This seminar examines the late twentieth- and twenty-first century emergence and saturation of contemporary culture by personalized electronic and computational technologies, primarily in the Anglophone West. The increasing cultural prominence of portable devices such as the Sony Walkman and the newly domestic character of "personal" computing -- from the Apple Macintosh to laptops to smartphones and networked applications -- through Michel Foucault's late career idea of "techniques of the self." For Foucault, such practices "permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality." While Foucault had a much longer historical perspective in mind, we will consider the novel prominence of technologies of the self and selfhood within the context of neoliberalism where the task of entrepreneurial self-management comes to define the ideology of personhood. Central to our inquiry, then, will be not only the literal technologies of the historical present but also the ways in which media technologies as well as aesthetics newly conjugate subject and environment in terms of a felt pressure to manage that relation. Notions of ambience and the ambient will be central to our investigations as well as the role of technological aesthetics in providing not only beauty or entertainment but rather moment-to-moment tactics of mood management. Topics may include ambient music, ASMR, self-care, and habit. Aesthetic texts may include works by Brian Eno, Tan Lin, Claudia Rankine, and Tsai Ming-Ling. Scholarly texts may include work by Nikolas Rose, Alan Liu, Lauren Berlant, Paul Preciado, Scott Richmond, Paul Roquet, Melissa Gregg, Mack Hagood, and others.
Hist 492-0-24 Global History of Science, Medicine, Environment
This seminar examines the historical geography of science, technology, and medicine, focusing especially on cross-cultural entanglements over the last five hundred years. While economic historians have been animated by questions of a "great divergence" between Asian and European economies in this period, historians of science have circled around questions of a great divide between Western and non-Western knowledge systems since the so-called "scientific revolution." The readings will include 8 or 9 monographs and about a dozen articles covering the major world regions: Europe, Africa, the Americas, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. We will historicize a number of relationships, including scientific disciplines and dominant ideas about reality, technologies and industrial economies, pandemics and public health, warfare and digital worlds, geology and geopolitics, racial and indigenous identities, and energy regimes and ecology. Assignments are designed to help students expand their expertise in their chosen time periods and regions.
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.
