but they have a profound impact on political, economic, and social stability within countries and regions. This course engages the interdisciplinary nature of global health by approaching the issue through the lens of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) developed by the United Nations. The SDGs range in focus from good health and well-being to gender equality to clean water and sanitation to affordable, clean energy. By engaging the ways that health has a stake in these goals, the course will bring the expertise of faculty from the University of Pittsburgh and CMU as well as practitioners to understand and address the issue surrounding global health from a myriad of perspectives and avenues. With an applied focus, the course will assist students in engaging and advocating for a community on a global health issue through a policy memo. This iteration of the course will examine gender equality and SDG #5.

Andrea Mubi Brighenti is Aggregate Professor of Social Theory and Space & Culture at the Department of Sociology, University of Trento, Italy. Research topics focus on space, power and society. He has published The Ambiguous Multiplicities: Materials, episteme and politics of some cluttered social formations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Visibility in Social Theory and Social Research (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Territori migranti [Migrant Territories. Space and Control of Global Mobility] (ombre corte, 2009). Has edited Urban Interstices. The Aesthetics and Politics of Spatial In-betweens(Ashgate, 2013), Uma Cidade de Imagens (Mundos Sociais, 2012 – with Ricardo Campos and Luciano Spinelli), and The Wall and the City (professionaldreamers, 2009). Urban Walls. Political and Cultural Meanings of Vertical Surfaces (Routledge, 2018, co-edited with Mattias Kärrholm).

Andrea Mubi Brighenti is Aggregate Professor of Social Theory and Space & Culture at the Department of Sociology, University of Trento, Italy. Research topics focus on space, power and society. He has published The Ambiguous Multiplicities: Materials, episteme and politics of some cluttered social formations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Visibility in Social Theory and Social Research (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Territori migranti [Migrant Territories. Space and Control of Global Mobility] (ombre corte, 2009). Has edited Urban Interstices. The Aesthetics and Politics of Spatial In-betweens(Ashgate, 2013), Uma Cidade de Imagens (Mundos Sociais, 2012 – with Ricardo Campos and Luciano Spinelli), and The Wall and the City (professionaldreamers, 2009). Urban Walls. Political and Cultural Meanings of Vertical Surfaces (Routledge, 2018, co-edited with Mattias Kärrholm).

A surprising number of animals appear in the fictional representations of the March 11, 2011 disasters in Japan. Why? My hunch is that the portrayal of animal inferiorities and portrayal of disaster are linked by narrative challenges and techniques: they both are "impossible." Furukawa Hideo has been writing through animals for some time, and with added poignancy after the Tohoku disasters; this presentation focuses on his fiction of Furukawa Hideo to examine his exploration of the fictional possibilities, and limits, of portraying animal inferiorities in fiction.

Women of the Gulag tells the compelling and tragic stories of six women as last survivors of the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago largely tells of the men caught in Stalin's camps and special settlements for "crimes against the state." Women of the Gulag, features six women in their eighties and nineties as they tell their stories while going about their daily lives in remote Urals villages, in break-away Sukhumi, or in Moscow suburbs. Their only hesitancy to speak out relates to sexual violence, about which they would only hint. Sadly, three died shortly after their interviews.