Advanced Topics in Human Anatomy

Student Learning Outcomes, Goals, Objectives:

Students successfully completing this course will be able to:

• Analyze the historical construction of anatomical knowledge, tracing how race, colonialism, class, and institutional power shaped the production and legitimization of anatomical collections and scientific authority.
• Evaluate competing ethical frameworks for their capacity — and failure — to resolve dilemmas involving human remains, consent, and repatriation, rather than applying a single framework to produce closure.
• Diagnose the structural conditions (economic, institutional, and racialized) that produce ethical failure in historical and contemporary cases, distinguishing systemic causes from individual acts.
• Translate complex ethical and biological issues for non-specialist stakeholder audiences — such as community advisory boards or institutional committees — while maintaining scientific accuracy and acknowledging where evidence is incomplete or contested.
• Construct a defensible set of ethical guidelines for a real or realistic context by integrating legal, historical, institutional, and stakeholder considerations and making explicit the trade-offs in their recommendations.
• Defend ethical arguments under structured critique, revising positions in response to identified weaknesses, unintended consequences, and conflicting obligations.
• Assess the limits of their own ethical reasoning, identifying where initial assumptions were challenged, where frameworks proved insufficient, and what tensions remain unresolved.

Course Grading Information:

Activity/Performance Measure	Percentage/Points
Ethical Deliberation Lab	20%
Case File: Ethical Reconstruction	20%
Community Translation Project	20%
Final Project: Ethical Guidelines	35%
Final Reflection	5%

Attendance/Participation:

Participation in the Ethical Deliberation Lab constitutes 20% of the final grade. Each class includes a structured deliberation lab in which students identify an ethical problem grounded in the readings, diagnose the structural conditions producing it, evaluate competing ethical responses, and produce a short written or diagrammatic output during class. These sessions may involve stakeholder mapping, constraint-based decision exercises, rapid policy drafting, or structured disagreement and rebuttal. All work is completed in class and submitted at the end of each session. Students are evaluated on their use of evidence, their ability to identify structural causes, and the clarity and defensibility of their reasoning.

Course Materials Purchased by the Students:

No course materials are required.