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2016-2017

Cluster Courses in Science Studies, 2016-2017

FALL 2016

COMM_ST 525-0-20 (16298): Problems in Communication Studies: Media Meets Technology
Pablo Boczkowski | F 3:00-5:50 pm | Parkes Hall 213

A doctoral-level seminar on current trend and future prospects of scholarship on news and journalism.

HISTORY 492-0-20 (17510): Topics in History: Ethnoscience in Global History
Helen Tilley | W 2:00-5:00 pm | Harris Hall L40

Until the middle of the twentieth century, no single knowledge system held sway over the planet and even then dominant epistemologies coexisted with myriad other ways of knowing. This seminar examines the historical geography of several expert domains relating to science, technology, and medicine, focusing especially on cross-cultural entanglements and intersections over the last five hundred years. If 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 ethnoscience and technoscience – or Western and non-Western knowledge systems – since the so-called “scientific revolution.” The readings will explore both large and small-scale struggles over knowledge and technologies, therapeutics and practice, which have created the heterogeneous and uneven epistemological terrain of today. The seminar is designed for graduate students in area studies, global and transnational history, and science and technology studies, and should offer a set of critical methods and concepts that help to explain both the past and the present. Students will be encouraged to use their existing expertise as a point of departure, approaching course questions and texts from the region and/or time period that most interests them.


PHIL 410-0-20 (13842): Special Topics in Philosophy: The Nature of Belief

Sandford Goldberg | W 3:00-5:50 pm | Crowe Hall 1-140

This seminar will explore the various issues (at the intersection of philosophy of mind and epistemology) regarding the nature of belief.  Topics include the norm(s) of belief, the relation between belief and judgment, the varieties of belief, our responsibilities as believers and the ethics of belief, and pathologies of belief.

SOCIOL 476-0-22 (14450): Topics in Sociological Analysis: Collective Memory
Gary Fine | Th 10:00am-12:20pm | SOCIOL Seminar Room 107

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?

WINTER 2017

POLI_SCI 469-0-20 (23040): Special Topics in Knowledge & Politics: Politics After Biopolitics: Foucault and His Critics
Jacqueline Stevens | T 9:00-11:50 am | Scott Hall 107 Burdick Room

This course will analyze concepts that are in the orbit of biopolitics broadly conceived, that is, conflicts over how to reproduce and maintain a particular body politic, in order to engage with the specific concept as appears sporadically in the work of Michel Foucault and is used and criticized by other thinkers. The objective is to understand the advantages and disadvantages of Foucault's critiques of sovereignty for analyzing current political conflicts situated in practices of the nation, race, class, and the family, as well as the subject positions associated with these, i.e., citizens, immigrants, Whites, Asians, rich, poor, the 1%, dependents, women, men, LGBTF, queer, and many more. The course will attend to the intellectual and political history informing Foucault's decision to develop critiques of the discourse of sovereignty, including juridical discourses. During class meetings we will discuss the uses and disadvantages of Foucault's historical periodizations of changing power/knowledge relations associated with biopolitics and evaluate the metanarrative that informs his new heuristics. The class will read extensively from works by Foucault as well as texts by Giorgio Agamben, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière, Ann Stoler, and others.

SOCIOL 406-2-20 (24698): Modern Theory in Sociological Analysis
Wendy Espeland | W 11:00-1:50 pm | University Hall 318

This class investigates modernity. It includes selections that illustrate 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. Readings will include works by Michel Foucault, Larraine Daston, Anthony Giddens, Bruno Latour, Jurgen Habermas, James Scott and Ted Porter, among others.

SPRING 2017

ANTHRO 485-0-0 (class number): Mind, Body, and Health
Rebecca Seligman | time  | location

ANTHRO 496-0-0 (class number): The Brain
Rebecca Seligman | time | location

PHIL 415-0-0 (class number): Seminar in French Philosophy
Penelope Deutscher | time | location