Sachs Grantee Jasmine Blanks Jones Teaches New Public Health Studies Course This Fall

from UPenn Course Catalog Fall 2020

PUBH 584 Health Messaging in Africa: Public Performance and Community Health Education

This course asks, What about performance offers a unique opportunity to learn from and with communities? How might dramatic performance be used to share information while learning from an audience? This course examines the work and research of young artists from Liberia, West Africa who used street theatre to teach best practices for prevention during the Ebola crisis and considers how their use of dialogical performance contributed to critical knowledge which iteratively informed interventions throughout their awareness campaign. The visiting artists will share their firsthand experiences and guide the class through use of their playwriting model for community change.

Students will design public performance projects around local-global community-based concerns using the tools they have learned. Students may choose from a variety of local organizations dedicated to serving immigrant communities and local communities of color in Philadelphia to develop performance-based public health messaging informed by a communications for development approach. Public health researchers who are looking for innovative ways to share their data will gain insights into this experimental ethnographic method and practitioners who want to offer their communities ways to connect best practices to lived experience will develop new pedagogical tools.

Taught by: Jasmine Blanks

Course not offered every year

Activity: Lecture

1.0 Course Unit