This course will provide a graduate level introduction to the anthropology of mind, body, and health. We will address broadly the question of how Anthropologists understand and investigate the social and cultural contexts of health and illness and the diverse ways in which humans use cultural resources to cope with pain, illness, suffering and healing. In addition, we will analyze medical practices as cultural systems, as well as the ways in which health, body, and mind are socially and politically constructed and manipulated, bodies are controlled and policed, and definitions of mind and mental processes influence and are influenced by social context. There will be a particular focus on the concepts of embodiment and trauma and their various uses and meanings in specific contexts. We will combine an examination of current theoretical paradigms with ethnographic case material from a number of societies, including Brazil, Japan, the US, and Canada. The goal of this comparative endeavor will be to analyze similarities and differences across understandings of mind and body and systems of healing, and to examine American perspectives, behaviors, and practices critically in order to illuminate the ways in which they are socially embedded and culturally specific. Open to all graduate students. No P/N.
Comp Lit 488-0-20 Study in French Philosophy: Biopolotics
This course addresses the emergence of sexuality as a philosophical theme within a number of currents of French philosophy, focussing on the feminist existentialist phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, the post-Marxist decolonialism of Frantz Fanon in A Dying Colonialism, the genealogical critique of Michel Foucault, and the latter's decolonial revision within the biopolitical analyses of the Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez.
The course has three main aims. We will critically compare and appraise the different methodologies, aims, concepts of power, and interpretive politics within these analyses of sexuality and/or the family as contingent formations. We will give attention to several recent publications by the philosophers under consideration that have prompted contemporary revision of established interpretations of these bodies of work. And we will ask how the work of Beauvoir, Fanon, Foucault and Castro-Gómez continues to be resituated today within a number of fields including contemporary critical theory, decolonial theory, critical race studies, and gender and sexualities studies. We will ask: what new concepts have now emerged from these transits and translations of mid twentieth-century theory?
English 434-0-20 Early Modern Sexualities: Studies in Shakespeare and the Early Drama
How can we practice the history and analysis of sexuality in early modern Europe? Is sexuality best described by a continuity of models, or alterity and historical difference? To what extent can we discuss "sexuality" in relation to "identity" in the pre-modern era? To address these complex questions, and to begin to ask new ones, we will concentrate on a range of exemplary literary and historical texts from around 1600 in England. We will be interested to explore both the multiple forms and functions of desire, eroticism, sex, gender, etc., in this culture, as well as the terms, methods, and theories we now use to read the sexual past. We will be particularly interested in gaining fluency in the languages of early modern identities and desires: sodomy, tribadism, friendship, marriage; bodies, their parts, and their pleasures. We will centrally engage recent critical controversies in the field over the utility of historicism in sexuality studies. We will interrogate sex/gender's intersections with categories such as race, religion, social class, and nation, and we will engage the emerging scholarship in early modern trans* studies.
English 441-0-20 Green Materialisms - 18th Century Literature
This course introduces students to a sequence of "materialisms" worked out from the 18th century to the present. While readings and discussions will gravitate toward contemporary Marxist and post-Marxist ecological thought (including the afterlives of ideas like "primitive accumulation" and "metabolic rift" in recent feminist, anti-colonial, and environmental frameworks), we will also spend time looking at the writings and influence of earlier thinkers whose controversial materialisms have returned to critical attention in recent decades (e.g. Lucretius, Spinoza, Herder). A guiding aim of the course is to assemble a fuller sense of the historical and conceptual underpinnings of first-world environmentalism; so we will ask what "matters," and to whom, in part by putting "greenness" under scrutiny as a critical category. Readings will emphasize theory and philosophy, but occasionally cross into poetry and science as well.
English 481-0-20 Studies in Literary Theory and Criticism - Racial Ecologies
How does contemporary Ethnic American literature contend with environmental crises such as rising sea levels, desertification, and loss of biodiversity? How do minority writers represent the asymmetrical effects of toxic exposure, crumbling infrastructure, and resource extraction? How might we think of race itself as ecologically constituted? To begin answering these questions, this graduate seminar will survey African American, Native American, Asian American, and Latinx novels, short stories, poetry, and film that explore the differential effects of what Anna Tsing calls "blasted landscapes" on minoritized populations. Concurrently, we will articulate an ecological approach to race, i.e., an interdisciplinary methodology drawing from critical race theory, Ethnic Studies, environmental studies, and posthumanism. Rather than seeing racial justice as a secondary concern to environmental crises, our discussions will highlight how race is always fundamentally imbricated in ecology. This unorthodox approach to racial representation will also push us towards formulations of comparative racialization, as we consider, for example, ecological entanglements of U.S. imperialism in Asia and Latin America. Finally, we will examine how art and literature imagine possibilities for minority resilience and flourishing. The class will pressure critical terms and paradigms such as representation, ethics, ecology, environment, risk, nature, and infrastructure.
This seminar will investigate how gender shapes politics, and how politics in turn shapes gender, with gender conceptualized as a set of relations, identities and cultural schema, co-constituted with other dimensions of power, difference and inequality (e.g., race, class, indigeneity, sexuality, religion, citizenship status). We aim to understand gendered politics and policy from both "top down" and "bottom up" perspectives. What do states do, via institutions of political participation and representation, citizenship rights and policies, and official categorization to shape gender relations? How do gender relations influence the nature of policy, classification systems, and citizenship? How have movements and counter-movements around the transformation of gender developed, and how have gendered divides influenced politics of all sorts? We expand on conventional conceptions of political participation and citizenship rights to include grassroots democratic activism, the creation of alternative visions of democracy, social provision and economic participation, as well as examining formal politics and policies. We will read and discuss scholars drawing on diverse theoretical and methodological traditions, and we engage with analyses of a variety of contexts across the world (the US, other rich capitalist democracies, postcolonial states and beyond), striving to situate states and political mobilization in global contexts. The course draws on gender and sexuality studies, political science, sociology, history, and anthropology to understand gender, power and politics.
MSLCE 525-0-26 Media Meet Technology: Ethnographies of Media Practices in the Americas
The winter 2022 iteration will examine recent book monographs which adopt an ethnographic stance to analyze media practices in one of ten countries across the continent: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, the United States, and Venezuela. We will pay special attention to cross-national patterns of similarity and difference in topical foci, theoretical framing, mode of argumentation, and interpretation of findings. We will view the continent as being both singular and plural, with many sources of heterogeneity that coexist alongside multiple nexus of various kinds of overlap. Thus, we will interrogate the assigned readings trying to unpack which media practices might be unique to each national or subnational setting, and which ones might be shared across one or more of them. In addition, because ethnography is both a process—a methodological orientation with its associated intellectual sensibilities—and a product—a resulting text that entails a series of argumentative, evidentiary and interpretive choices shaped by the encounter of authors, editors, reviewers, and imaginary and actual readers within various institutional environments—we will devote a significant part of our weekly conversations to discuss the challenges and opportunities afforded by ethnographic writing.
MTS 525-0-21 Environment and Climate Issues in MTS
This Ph. D. seminar investigates environmental and climatological issues in relation to the field of Media, Technology, and Society. The seminar is organized into five themes: Land, Sea, Sky, Animals, Humans. In addition to readings, discussions, screenings, and in-class presentations, students will conduct research relevant the themes of the class and their own research trajectories. PHD STUDENTS ONLY.
This seminar will review the new and most recent research literature on how children and adolescents use and are influenced by digital media, especially the newer interactive technologies of tablets, smartphones, interactive toys and the internet.
Perf St. 515-0-26 Digital Performances in the Era of Virality
Acting as "historians of the present," in this project-based course we will investigate the relationship between performance and digital technology as we track how creators, scholars, and activists have been intervening in contemporary scenes of social unrest. What emerging performance genres—from vaxxies to mental health TikTok videos and from Zoom performances to Instagram livestreams—have taken off during the last two years of social isolation and polarization? What digital aesthetic strategies link personal experience to collective crisis and action? How have artists and activists drawn attention to issues such as anti-Blackness, gender violence, and authoritarianism and their imbrication in the current public health crisis? To address these questions, students will read scholarship on performance and new media, examine digital performances of their choosing, and produce critical essays and/or practice-based research projects that incorporate digital tools. By the end of the course, students will have gained skills to analyze digital performances, to think critically about liveness, embodiment, and mediated performance, and to share their research using a critical digital humanities approach.
SESP LRN 451-0-23 Global Histories of Engineering Education
In this course we examine what role engineering education plays, has played historically, and could play in mediating dynamics of power, in(equality), and (in)justice in society across global contexts. A wave of recent scholarship has examined the nefarious impact of new technologies on racial equity (Benjamin, 2019; Noble, 2018), social and economic justice (Eubanks, 2018), teaching and learning processes in schools (Watters, 2021), and on the health and survival of the planet itself (Crawford, 2021). Learning about the politics of technologies, and the technologies of power, is thus emerging as one of the most significant needs in education. Building from Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspectives, in this course we shift our analytic focus to the politics of engineering education institutions (Lucena, 2013; Riley, 2003). What are the historical, cultural, and political forces operating on these institutions? How do they cultivate particular kinds of engineering identities? We will ground these inquiries through case studies of specific engineering education institutions in diverse global contexts (Indonesia, India, Denmark, Iran, Chile, Kenya, and the US). Across the cases, we will carefully examine how themes such as modernization, globalization, nationalism, and militarism have shaped the content, character, and ontology of engineering education. Ultimately, we will work towards a critical, global understanding of the power, responsibility, and possibilities for socially just and ethical engineering education.
Soc 406-3-1 Contemporary Theory in Sociological Analysis
Modernity has become a contested term. This class investigates how various thinkers have conceived of what it means to be "modern" or "post-modern," critiques of modernity that have profoundly shaped our images of it, and skeptics who challenge the idea of modernity. It also includes sections that investigate in detail what I call "mechanisms" of modernity: procedures, devices, approaches or strategies that people adopt or promulgate in their efforts to be rational, manage uncertainty and conflict, or attain efficiency in various institutional arenas.
Soc 476-0-23 Indigeneity, States and Settler Colonialism
In this seminar, we examine settler colonialism as a political, social, cultural and economic formation, and Indigenous resistance, resilience and resurgence, focusing on the US in historical, comparative and global perspective. Settler colonialism is a distinctive form of social organization, which emerges within a global context of empires and colonial domination of peoples of the Americas, Africa, Oceania and Asia by Europeans and their descendants, in which settlers "come to stay" (Veracini 2010) and seek replacement of indigenous peoples, rather than the extraction and transfer of wealth to the "home" country (Bacon and Norton 2019). It is a constituent part of modernity. As Glenn (2015) has argued: "The settler goal of seizing and establishing property rights over land and resources required the removal of indigenes, which was accomplished by various forms of direct and indirect violence, including militarized genocide. Settlers sought to control space, resources, and people not only by occupying land but also by establishing an exclusionary private property regime and coercive labor systems." We need increased recognition of Indigenous values, worldviews, and lifeways, as much sociological work omits the Indigenous perspective, and consequently sociological explanations are often ill-fitting or insufficient in understanding the "fourth world" of Native nations and their relations with settler societies. Notably, we seek to engage with analyses of inequality, power and difference that reflect the distinctive Indigenous experience within US settler colonialism: "Native peoples were colonized and deposed of their territories as distinct peoples - hundreds of nations - not as a racial or ethnic group…" (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014, p.xiii). The readings are multidisciplinary - covering sociology, Native studies, other social sciences and history, and we incorporate the works of diverse Indigenous scholars, philosophers and thought leaders. Topics covered include: indigenous perspectives on time, power and knowledge; key concepts for studying groups; overviews of the literatures on empire and colonialism and the entanglements of social science with settler colonialism; the emergence and co-constitution of modernity, empire, settler colonialism, states and indigeneity; property, dispossession and capitalism; biopolitics, reproduction, sexuality, gender; the US as a settler colonial formation; political contestation over settler colonialism and indigenous rights; native sovereignty, representation, decolonization and Indigenous justice.
This course is motivated by the assumption that knowledge and technology have become central to the social, cultural, political, and material organization of modern societies. The fundamental goal of the course is to develop intellectual tools to understand not merely the social organization of knowledge, science, and technology but also the technoscientific dimensions of social life. Although much of the course content concerns science and technology, the theoretical and analytical frameworks developed in this course are intended to apply to any domain involving knowledge, expertise, technologies, or formalized techniques. How might sociology as a field of study benefit from closer engagement both with epistemic concerns and with the material aspects of our technosocial world? We will examine: why we believe what we believe (the politics of knowledge production, circulation, and reception); the impact and uptake of technologies and the assessment of technological risks; the character of life in expert-driven “knowledge societies”; the resolution of conflicts around knowledge and technology (and the use of knowledge and technology in conflict resolution); the encounters between and across different knowledge systems, ways of knowing, and epistemic cultures, both locally and globally; the use of technologies to tell us “who we are” and “where we belong”; the social and technological reproduction of inequalities, including those related to social class, race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, location in global hierarchies, etc.; the relations between activists and experts, and the tensions between expertise and democracy; the roles of social movements when intervening in debates about knowledge, science, and technology, as well as the use of knowledge and technology by social movements; and the nature of governance in technologically sophisticated societies—including the character of collective decision-making about knowledge and technology, as well as the uses of knowledge and technology to arrive at such decisions. A lot (but not all) of the course content focuses on the United States, though we will try whenever possible to place developments in a global context and we will benefit from comparative and postcolonial approaches to STS. While much of the scholarship we will consider is broadly sociological, some of it is drawn from other fields, and part of the goal of the course is to suggest the interdisciplinary character of STS. Students from other disciplines are welcome.
