Master of Arts in Health and Human Experience

This course examines the intersection of literary studies and medicine, exploring how literary texts — including fiction, poetry, memoir, drama, and life writing — represent, interrogate, and shape understandings of illness, the body, care, and death. Students engage with a wide range of texts from different cultural traditions and historical periods. The course considers how literature offers resources such as: the cultivation of empathy and moral imagination, practice in tolerating ambiguity, and attentiveness to the particularity of individual experience. Students also examine how literary form — genre, voice, metaphor, narrative structure — mediates the representation of health and illness, and what it means to read such texts with both critical rigour and ethical care. The course includes collaborative close reading workshops and engages with medical practitioners who use narrative medicine in healthcare and community settings, and leverages the programme's partnership with Sing Lit Station's Poetry for Health initiative.

Creative Writing: Narratives of Self-Care is a workshop-based course with an emphasis on the various forms of narrative that constitute contemporary literary production. You will explore the possibilities of a broad range of narrative forms and genres. The following are some narrative forms that may be introduced: letters, journals, diaries, memoir, literary fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, lyric essays, among others. You will embark on a process for the development and production of individual creative works of your own writing. You will work intensively towards the production of your writing portfolio, all while gaining a deeper understanding of craft elements across varied texts. There is the broad focus on narratives in healthcare, alongside contemplating the self as subject — all its complex, distinct subjectivities in identity, history, desire, struggle, joy, pain, virtue, attitude, habit, activity, ambition, promise. In a supportive and critical environment, students will critique one another's work and discuss the progress of their writing projects, as well as their developing working practices. Within this introspective scrutiny is often involved the long hard look, in an effort to better understand our own selves, both as identity and authorial presence. This commitment to paying attention extends to the way we observe both our inner and outer worlds, with particular significance on language and craft. Through such explorations, this course will hopefully aid us in better understanding the life of the professional practising writer, while intimating with one's individual needs and ambitions.

This course offers an interdisciplinary, research-led exploration of food as a central lens for understanding health and human experience. Drawing on food studies, medical humanities, sociolinguistics, and health communication, the course examines how food operates simultaneously as a determinant of health, a cultural narrative, a site of ethical and political debate, and a medium of communication. The course is shaped by contemporary research on alternative proteins and future food systems, gastrodiplomacy and culinary diplomacy, culinary tourism, and heritage. Using humanities methodologies (e.g. interpretative analysis, narrative ethics, ethnography, semi-structured interviews), students will investigate how emerging food technologies, national food branding, tourism practices, and media representations shape public understandings of health, sustainability, and wellbeing. Particular attention is given to Singapore and Asia as key sites for innovation in alternative proteins, food policy, and global health communication, while maintaining a comparative, transnational perspective. Through case studies, practical workshops, and collaborative projects, students will analyze how health narratives are constructed across texts, images, platforms, and sensory experiences — ranging from policy documents and public campaigns to menus, exhibitions, and digital media. The course emphasizes applied and experiential learning, preparing students to translate cultural analysis into professional contexts such as healthcare communication, wellness industries, community services, policy development, and NGO work. By integrating critical theory with hands-on practice and field sites, this course equips students with the analytical, communicative, and collaborative skills needed to address contemporary health challenges in culturally responsive and socially engaged ways.

This course investigates the complex and often underappreciated relationships between religion, culture, and health across diverse communities and contexts. It examines how faith, spirituality, and cultural belief systems shape health behaviours, coping mechanisms, help-seeking practices, and patient-provider relationships. Case studies are drawn from Singapore and the wider Asian and global context, with attention to how spiritual and religious diversity shapes health outcomes and demands culturally responsive care. The course integrates invited perspectives from healthcare practitioners, community leaders, and those with lived experience.

This course examines traditional medical systems across China, South Asia, and Southeast Asia as coherent intellectual and cosmological traditions in their own right, rather than as precursors to or variants of biomedicine. We will trace how indigenous conceptions of disease, physiology, and the body are embedded in broader frameworks of cosmology and faith, drawing on each tradition's distinct textual history. The course also attends to the uneven status of integration of these systems into contemporary healthcare policy and practice, and to the differing intellectual property models that govern medical knowledge across these contexts — including the particular vulnerabilities faced by minority ethnic communities whose knowledge is often undocumented or unprotected. We close by considering ethnobotanical research as a site where these tensions converge, weighing its promises for therapeutic discovery against the obstacles of biopiracy, consent, and unequal benefit-sharing.

This course examines how media — including film, television, journalism, and digital platforms — construct, circulate, and contest representations of health and sickness. Drawing on literary studies and medical humanities, students interrogate how media framings shape public attitudes, influence policy, and affect the lived experiences of those depicted. The course explores the ethics and power dynamics of representation: who has the authority to tell stories about health and sickness and whose perspectives are marginalised or distorted? Students analyse the complexities of inclusion and exclusion that operate in the making and circulation of media texts, attending to questions of authorship, audience, and context. Screenings, interviews with practitioners, and analysis of authentic media materials are central to the course.

This course explores the use of charms, amulets, and other forms of supernatural healing across a range of cultures and time periods. In examining how patients throughout history have sought to influence health, sickness, and safety, students will gain an understanding of how medicine intersects with religious and cultural belief. The approach will be interdisciplinary, drawing from material artifacts, literary texts, historical documents, and religious works, among others.

According to the second law of thermodynamics, the state of entropy of the entire universe tends to increase over time. While living systems are not exempt from the second law, they can temporarily maintain local order by importing energy (food and sunlight) and exporting entropy (heat and waste) to their surroundings. Ageing appears when the systems, mechanisms, and processes that hold this local order in place become imperfect and diminish over time. Biologically, this shows up as the shortening of telomeres, DNA mutations, cellular senescence, protein misfolding, and organelle dysfunction. Philosophically, ageing and mortality are not mere accidents but rather the outward signs of complex, self-organizing, dissipative structures struggling against entropy with limited resources. Our existential horizons are therefore statistical horizons, written into thermodynamics and evolution. This course, in a big-philosophical manner, seeks to help students understand how things, understood in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term with respect to ageing.

How can the humanities remain relevant and meaningful in an era marked by climate and environmental crises, threats on public health, and the rapid expansion of A.I. and digital technologies? How can we envision and create sustainable futures in an age of crises? Engaging with current discussion and debates in environmental humanities, and its intersections with medical and digital humanities, this course examines how humanities research continues to help us understand, navigate, and respond to the drastic transformations of our world. It focuses on both theory and practice. By foregrounding ecology, health, and technology, it introduces key theoretical approaches in environmental humanities and their applications in the critical analysis of literature, film, media art, and other cultural texts. At the same time, it offers practical skills in interdisciplinary humanities research, such as conference preparation, academic publishing, and navigating the academic job market in the rapidly changing environments. This course is open to MA and PhD students, and advanced-level UG students who wish to conduct their FYPs on related topics.

This course examines the modern reception and representation of medieval European medicine. Through considering how modern media distorts historical reality, students will gain an understanding both of medieval medical history and of modern messaging. Together we will discuss sources including medieval medical recipes, scientific analyses, modern films and novels, author interviews, and scholarly articles about medieval art and literature.

This course examines the environmental, infrastructural and governance transformations in China and Hong Kong from the late 19th to the late 20th century, integrating historical, social and urban studies perspectives. Students will explore the development of urban infrastructure — including transport systems, housing, and public utilities such as water and electricity — alongside environmental and socio-natural challenges, including water shortages, flooding, typhoons and epidemics such as cholera and smallpox. Using theoretical frameworks such as urban metabolism, socio-natural systems, political ecology and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the course demonstrates how these concepts can be applied to practical analyses of urban planning, policymaking and environmental and public health management.

Rapid technological transformation in healthcare, including AI-assisted diagnostics, algorithmic triage, digital surveillance, and data-driven governance, has intensified uncertainty rather than eliminated it. While such technologies promise efficiency and objectivity, they often obscure ethical risk, redistribute responsibility, and disproportionately affect vulnerable populations. This course responds to a critical gap in professional education: learners are trained to manage risk, optimise decisions, or comply with protocols, but rarely to interpret, inhabit, and act responsibly within uncertainty. Rather than treating uncertainty as an individual deficit to be overcome through confidence or tolerance, this course introduces Uncertainty Literacy as a reflective, ethical, and relational competence. Students will learn to recognise how uncertainty operates across epistemic, technological, institutional, and moral domains, and how responses to uncertainty shape resilience, care practices, and justice. The course equips students to engage technological advancement without retreating into either technocratic certainty or paralysing scepticism. Uncertainty is treated as a pedagogical resource, not a problem to be neutralised.

This course introduces students to the foundational theoretical frameworks underpinning the study of health equity and the social determinants of health. Drawing on sociology, public health, and global health studies, it examines how structural conditions — including class, race, gender, disability, and migration status — shape differential health outcomes across populations. The course critically interrogates how dominant public health paradigms can both address and reproduce inequity, and equips students with the analytical tools to assess health systems and interventions. Particular attention is given to Singapore and Asian regional contexts alongside global comparisons.

This course examines economic frameworks, resource allocation decisions, and the structural design of health systems. Students engage with foundational concepts in health economics — including insurance and pricing models, cost-effectiveness analysis, and the logic of universal health coverage — and interrogate how these frameworks interact with social issues such as inequality. The course asks students to grapple with the ethical tension between designing sustainable health systems under resource constraints and upholding the rights and dignity of individuals whose conditions fall outside dominant paradigms.

Recent pandemics, geopolitical & economic shifts have revealed how deeply interconnected human societies are, and how the global health system is ultimately only as strong as its weakest links. This course examines how health systems are designed for population health, how priorities shift over time, and how trade-offs are made between sustainability under resource constraints and the rights and needs of individuals — particularly those whose conditions, identities, or experiences are less visible or harder to articulate. Grounded in the Singapore context, the course explores historical and recent health system shifts prompted by rapid population ageing, while critically interrogating which populations continue to be left behind. Students will analyse how social, economic, political, and cultural forces shape health systems and how they continue to influence changes over time. The course also examines stigma (self, perceived, anticipated, and structural), the social construction of disability, representations of health and sickness in media, alongside the roles of community support organisations and patient advocacy groups. Through multidisciplinary and experiential approaches, learners engage with community engagement and co-design as pathways toward more inclusive, equitable health systems.

Medicine is among our most important institutions. Though its aim is practical, medicine is shot through with conceptual commitments and theoretical assumptions, its basic tools rely on causal hypotheses supported to varying degrees by inductive inferences, and medical research is developed in a complex political and economic nexus. Thus medicine is a prime subject for philosophical analysis. This course will study leading theories of health and disease, philosophical issues underlying evidence-based assessment of medical interventions, philosophical problems in psychiatry, and policy-related questions in medical regulation and public health.

This course uses case study-based inquiry to examine the lived experiences of communities navigating stigmatised health conditions and marginalised social identities. Three interconnected case studies structure the course: living with HIV and the challenges of disclosure, treatment adherence, and substance dependence in the context of MSM communities and beyond; living with rare disorders and the particular burdens of diagnostic delay, economic marginalisation, and social isolation; and the health challenges facing sex workers, including the intersecting vulnerabilities of precarious legal status, migration, and access to care. Across these cases, students examine how stigma — in self, perceived, anticipated, and structural forms — shapes health outcomes and obstructs care. Site visits, guest speakers with lived and professional expertise, and documentary materials ground the analysis in real communities and institutions. Students develop skills in compassionate and critically informed engagement with complex, intersecting vulnerabilities in health and care settings.

The Great Reminder: How Dying and Death Systems Shape Contemporary Society examines how death, dying, and the systems that surround them profoundly influence social life, cultural meaning, health practices, and public policy in contemporary Western and Asian societies. Situated within the interdisciplinary field of Thanatology, the course critically engages with how mortality functions not merely as a biological and physical endpoint, but as a powerful social, cultural, political, and humanistic force. Drawing on perspectives from psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, public health, medical humanities, and cultural studies, students will explore key death systems such as Art and the literary imagination, the evolution of palliative care, funerary practices across times and cultures, legal and bureaucratic regimes, media representations, the challenge of memorialisation, and emerging digital afterlives. The course interrogates how these systems reflect, reiterate, and at times, reimagines psychological thought, social values, and cultural norms with death as the core spectacle. Students will be encouraged to critically analyse how contemporary societies manage death through institutionalisation, professionalisation, and technologization, as well as how counter-movements — such as death positivity, community-based end-of-life care, and alternative memorial practices — challenge traditional or dominant paradigms. Attention will also be paid to global and cross-cultural perspectives, highlighting how death systems differ across contexts and what these differences reveal about culture, health, and society. By the end of the course, students will have developed an essential understanding of how Thanatology can be employed as a vital lens for examining their own lives and broader society, with "The Great Reminder" shaping how we live, love, care, suffer, govern, and make sense of it all in contemporary life.

This MA course looks at how technology – especially AI systems – are changing contemporary medicine and how philosophical tools from philosophy of technology, philosophy of medicine, and philosophy of science can help us understand what it means and evaluate it. Instead of viewing AI as just a neutral tool, the course sees health technologies as sociotechnical systems: the technology itself is treated as a piece of a bigger whole that includes human stakeholders, infrastructures and workflows, governance and institutions, and political economies. We start with some theoretical scaffolding by considering the idea of a sociotechnical system and human-centered design, how artifacts can have politics, how medical records anddatasets are not neutral, how classifications loop back into – and shape – lived experience, and how prediction can be value-laden. After that, we clarify pressing issues at the intersection of health and technology: automation bias and technological somnambulism, black-box decision-making and its impact on trust, bias and fairness in clinical algorithms, misinformation and its impact on health policy, the design of recommender systems and their impact on mental health, the commercialization of healthcare, the risks of LLMs as psychotherapy chatbots, and the ethics of digital twins. The goal is to analyze how technology reshape, influence, and control our health from a plethora of angles — and for students to develop their own principled ways of evaluating and responding to them. Each week pairs two readings with films, documentaries, or TV show episodes. Students use the week's frameworks to diagnose the sociotechnical structure, ethical tensions, and governance failures embedded in these actual or imagined realities. The goal is to provide a multimodal path towards situating theoretical concepts into our world, and a means of concretizing the worries and conceptual questions raised each week.

How might we understand ageing outside of the conventional frameworks of loss and decay? In this course, we will attend to literary, theoretical, and cultural works that frame oldage as a time of rejuvenation and community even as they acknowledge the physical and emotional difficulties that this season of life brings. Ageing is frequently conceived of as a challenge, but for such writers as Jonathan Swift to Edward Said, old age is also an opportunity to experiment with new aesthetic styles and re-think old relations. To develop this alternative understanding of ageing, we will consider writings from the 16th to the 21st century, considering forms of ageing that cross both temporal and national boundaries. This course is divided into three units. The first, "Finding Meaning," examines a smattering of canonical writings on old age that have shaped the cultural imagination, including Shakespeare's King Lear and the essays of the philosopher Michel de Montaigne. You will put the ideas you glean from these writings in conversation with your insights from a short oral interview you will conduct with someone above the age of 60. The second unit, titled "Companionship," will survey 18th-century utopian writings about aged communes as well as letters and essays by writer and artist duos who continue to collaborate in old age, tracking the new or deepened platonic, familial, and romantic ties that ageing brings. We will also hear from those who work with therapy animals in elder care contexts. The last unit of the course attends to ageing as it relates to social justice. We will read dementia novels that were intended as forms of advocacy while also learning about subtler forms of advocacy against ageism in Singapore, including fashion shows and art exhibitions initiated by practitioners later in life.

In this course, learners will discover embodied and relational forms of knowing through theatre exercises from improvisational theatre and Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed. This course explores issues of diversity, layers of communication and affective dimensions of clinical interactions and interpersonal encounters through experiential learning. As we investigate these components at the core of patient encounters, learners will exercise versatility, critical thinking and problem-solving skills, collaboration, presence and observation. In line with Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal's critical pedagogy, this course's pedagogical approach empowers learners to draw original insights from the activities and practise relational thinking rather than being guided by learning objectives.

This course examines design as a discipline concerned with improving human health, safety, and wellbeing. It explores how human-centred design, participatory methods, and design thinking can be applied to healthcare and public health challenges — from the design of protective equipment and clinical environments to AI-assisted care tools, assistive technologies, and socially assistive robotics. Students engage with real-world case studies and address the ethical dimensions of designing for vulnerable users, including questions of trust, accessibility, cultural responsiveness, and the power dynamics inherent in design decisions. Students develop practical skills in design research and prototyping, alongside the critical and humanistic frameworks needed to evaluate the social and health implications of designed objects, systems, and environments.

This proposed course is for all students interested in healthcare communication, their relation to healthcare outcomes, and how humanities and social science disciplines can contribute to the medical profession. The course introduces current issues in healthcare interaction between clinicians and patients through the examination of authentic recorded consultations, and adopts an multidisciplinary approach (sociological and philosophical) towards the understanding of such issues as it relates to the development of the healthcare professional.al.

This course investigates the intersections of artistic practice, emerging technology, and therapeutic application. Students examine how art-making and art-engagement can serve as resources for psychological wellbeing, rehabilitation, and care. The course traces the history and theory of art therapy and creative arts in health, before turning to contemporary developments. Students also engage critically with the risks and limitations of technologically mediated therapeutic art — including questions of depersonalisation, ethics of AI creativity, data privacy, and the potential for technology to widen inequities in access to arts and health programmes. Studio-based workshops, practitioner perspectives, and hands-on experimentation with relevant tools and platforms are central to the course.

This course examines how visual culture — including graphic design, photography, film, data visualisation, and digital media — shapes public understanding of health, illness, and the body, and how the ethics of visual representation intersect with questions of power, identity, and justice. Students analyse the visual rhetoric of public health campaigns, medical imaging, pharmaceutical advertising, and digital health data visualisation. Students develop skills in visual analysis and ethical critique, and produce their own visual communication outputs responsive to the principles discussed in the course.

This course examines disability as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon, exploring how societal structures, norms, and policies construct disability and shape the lived experiences of disabled people. Engaging critically with the social model of disability and its applications in Singapore and globally, students interrogate how dominant frameworks of inclusion and exclusion operate across healthcare, education, policy, and media. A central thread of the course is reflexivity and positionality: students are guided to examine their own beliefs, biases, and assumptions as researchers and practitioners, and to understand how these shape engagement with communities and research subjects. Patient testimonies, policy documents, and scholarly texts are used alongside practitioner perspectives to develop an embodied and critically aware approach to working with and alongside disabled communities.