The College of Public Health began offering its new public health and the arts minor spring semester of 2022. Credit: Phoebe Helms | Lantern Reporter
Ohio State’s College of Public Health created a new minor by combining two seemingly opposite fields: public health and the arts.
The public health and the arts minor was offered as an option to students for the first time during the spring 2022 semester. It aims to emphasize the idea that community health and well-being are all-encompassing of daily life through traditional public health courses and specific arts courses, according to the College of Public Health’s website.
Amy Ferketich, a professor of epidemiology in the College of Public Health, said she had the idea to bring the minor to Ohio State following interactions with the staff at Kenyon College. Ferketich said she showed tobacco advertisements that were displayed in the Gund Gallery in her public health class, and from there, she and her team began developing the minor.
“When we were working on this proposal, what hit, like, all of us at once during this large group meeting that we were having, is that public health officials and artists have a common goal of improving community health and well-being, they just come at it from slightly different perspectives,” Ferketich said. “What we want in this minor is for students to learn those different perspectives.”
Although the two disciplines may seem unrelated, public health and the arts seek to answer many of the same questions, Ferketich said.
“How do artists talk about racism as a public health crisis?” she said. “How do artists talk about poverty? How do artists talk about violence against women, you know, all of these issues that are key and critical issues?”
Comprising 15 credit hours, the minor includes a foundational public health class, a foundational arts class and options that would fulfill three credit hours for practice, performance-based and service-learning courses. It also includes a critical thinking and reflective course and a final course in either category, according to the website.
“Students will learn about how, you know, public health professionals view public health issues through the classes they take — the required class is ‘Intro to Global Public Health’ — but then they’re also going to learn about it from an arts perspective,” Ferketich said.
Ferketich said Jared Gardner, a professor of English and director of the Humanities Institute, helped develop the minor and offered a fresh perspective as to why the intersection between public health and the arts is important.
“There’s a hunger for put-together interdisciplinary conversations and possibility. So this minor, in some sense, presents itself as an opportunity to take two very different fields that have not historically talked a lot to each other and add them together,” Gardner said. “I think the diversity for both the public health program and our arts and humanities college are really ideally positioned to do that.”
Art has the potential to lead to health-related activism and has proven to be particularly impactful on public health during the AIDS epidemic, Gardner said. The “Act Up” movement, in particular, played a crucial role in mobilizing citizens and, eventually, the government against AIDS, he said.
“We began to see dramatic changes in the cocktails that first extended life and health for AIDS victims, and now today, AIDS is no longer a death sentence,” Gardner said. “If you have access to the medicine, you can live a full life, and that was unimaginable to me as a kid, and it wouldn’t have happened without the arts.”
