Epidemiological Methods for Measuring Hu

People across the world turn to the language and legal structures of human rights to advance justice and accountability. This course explores the intersections between epidemiology and human rights, examining how epidemiologic concepts and methods can help document violations, assess inequities, monitor progress, and support accountability. With its focus on the distribution and determinants of disease, disability, death, and injury, epidemiology offers powerful tools for substantiating claims related to the rights to health, a healthy environment, equitable resources, and freedom from violence and trauma. 

The course has three central goals: to help students critically examine the connections between human rights, justice, epidemiology, and quantitative measurement; to introduce epidemiologic methods relevant to human rights research, including vital statistics, population-based surveys, capture-recapture analyses, latent variable modeling, policy mapping, and causal inference; and to guide students in designing and communicating rigorous research that can inform human rights advocacy. Through this course, students will learn to select and design indicators of civil, cultural, economic, political, social, and collective rights; to evaluate and interpret quantitative evidence used in human rights contexts; to identify and articulate theories of change underlying human rights research; and to translate epidemiologic findings for diverse audiences in ways that maintain scientific integrity while advancing advocacy goals. The course culminates in a final paper in which students apply these skills to a set of human rights concerns in a particular context.