Mar 28, 2024  
Loyola Marymount University Bulletin 2022-2023 
    
Loyola Marymount University Bulletin 2022-2023 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

Health and Society Minor


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Acting Director: Amanda Apgar

Health and Society is an interdisciplinary minor designed to provide undergraduate students with training in the social foundations of health. This includes, but is not limited to, how social arrangements shape morbidity and mortality patterns across different populations; the organization and financing of health care; how culture informs ideas and practices related to bodies, illness, and disease; and how people experience and make sense of illness in their everyday lives.

The minor requires students to take five courses, including HEAS 2000 Introduction to Health and Society  and four additional courses selected form an approved list. Courses are offered in Bioethics, Biology, Economics, Film and Television Studies, Health and Human Sciences, History, Psychology, Sociology, and Women’s and Gender Studies. Key features of the program include: 1) an interdisciplinary and rigorous approach to understanding historic and contemporary social forces that impact health, and 2) a flexible curriculum that allows students to focus on specific issues or perspectives of interest.

Students completing the minor will know about historic and current efforts aimed at improving the health of populations and should be able to use different disciplinary lenses to analyze how social forces shape health, broadly defined. They should also be able to formulate macro- and/or micro-level interventions aimed at reducing disease burdens on particular populations.

Health and Society Learning Outcomes


  • Be able to identify the conceptual and methodological tools employed in different disciplines to study health, disease, and the body
  • Be able to analyze how social forces (e.g., culture, policies, racism, class structures) shape health
  • Be able to gather and analyze information related to specific health topics
  • Know about specific historic and/or current efforts to improve the health of populations

Minor Requirements


LMU students wishing to declare the Health and Society minor must meet with the program director. The director will sign the student’s Change of Program form provided the student meets certain academic standards that include having a minimum LMU GPA of 2.0 (C) and not otherwise on academic probation.

The minor requires the completion of five courses (15-20 semester hours; units may vary depending on the mix of courses taken given different college/school policies on the number of semester hours offered for courses). The only required course in the minor is HEAS 2000 Introduction to Health and Society , which introduces students to important conceptual frameworks and prepares them for interdisciplinary coursework. Students must adhere to the following program guidelines:

  1. In addition to HEAS 2000 Introduction to Health and Society , students may only take ONE additional lower-division course.
  2. At least 10 semester hours of upper-division coursework.
  3. No more than two courses may be taken from the same department or program.
  4. A minimum grade of C (2.0) is required in HEAS 2000 Introduction to Health and Society  in order to progress in the minor.
  5. An average grade of C (2.0) is required in courses included in the minor.
  6. Students must complete a minimum of 6 units in HEAS that do not count towards any other program in which they are enrolled. 

Other courses that count towards the minor, include, but are not limited to the following:


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