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Course Catalog

GRAD TBD 101 – GRAD TBD 101

TBD

GRAD TBD 102 – GRAD TBD 102

TBD

GRAD TBD 103 – GRAD TBD 103

TBD

Soc 406-3 – Contemporary Theory in Sociological Analysis

This course offers an introduction to classical sociological theory. A “classical” work is thought to be a must-read, a foundational text that influenced the older (as opposed to contemporary or modern) ideas that undergird discipline of sociology, both the way we think about it and perform it. We will focus mainly on Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Du Bois, exploring what they have to teach us about the sociological enterprise. Readings and graded assignments focus on determining these foundational disciplinary authors’ (1) methods for viewing and understanding the socioeconomic world, (2) ideas about the proper objects and subjects of study and how sociology should be properly conducted, and (3) key contributions to early sociological thought. Ten weeks is a very short time to acquire and engage with this knowledge, so expect this course to be very reading and writing intensive.

Sociology 476 – Sociology of Health and Biomedicine

This course will provide an introduction to central topics in the sociology of health, illness, and biomedicine. At the same time, it will show how that field has been redefined and reinvigorated by science and technology studies. We will seek to understand health, health care, and biomedicine by exploring multiple domains: the work sites in which health professionals interact with one another, with their tools, and with their clients; the research settings where medical knowledge and technologies are generated; the cultural arenas within which ideas of health and disease circulate; the market relations that produce health care as a commodity; the institutions and practices that transform social inequalities into health disparities; the social movements that challenge the authority of experts; and the bodies and selves that experience and are remade by illness. Students from other disciplines are welcome.

Courses Primarily for Graduate Students

Anthro 389-0-1 – Ethnographic Methods and Analysis

This course is designed to prepare students to design and carry out an independent ethnographic research project. Students will complete several in-class and field exercises related to a collaborative ethnographic project, culminating in a short ethnographic report and presentation of findings. Weekly reading assignments will complement fieldwork and form the basis for in-class discussions about ongoing research. In addition, students will be expected to develop a short concept paper for a future independent ethnographic research project.

Anthro 485 – Mind, Body, and Health

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.

Anthro 485-0-1 – Seminar in Mind, Body and Health

This course will provide a graduate level introduction to the anthropology of mind, body, and health, addressing broadly the question of how people use cultural resources to cope with pain, illness, suffering and healing in specific social, cultural and political contexts. In addition, we will analyze how body and mind, health and illness, are socially influenced and socially constructed, how these constructions articulate with the material body, and how they are influenced by and implicated in power. We will give special attention to trauma, as a diagnostic category, biopolitical construct, and an experiential domain. We will also explore in depth the concept of embodiment, its various uses and meanings, especially in the context of the social determinants of illness and healing. The course will combine an examination of current theoretical paradigms with ethnographic case material from around the world, including Brazil, Japan, Mexico, 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 medical systems, behaviors, practices and institutions critically in order to understand the implications of the ways in which they are socially and politically embedded and culturally specific.

Anthro 490-0-24 – Ethnographic Writing

This is an intensive workshop on how to write ethnography. There are three elements to the class: (1) discussion of classic examples of good ethnographic writing and key concepts like ‘thick description'; (2) taking apart some elements of an academic ethnography, including writing vignettes, describing people and places, constructing an argument, and engaging other writers; and (3) workshopping papers, in which the class discusses a pre-circulated example of your ethnographic writing, with a focus on construction and style, not content.

ART_HIST 430 – Studies in Renaissance Art: Exposed to the Elements: Matter and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (at Newberry)

Comm St - 489-0-1 – History of Media Technology

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.

Comm St 425-0-1 – Race, Technology and Information

This course will engage scholarship that traverses studies of race and difference, technology and science, and a variety of information systems and platforms. The objective is to develop a scholarly foundation of the literatures relevant to the ways racially marginalized communities experience, navigate, and inhabit information infrastructures. A special emphasis will be placed on understanding how the concepts of trust, justice, and equity function within these relationships, both historically and at the contemporary moment.

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?

Econ 420-2 – European Economic History

Application of economic theory and other quantitative techniques to studies of European economic evolution.

Econ 420-2 – European Economic History

Application of economic theory and other quantitative techniques to studies of European economic evolution.

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 461-0-21 – Contemporary Experiments in Racial Form

This seminar surveys literary experiments in contemporary Ethnic American poetry and narrative that expand notions of what constitutes "ethnic literature," a category historically denigrated as insufficiently imaginative or aesthetically minded. In addition to highlighting the richness and complexity of these literary traditions, our goal in this course is to track evolving referents for racial formation in a "postracial" era defined by the gap between ostensible cultural tolerance and the persistence of structural inequality. Responding to the contradictions of racial representation, scholars of African American, Latinx, Asian American, and Native American literatures have redoubled critical engagement with form, genre, and aesthetics to expand our understanding of race's imbrications with embodiment, aesthetic judgment, cultural belonging, and the constitution of histories and futures. With particular emphasis on familiarizing students with foundational texts of Ethnic American Literature, the class will pressure critical terms and paradigms such as representation, racial formation, genre & form, voice & lyric, and history. Participants will develop skills of close reading for racial formation as a formal feature of textual composition as well as gain proficiency with central and emergent debates within Ethnic American literary studies regarding the relationship between politics and aesthetics. Some conceptual questions for consideration include the following: how do experimental texts by writers of color destabilize conventional modes of understanding ethnic and racial representation? What tensions and resonances arise when critical race and ethnic studies meet theories of the avant-garde? And to what extent do these literary experiments suggest that race itself can be understood as a cultural form or generic object?

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.

Gender St. 490-0-20 – Gender, Power and Politics

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.

Hist 492-0024 – 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.

History 405-0-22 – Sexual Knowledge: Science, Archives, Traces

Sexuality studies has flourished in recent decades amidst the multiplicities of desires, identities, and bodies. As loci of meaning-making, hierarchical differentiation, and political struggles, as well as the space of transgressive imagination and alternative subjectivities, sexuality studies has never been neutral. This course focuses on the scholarly debates over the practices and politics of sexual knowledges across historical moments, locations, and projects. We will analyze how this knowledge was (and is) produced, what counts as knowledge, who gets recognized as an Aexpert@ (and why), and who collects and curates. Our work will especially highlight the dynamic relations between story-telling, assembling, documentation, and interpretation. In doing so, we critically examine the multiple meanings of archives, their origins, and uses. Equally, we problematize the silences and so-called ephemera. Readings will include works on sexuality and bio-politics, classic works in sexology, and ethnographies. The course will also consider film and other media as well as digital archives. Finally, I hope to arrange Zoom conversations with archivists, collections curators and investigators on how they navigate collections as well as how they have assembled their research.

History 405-0-26 – Understanding Marx

TBD

HISTORY 405-0-30 – Embodiment/ Materiality/ Affect Seminar in Historical Analysis

A varying menu of courses in methodology and/or theory. At least two seminars are offered every year.

Topic Varies by instructor. See Caesar for current course description.

HISTORY 485 – Literature of the History of Science

Recent scholarship in the history of science, technology and medicine has sought to open for examination the processes by which certain features of the world—including our social life—have come to be marked out as "natural," even as they have paradoxically been made more subject to control. But how was the boundary between the natural and the artificial drawn in the first place? And how has the character of this knowledge been shaped by its social and political context? In this class we read historical works alongside articles from the field of science studies. The course moves temporally from the early modern era to the twenty-first century, covering topics ranging from the role of wonder, artisanal labor, and global exchange in the rise of scientific knowledge… to science's more recent roles in state-building, marker of racial and sexual difference, and predictor of our climate's future. Throughout we will treat knowledge-making as a social process that involves the labor of many different kinds of people, working in ways that simultaneously reflect and reshape the broader culture.

Read more about HISTORY 485

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 – Graduate Seminar: 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, with a book and additional readings (additional readings provided via Canvas) for each theme: Land (Schwoch, Wired Into Nature); Sea (Starosielski, The Undersea Network); Sky and Outer Space (Jones-Imhotep, The Unreliable Nation); Animals (Benson, Wired Wilderness); and Humans (Latour, Down To Earth.) In addition to readings, discussions, screenings, and in-class presentations, students will conduct research relevant to the themes of the class and their own Ph. D. research trajectories. There are several research possibilities for students. You might consider starting a research paper or grant application, doing early work in anticipation of eventually teaching a course in this area, or doing advance reading for a qualifying exam or for your dissertation. There might also be collaborative research possibilities at NU, to be discussed.

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.

MTS 525-0-25 – Children and Media

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.

Perform 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.

Rel 471-20 – Graduate Seminar: Embodiment, Materiality, Affect

This seminar explores theoretical approaches to the problems of embodiment/materiality/affect. One aim of the course is to examine various methodological approaches to embodiment, materiality and affect, making use of sociology and philosophy (Pierre Bourdieu, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Spinoza, Massumi). The second and closely related aim is to situate bodies in time and place, that is, in history. Here we look to the particular circumstances that shaped the manner in which historical actors experienced their bodies in the Christian west (Peter Brown, Caroline Bynum, Mary Carruthers, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault). Ultimately, we will be examining theoretical tools while we put them to work. The goal: how to use these thinkers to write more dynamic, creative, interesting scholarship.

SESP 450-0-23 – 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.

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 – 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 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 406-3-20 – Contemporary Theory in Sociological Analysis

This course offers an introduction to classical sociological theory. A “classical” work is thought to be a must-read, a foundational text that influenced the older (as opposed to contemporary or modern) ideas that undergird discipline of sociology, both the way we think about it and perform it. We will focus mainly on Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Du Bois, exploring what they have to teach us about the sociological enterprise. Readings and graded assignments focus on determining these foundational disciplinary authors’ (1) methods for viewing and understanding the socioeconomic world, (2) ideas about the proper objects and subjects of study and how sociology should be properly conducted, and (3) key contributions to early sociological thought. Ten weeks is a very short time to acquire and engage with this knowledge, so expect this course to be very reading and writing intensive.

Soc 476-0-20 – Sociology of Sexuality

This graduate seminar asks the following questions: What do we learn about society by studying sexuality? What do we learn about sexuality by studying society? We will focus on sociological approaches to studying sexuality and link sexuality studies to broader sociological questions about culture, social interaction, social inequality, globalization, social movements, science, health, and public policy. We will explore various theoretical and methodological approaches that have been used in sociological studies of sexuality—including those that guide sexuality-related analyses of meanings and identities, practices and behaviors, politics, power, relationships, population movement, collective identities and social movements, and morality and social control.

Soc 476-0-21 – Politics of Knowledge

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.

Soc 476-0-22 – Collective Memory

This seminar is designed to expose students to the realm of sociological research (and research in other disciplines, notably history) that addresses how we think about and memorialize the past. How is history constructed? How are historical events shaped and made socially meaningful? Who are the shapers and who are the shaped?

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.

Soc 476-0-4 – Politics of Knowledge

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.

SOCIOL 406 – Contemporary Theory

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.

SOCIOL 476 – Sociology of Health, Illness, and Biomedicine

This course will provide an introduction to central topics in the sociology of health, illness, and biomedicine. At the same time, it will show how that field has been redefined and reinvigorated by science and technology studies. We will seek to understand health, health care, and biomedicine by exploring multiple domains: the work sites in which health professionals interact with one another, with their tools, and with their clients; the research settings where medical knowledge and technologies are generated; the cultural arenas within which ideas of health and disease circulate; the market relations that produce health care as a commodity; the institutions and practices that transform social inequalities into health disparities; the social movements that challenge the authority of experts; and the bodies and selves that experience and are remade by illness.