I was originally attracted to this course due to my history of taking a lot of Women’s and Gender Study classes, along with my curiosity of Anthropology. Just in the first week, I had already learned so much about Biomedicine that I was not aware of prior and knew that this was going to be a course that would put me a little out of my element and overall comfort zone in order to learn new concepts and ideas. I stumbled upon Croatia for the country I was going to write my activity posts on and ended up learning so much about a current women’s rights issue happening there in regard to obstetric violence, which I will write about more in-depth in my final project. In doing so, I also learned how to apply a familiar approach, feminist theory, to this gender-based health issue, but with an anthropologist’s lens instead of a sociologist’s.

Although it took a second to readjust, I enjoyed how the course’s use of WordPress. The weekly lectures were available in full written transcript form, which helped me tremendously. I also enjoyed reading through other classmate’s responses and formulating comments back. I have taken many online classes, and this was the first to really compensate for discussions that would normally be held in a classroom setting. After finishing my blog or activity post for the week, it was always so interesting to read through other’s responses and assess the variety of educated perspectives.

As far as the future of this course goes, I do not know what I would change. I thought that writing an activity post every week was a lot of effort, but now I’m realizing how helpful it was to have written those posts when drafting out my final project. I have no complaints!