Leonard & McDonough TuTh 4:20-5:40pm Disc: ONLINE COURSE
Anthro 101-6-22 Biological Thought & Action
Science is a process by which people make sense of the world. Scientists examine evidence from the past, work to understand the present, and make predictions about the future. Integral to this process are the methods they use to collect and analyze data, as well as the ways in which scientists work together as a community to interpret evidence and draw conclusions. In this class, we will take a multidisciplinary approach to examining biological thought and action and their social ramifications. We will seek to understand science as a social pursuit: the work of human beings with individual, disciplinary, and cultural differences, and requiring tremendous investments in training and equipment. Does it matter that participation in science is more accessible to some than to others? How do biases, assumptions, uncertainty, and error manifest in scientific work? What is the history of scientific values such as objectivity and reproducibility? The course will conclude by investigating current topics of public debate.
ANTHRO 101-6-22 Mobile Papers: Passports, Visas, Cash in the Globa
This course title refers to the papers upon which the global order of mobility rests in our contemporary era. It approaches these papers as good tools to think with in order to study the disturbing intensification of global inequality in diverse populations' access to transnational mobility over the past few decades. In this seminar, students will read about, discuss, write about, and thus gain the intellectual tools to begin to evaluate, these past and present inequalities that make up our global order of mobility. These inequalities, materialized in paper form, allow people to move across multiple borders, and so doing, underpin our current global order of differential mobility: a mobility that is distributed unevenly, taken for granted for the select few, while being denied to the vast majority of others around the world. We will read across several different academic disciplines and investigative journalism to become familiar with key analytic concepts, methods, and historical phenomena, such as citizenship-for-investment schemes, the US Green Card lottery, US-Mexico borderlands, nationalism, migration, ethnography, and political economy. Our goal in the seminar is to critically assess how seemingly mundane papers make or break the possibilities of movement across modern state borders, differentiated at the intersection of nationality, race, class, gender, and/or geography.
A survey of cultural and ethnographic approaches to money and finance. Topics of investigation include “primitive money,” the uses of money in religious and ritual practices, social and cultural meanings of numbers, mobile money, crypto-currency and other alternative currency systems, and the politics of central banking. Prerequisite: None
This course provides a broad overview of forensic anthropology, an applied sub-field of biological anthropology. Forensic anthropology focuses traditional skeletal biology on problems of medicolegal significance, primarily in determining personal identity and assisting in the cause of death assessment from human remains. In this course we will discuss the full range of issues associated with human skeletal identification from trauma analysis to the identification of individuals in mass disasters. These problems will serve as a model for understanding the broader aspects of applied anthropology.
ANTHRO 327-0-20 Archaeology of Ethnicity in Americas
Historical Archaeology is a field archaeology that focuses on the past 500 years and addresses a myriad of questions including, identity, European colonialism, resistance, capitalism, and power. This course will explore the history of different peoples in the Americas through the study of the material remains they left behind: architecture, burials, food remains, clothing and jewelry, etc. Attention will be focused on the presentation and/or exclusion of groups in depictions of history and in the creation new identities (ethnogenesis) in different parts of the Americas. It will also consider the ways in which power and economy intersect with other forms of identity, such as class, gender, and sexuality. The course will survey a variety of communities, concentrating on Indigenous Peoples, as well as people of European, African and Asian descent in American contexts. While there will be course material which touch on French and Iberian colonial contexts, class projects will primarily draw on study of artifacts and communities in the Eastern United States and the Anglophone Caribbean.
Discussion-based analysis of cutting edge research on the microbes associated with the human body and their impacts on health. Consideration of historical, social, and political influences on observed patterns.
Anthro 370-0-20 Anthropology in Historical Perspective
Rather than attempting the impossible, an overview of the whole history of the discipline of anthropology, this course will focus on one particular problem: the relationship between theory and ethnographic description in cultural Anthropology. The course will attempt to survey the development of certain schools of thought in the discipline since the mid-nineteenth century: evolutionism; historical particularism; structural-functionalism; culture and personality; cultural materialism; interpretive anthropology. In order to examine the ways in which each of these theoretical approaches affects the ways in which anthropologists choose to describe what they observe, the class will read a series of ethnographies (or excerpts from larger works) written at different times from different points of view.
Environmental anthropology is a more recent outgrowth of ecological anthropology, which emerged in the 1960s and 70s as an empirically-based focus on systemic human-environment relationships, especially as they pertain to patterns of social change and adaptation. Environmental anthropology became more prominent in the 1980s, and is typically characterized by research on communities' engagements with contemporary environmental issues. Environmental anthropology has greater commitments to advocacy, critique, and application than ecological anthropology, but as we'll see in this course, the proliferation of "new ecologies" (as opposed to "new environmentalisms") denotes the continued synergy between ecological and environmental anthropologies. This course is divided into two parts. Part I will provide an historical overview of the development of environmental anthropology. We will cover some of the most influential research trends in the field: environmental determinism, cultural ecology, systems ecology, ethnoecology, historical ecology, political ecology, and post-humanist ecology. Part II will then pivot to the application of environmental anthropology knowledge to some of the most pressing environmental issues facing the contemporary world: population pressure, capitalist consumption patterns, biodiversity conservation, sustainable agriculture, climate change, and environmental justice.
Many diseases of contemporary society, including ailments like obesity, diabetes, and depression, have only emerged as major health issues in recent human history. In addition, different human groups or ethnicities vary markedly in the burden of these conditions, with factors like poverty, inequality and discrimination consistently predicting who is most affected. What might account for these common findings? In this course we explore two related ideas to gain insights into these issues. The first is that many modern ailments may be viewed as an imbalance between modern life ways and those which shaped our biology during much of human evolution. The second is that differences in factors like inequality and discrimination, which trace to political, economic, and historical factors, help explain why some groups tend to be more affected by these imbalances than others. We will begin by reviewing foundational concepts in evolutionary biology, molecular biology, anthropology and human evolution, revealing why our bodies by necessity come equipped with biology that is responsive to the environments that we inhabit. We will then use these principles to explore case studies that illustrate the power of evolutionary principles to shed light on why we get sick, including the role of social, economic and political factors as drivers of major disparities in disease burden.
One of the topics in social science that has been as contentious as it has been enduring has been human fertility and attempts to control it through technological means. Underlying nearly all these discussions are those such as the following: tensions between individual vs societal control, rights vs. obligations, differing interests among sexual and reproductive partners (and their families), morality/religion, potential profits to be gained by appropriating sexual/fertility technology and intervention, and attempted manipulations of highly contextualized understandings of technology and intellectual property across time and place. To mine this rich subject, this class will examine relevant debates that have arisen in classic literatures in anthropology, sociology, demography, law, and history. Of additional interest will be several very recent topics that have surged to the fore in debates over the meaning of new technologies of cultural/symbolic reproductive control. Examples will include legal entanglements governing reproduction and the transfer of technologies across national and international borders, debates over contraception and its alleged links to pathologies of vaccines and sexually transmitted diseases, and struggles over funding for fertility control for rich vs. poor, and dilemmas of reproduction in the age of gender and partnership fluidity. Regional emphases will be broad. Of special interest will be Africa, Western Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and the US.
ANTHRO 390-0-27 Fire and Blood: Political Ecologies of the Environ
What kinds of tools would help us understand urgent global issues we are facing today, ranging from global pandemics and climate emergency, wildfires in California and Australia, hurricanes in Puerto Rico and Louisiana, occupational diseases in South Dakota and Toronto, or urban infrastructure crises in Mumbai and Senegal? Over the past three decades, political ecology has emerged as a powerful interdisciplinary tool for understanding and critiquing global ecological change. Political ecology seeks to unravel the political forces at work in environmental processes on a global scale. It is a powerful strategy for reinserting politics into apolitical or "greenwashed" discussions of ecology and the environment and unsettling common-sense understandings of "the environment" or "nature" as separate from the social and the cultural. It is also an essential tool to understand how disparate-seeming places, events, and living entities in the world are intimately linked to each other in often uneven ways. In this course, we will critically approach topics such as resource extraction, conservation, carbon management, natural disasters, sanitation politics, and human-animal-plant relations. In doing so, we will explore the gendered and racialized ways and the ongoing histories of slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism through which environmental and energy politics operate in our societies today.
"Planetary" has increasingly come to capture the imagination and apprehension of people around the world. It has also been receiving special attention in the critical social sciences and humanities as a concept that captures the relationship between social life and the Earth. Our planet is going through massive changes in its climate and ecosystems. At the same time, humans have become a major force that has been shaping the dynamics of the planet. Taking this interdependence between social life/humans and the planet, this course explores the ways in which social sciences and the humanities are responding to the entanglement of humanity and our planet. Understanding our planet as the product of a dynamic planet, self-organizing over deep time, we will explore how the social and political processes of fire use, mining, disease, slavery, colonialism, extraction, trade, and extinction have powerfully shaped and have been shaped by inhuman planetary formations. One main task of the course will be to understand how racialized and economic inequalities have made their mark on Earth through the reorganization of planetary processes.
In this course, we examine the relationship between science and society, via close study of three socio-cultural practices: detection; investigation; and diagnosis. Specifically, we will be posing questions about: how various forms of scientific knowledge are produced and legitimated; the regimes of evidence guiding these practices; how expertise and experts emerge; and how "facts" and "truth" are adjudicated. In so doing, we will learn about how scientific knowledge shapes and reflects our social relations, material conditions, and subjectivities. Throughout the course, we will reflect upon the value of anthropological methods and theories for studying scientific practice.
Asian Am 360-0-21 Trans Surgeries in Transnational Contexts
This course is situated at the intersection of theoretical, cultural, medical, and commercial online discourses concerning the burgeoning Gender Affirmation-related surgeries presented online and conducted in Thailand. Using Gender, Queer, Trans, Asian American, and Digital Humanities Theories, we will discuss the cross-cultural intersections, dialogues, refusals, and adaptions when thinking about medical travel to Thailand for gender/sex related surgeries. We will examine Thai cultural/historical conceptions of sex and gender, debates concerning bodies and diagnoses, and changes in presentations of sex/gender related surgeries offered online. We will also explore how digital archives are created and managed. Investigating transcripts of live interviews, medical discourses, and an archive of web images offering GAS surgeries produced by Thais for non-Thais will serve as axes for investigating this topic.
Bio Sci 101-6-01 Promises & Perils: The Social Reality of Biology
The word biology describes both the characteristics and processes of life and living organism, as well as the discipline that studies these. Like all the natural sciences, the study of biology is a data-driven endeavor, concerned with describing, predicting and understanding natural phenomena based on evidence from observation and experimentation. But like all human activities, it does not exist in objective isolation, but rather within a societal context. And biological phenomena, such as infection and disease, interact with non-biological elements of human society. This course aims to contextualize the study of biology towards a better understanding of how social and cultural histories and dynamics have had a profound effect on both biological research as well as biological phenomena, and how social, political and economic parameters influence the impact of scientific breakthroughs and the outcomes of biological events such as epidemics. The topics we will cover, among others: the cultural, political and societal barriers to reaping the benefits of biological research; the damaging legacies of racism, sexism and colonialism on the biological research enterprise; the role of communications in the field of biology; and select biological topics in evolution, genetics and disease. Students will learn from press articles, academic literature and non-fiction books (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot; Pandemic, by Sonia Shah).
One of the major challenges of our changing world is the loss of biological diversity. An overwhelming majority of people agree that we should work to save biodiversity, but their views are largely based on vague, positive feelings about nature rather than concrete justifications. This course investigates those concrete justifications. The first half of the course sketches out the argument for preserving biodiversity (i.e., "thinking globally"). The second half of the course focuses on the practice of ecological restoration in forest preserves a few miles from campus (i.e., "acting locally") not merely as a way to preserve biodiversity, but as a path to redefining a sustainable relationship between nature and culture. The readings for the course range from classics of environmental writing to recent research papers in the primary scientific literature. Biodiversity also needs to be experienced directly, so we will take a field trip to a local forest preserve where we will roll up our sleeves and help restore a native habitat and see how much biodiversity means to the people with whom we live and work.
Conservation biology is an integrated science based primarily on ecology, with important contributions from genetics, evolution, and biogeography, as well as nonbiological disciplines, including economics, politics and ethics. The first half of the course will address the definitions, origins, and patterns of biological diversity; explore why the maintenance of biodiversity in natural and unnatural ecosystems is fundamentally important to the continued well-being of humans and other species; examine the context and causes of extinction. The second half of the course will deal with strategies and tactics for preventing or ameliorating the loss of biodiversity. Specific topics will include: the biology of small populations including population viability analysis; the selection, design, and management of protected areas; ecological restoration; conservation design, legislation, and other higher-level strategies.
Chem 105-6-02 The Scientist and the Science: Exploring Communication
The scientist and the science: exploring effective scientific communication through graphic novels: Clear and concise communication is highly valued in many STEM fields. Whether conveying the technical details of an experiment for a colleague or translating the impact of a study for the public, scientists need to know how to discuss complex ideas with different audiences. This course analyzes the goals of scientific writing by examining texts that represent different levels of communication, including how to use the visual language of comic books for conveying complex scientific ideas.
CHI FIELD ST 387-0-1 Field Studies in the Environment, Science and Sustainability
With Chicago as the field, FSESS will focus in particular on questions of science and sustainability within urban landscapes and beyond. We will explore how conflicting political, economic, and social interests and values contend for influence and exert power in the realm of environmental governance. We will look at how the local, regional, national, and international institutions, non-governmental organizations, experts, interest groups, and the public interact in defining environmental problems, and formulating and implementing solutions. Drawing on students' internship experiences, we will also discuss how concepts such the environment, sustainability, and green technology are defined and constructed in practice. Field Studies in Environment, Science, and Sustainability should be especially appealing to anyone interested in exploring the big issues facing the environment, understanding the environmental policy process, and doing something about the planet's changing environments.
People who understand communication are uniquely positioned to solve health related problems, and their services are increasingly in demand. As such, this course is designed to familiarize you with the theory and research on communication in health and illness contexts, focusing on how messages from interpersonal, organizational, cultural, and media sources affect health beliefs and behaviors. We will explore communication in health care delivery, health care organizations, as well as health promotion and disease prevention. By taking this course, you will become a more mindful, educated, and effective health communicator.
This class satisfies the CS394 requirement for the undergraduate major. CS394 seminars bring together a small group of students and an instructor in a seminar format, with the goal of each student completing a longer written project or equivalent. In our seminar, we will look for and write about contemporary issues, ideas, and representations of climate change.
Explores processes by which values, attitudes, social structures, institutions, and media influence public engagement with controversial science and technology issues and the implications for public policy.
The challenge of sustainability to "meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" has evolved over the past few decades. This course will introduce fundamental concepts of sustainability, consider the application of these concepts in diverse societal, economic, and cultural settings, and explore the potential of climate science and sustainable development to act as forces for environmental and social justice.
EARTH 105-0-01 Climate Catastrophies in Earth History
The objective of this course is to introduce students to the fundamental components of the Earth system, the atmosphere, hydrosphere and solid Earth, and more importantly, examine how these components interact in response to internal and external influences to control climate. Within this Earth systems context, we will explore how climate is changing today, how it has changed, sometimes catastrophically in the geologic past, and how it may change in the future.
Earth 342-0-01 Contemporary Energy and Climate Change
The increasing worldwide demand for energy presents a number of complex interdisciplinary challenges, from resource depletion to climate change. This class will challenge students to answer the question, How shall we power the world in the 21st century? We will examine the history and geography of energy use; links between energy and climate change; challenge of sustainability; and the fundamental science of climate change. This is a fully remote, asynchronous class. Synchronous, remote sessions may be offered, but will be optional and appropriately scheduled for different time zones.
This course applies theoretical and empirical tools of microeconomics to the study of health insurance and the health care sector. We will consider topics such as the design and financing of health insurance, the design and interpretation of clinical trials, the behavior of non-profit and for-profit hospitals, the role of competition in the health care market, the determinants of health care spending and the sources of technological change in the health care sector, and the effects of government regulations. We will also study the role of adverse selection and moral hazard in health care markets, both theoretically and empirically. Asynchronous components: Students are expected to attend classes live via Zoom. Students who cannot attend classes live (e. g. due to time zone or internet connectivity issues) will get access to video recordings. Students will have at least a 24 hour window to complete the midterm and final exam.
This class will help students understand the key economic forces that have shaped the US health care and health insurance industry. What role do the particularities of health care and health insurance as economic goods play in explaining the size and growth rate of the health care sector? What's the effect of private incentives, adverse selection, moral hazard, and regulation? What's the effect of different organizational structures of health care provision? What can we learn from comparing the US health care and the health insurance system to other countries' systems? Students will learn that these issues are important in the current public policy discussion.
ECON 323-1-20 Economic History of the US Before 1865
The course examines the economic and institutional development of the United States from colonial times to the Civil War. It focuses on questions related to differential patterns of development across the Americas and the US, devoting specific attention to labor market institutions, its divergence across North and South, and the role of Slavery in the development of the American Economy.
Economic change in sub-Saharan Africa, emphasizing current issues and policies in their historical contexts. Agriculture and rural development, industrialization, and international economic relations. Prerequisites: ECON 281-0, ECON 310-1, ECON 310-2, ECON 326-0.
Analysis of gender differences in employment, earnings and division of labor in the household. Family, labor market, discrimination, segregation, historical and international conditions, and antidiscrimination legislation. Prerequisites: 281, 310-1,2.
In this course, we will look into the many different facets of the economics of gender. We will study economic decisions that individuals and households face from a unique gender perspective. The topics we will cover include, among others: the status of women around the world, education, marriage, fertility, labor supply, household decision-making, and discrimination. The class will put an emphasis on applied microeconomic theory and empirical analysis. A combination of econometric techniques and theoretical models will feature prominently in the course. For each topic, we will study concrete examples emanating from all over the world, and make an intensive use of statistics and econometrics. We are also very much interested in understanding the relationship between research and public policy recommendations. Asynchronous components:Class material will be delivered through a combination of both asynchronous recordings (when applicable) and synchronous Zoom meetings (the later will happen at the scheduled class times). There are a series of class activities that require synchronous participation at the scheduled class time. The exams, and possibly some in-class quizzes and exercises, will be synchronous: students must take them at the designated class time. Elements of a "flipped classroom" model will be used whereby students should review some recorded materials before class, and then class sessions emphasize synchronous participation and Q&A that will enhance learning. The substantial synchronous components are central to the learning objectives of the course.
The goal of this course is to understand the functioning and regulation of energy markets. The energy sector is a vital input to the economy. It is often highly concentrated, generating concerns about competition, and a big emitter of greenhouse gases and other pollutants, generating concerns about the environment. As a consequence, the energy sector is subject to substantial economic and environmental regulation. We will use economic theory and empirical evidence to analyze the real-world operation of electricity, oil, and natural gas markets. These tools will allow us to critically understand how these markets are regulated. We will examine policies in a range of current topics. For example: Why has the performance of electricity markets been debated? Who pays the bill of carbon regulation? What are the pros and cons of renewable energy policies? What are the prospects for energy efficiency improvements? The course will draw upon material taught in Economics 310-1, 310-2, and 281, with the tools from Econ 310-1 and 281 being absolutely essential. Asynchronous components:Videos and materials available asynchronously. Exam will be synchronous. Synchronous participation will enhance the learning and therefore is highly encouraged if possible. Participation is required but no penalty for reasonable justifications. Students will need to compensate their participation by actively participating in the asynchronous online discussions.
The environment and our natural resources are scarce yet their values are quite hard to determine. Furthermore, there are a variety of problems with the incentives to use them well. Using the tools of microeconomic analysis and some econometrics, this course will define and examine "environmental problems" in terms of economic efficiency. We will also discuss the methods, and shortcomings of these methods, used by economists and policymakers to place dollar values on environmental amenities, since such valuations will determine what policy options are deemed "efficient", such as benefit-cost analysis. Then we will apply these tools to look at a particular set of environmental problems caused by negative externalities transmitted through naturally occurring amenities, and the effects of the policies we construct in response to these problems. NOTE: This class is not open to students who have taken Economics 370: Environmental & Natural Resource Economics.
Evaluation of economics models and public policy concerning natural resources such as farming, fisheries, forests, minerals, ores and fossil fuels. Prerequisites: ECON 281-0, ECON 310-1, ECON 310-2. (Students may not receive credit for both ECON 370-0 and ECON 373-0.)
ENGLISH 378-0-21 Environmental Justice in Black and Indig. Women's Lit
While ecocriticism has not always considered the lived experience of women of color, literary texts by African American and Native American women have found ways of theorizing their own versions of environmental and spatial justice. Reading leading theorists like Rob Nixon and Edward Soja side by side with Jesmyn Ward's post-Katrina novel Salvage the Bones, 2011, Toni Jensen's stories about oil and fracking on Indigenous lands, and poetry by Nikky Finney and Heid E. Erdrich, this class interrogates how literature can inform our understanding of environmental injustice and different types of violence. It grounds the discussion in a longer history of colonial extraction and Indigenous dispossession, racism, structural neglect, and ongoing residential segregation by discussing Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 hurricane novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and looking at Zitkala's influential 1924 report on the settler defrauding of Osage Indians for their oil-rich lands.
English 381-0 Contagious Narratives, Literature & Medicine
In her monograph Contagious, Priscilla Wald writes, "Disease emergence ineluctably evinces human interconnections on global scale, but the stories of disease emergence fashion the terms in which those connections make sense" (270). For Wald, and for others, understanding the narratives of contagion can help us understand the cultural and social work that diseases do in the world. In this independent study, we will investigate how authors imagine the lifeworlds of those in the grip of contagious outbreak. The course will move in three sections. Beginning with HIV/AIDS epidemic, we will examine Tony Kushner's masterwork, Angels in America. In the second section, we will extracts from some of the most famous nonfiction writing on disease outbreak, including the work of John Barry, Laurie Garrett, and Richard Preston. In the final section of the course, we will examine fictions of virality unmoored from the real world, including Colson Whitehead's novel Zone One, Francis Lawrence's film I am Legend, and Junot Diaz's "Monstro." Throughout, we will engage with important secondary literature from scholars including Priscilla Wald, Ramzi Fawaz, Neel Ahuja, Adia Benton, and others. We will be especially attentive to how race, gender, and sexuality relate to notions of susceptibility to disease, how these categories organize government response, and how solidarity within and between these communities has reorganized political and cultural responses to contagion.
For millennia, literature has helped to represent and define the experience of illness. It has given voice to suffering and dramatized diagnoses and treatments that are inseparable from their cultural history. From Victorian notions of "moral insanity" to contemporary focus on personalized care, this course examines two centuries of writing on the tangled relationship between illness and narrative, norm and pathology, and diagnosis and treatment. It revisits the rise of the asylum and of the case study; the rhetoric of addiction and the demand for rest cures; the testament of patients, including as patient power; the rise of biomedicine and psychopharmacology; and the transformation of ordinary conditions into treatable disorders. Designed for students wanting to pursue a career in the health professions, the course is also for those drawn to science and literature, the history of medicine, medical ethics, the politics of diagnosis, and how literature shapes our understanding of health and illness.
ENGLISH 381-0-20 Intro to Disability Studies in Lit & Medicine
The field of disability studies grew out of the rights-based activism that led, in the United States, to the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Yet, as disability theorists have observed, "western" literature has long been obsessed with disability as metaphor, character trait, and plot device. This course will serve as an introduction to the application of disability studies in literature. We will explore a range of questions: how do we approach the representation of disability in texts by non-disabled authors? How do we differentiate, or should we, between disability and chronic illness, or between physical and mental disabilities? Can literary representation operate as activism? How do we parse the gap between disability as metaphor and lived experience? What does literature offer disability studies, and why should disability studies be a core method for studying literature? Readings will be divided between theoretical texts and primary sources. Students will learn to grapple with complex sociocultural and literary analysis, as well as to make space for their own primary source readings.
This course explores the anxiety, exhaustion, and unease brought on by information technologies. We will trace emotional responses to technological change, from the shock of the printing press to the malaise of the present "information economy." How did new text technologies reshape language and society? Who is permitted access to certain kinds of information and why? We will take a hands-on approach to these questions by pairing literature that addresses the anxieties of technology, like the scifi linguistics of Arrival and the postapocalyptic Shakespeare of Station Eleven, with book history and digital humanities techniques designed to manage information. Students will learn how books are made, how search algorithms work, and how to analyze text with code.
The concept of environmental justice in the United States emerged in the early 1980s as African-American residents fought hazardous waste sites planned in and around their communities. Since then, the environmental justice perspective has been expanded to include the struggles of other minority groups disenfranchised on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender or class. In the first part of the course, students will learn about the history of the environmental justice movement in the US and its development. Next, the course will take a closer look at environmental justice in Chicago, both past and present. A mandatory field trip to a local environmental justice organization is part of the course.
Overview of the interactions between societies and the natural environment. Examines both key environmental problems, like climate change and oil spills, and possible solutions, and the roles played by different social structures and groups in shaping both issues.
Envr Pol 336-0-01 The Climate in Crisis, Policies and Society
Climate change is the worst environmental problem facing the earth. Sea levels will rise, glaciers are vanishing, horrific storms will hit everywhere. After looking briefly at the impacts of climate change on natural and social environments both in the present and near future, we then consider how to best reduce climate change and how to adapt to its impacts. Issues of climate justice, divides between the global North and South, social movements, steps taken in different countries and internationally, and the role of market and regulations are addressed. Climate change is a disaster, the worst environmental problem facing the earth: sea levels will rise, glaciers are vanishing, horrific storms will hit everywhere. What can be done to reduce climate change and to adapt to its impacts? Climate justice, divides between the global North and South, social movements, climate deniers, and the role of the market and regulations are addressed.
Envr Pol 340 Global Environments and World History
Environmental problems have become part and parcel of popular consciousness: resources are being depleted at a record pace, human population levels just crossed the seven billion threshold, extreme poverty defines the majority of people's daily lives, toxic contaminants affect all ecosystems, increasing numbers of species face extinction, consumerism and the commodification of nature show no signs of abating, climate changes are wreaking havoc in different places every year, and weapons and energy systems continue to proliferate that risk the planet's viability. This introductory lecture course is designed to help students understand the relatively recent origins of many of these problems, focusing especially on the last one hundred and fifty years. Students will have an opportunity to learn about the environmental effects of urbanization, industrialization, population growth, market economies, empire-building, intercontinental warfare, energy extraction, and new technologies. They will also explore different environmental philosophies and analytic frameworks that help us make sense of historical change, including political ecology, environmental history, science studies, and world history. Finally, the course will examine a range of transnational organizations, social movements, and state policies that have attempted to address and resolve environmental problems. This year, we will also explore questions of environmental health, disease ecologies, spillover events, and Covid-19.
Climate change is the keystone environmental issue of this generation, and most likely for many generations to come. It now appears inevitable that temperatures will increase this century by more than 2?C, and perhaps by substantially more than 3?C, with the inertia of the system ensuring that temperatures will continue to increase for centuries thereafter even under scenarios of total decarbonization. Climate change is already posing serious risks for both human institutions and natural ecosystems. These risks will seriously escalate throughout this century, especially if the world community fails to substantially increase its commitment to addressing greenhouse emissions, inadequately allocates resources to adaptation, or, perhaps, fails to commit itself to technological approaches to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
The term "natural disaster" conjures images of tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes, and other powerful forces of nature that strike without warning, inflicting massive suffering on a powerless and unsuspecting populace. We now have several decades' worth of research from the social sciences and humanities showing that so-called "natural" disasters are not very natural at all. Instead, they are deeply political and profoundly man-made. This course adopts a historical and global approach in order to denaturalize disaster. From famines in British India to earthquakes in post-colonial Peru, from floods in New Orleans to nuclear disaster in Japan, we will see how disasters expose and exacerbate pre-existing inequalities, inflicting suffering disproportionately among those groups already marginalized by race, class, gender, geography, and age. These inequalities shape not only the impact of the disaster but the range of responses to it, including political critique and retrenchment, relief and rebuilding efforts, memorialization, and planning - or failing to plan - for future disasters of a similar kind. The course culminates in a unit on the contemporary challenge of anthropogenic global climate change, the ultimate man-made disaster. We will consider how memories, fears, and fantasies of past disasters are being repurposed to create new visions of what climate change will look like.
ENVR POL 390-0-28 Ocean and Coastal Law and Policy
This course focuses on laws, policies and the decision-making process related to coastal and ocean resources in the United States, and internationally. Through examination of treaties, statutes, cases, administrative materials, and academic articles, we will explore issues such as coastal land use, offshore energy, ocean pollution, the impacts of climate on ocean/coastal ecosystems, marine mammal conservation, and fisheries management.
ENVR POL 390-0-29 Special Topics: Natural Disasters
From earthquakes to hurricanes, fires to floods, we tend to think of natural disasters as spontaneous occurrences. The word disaster originates in the idea of being born under an unlucky constellation or struck down by an uncaring universe. When homes are flooded or crops are destroyed, we see the natural world encroaching on lives and livelihoods in seemingly unpredictable and certainly unwanted ways. But are these disasters truly a product of nature? In this class, we will engage with the complex history of natural disasters: how people experience and rationalize these events, how communities respond to them, and how the causes of disaster are explained by various stakeholders, from victims to insurance companies. By the end of the quarter, students will have developed historical, cultural, and theoretical tools for understanding the nature of the natural disaster.
ENVR POL 390-0-30 Cyborg Environmentalism: Technology and the Natura
When was the last time you hiked without a smartphone? What can playing video games teach us about interacting with nature? If you didn't post a picture of a tree in the forest, did you really see it? In this course, digital humanities theory and practice are taught through the lens of environmental studies and political ecology, using cyborg theory to explore how the relationship between humans and the natural world is increasingly shaped by and mediated through digital technologies. This course explores theoretical concepts like connective memory, our relationship to social media and mobile photography, and digital colonialism, grounding them in tangible examples of digital humanities projects. This course will primarily use seminar style discussion with some lecture and workshops.
As the earth's climate changes, maple trees and the maple syrup industry in the U.S. and Canada are being affected, in both good and bad ways. The class will cover these effects, their impact on Native American and non-Native communities, the maple syrup industry, and maple species themselves through articles and readings.
Envr Pol 390-26 Archaeologies of Sustainability and Collapse
This course is a seminar that uses archaeological case studies from the past to interrogate human-environment relationships across time and space, including the present and the future. The emphasis here will not be on learning environmental archaeology methods. Instead, we will be focusing on how archaeologists think about key environmental concepts, including climate change, sustainability, and resilience. We will discuss examples of "failure" and "success" in the long history of human-environment interactions, and see if there's room for nuance along the way. We will also use this course as an opportunity to consider how archaeology can contribute to environmental sustainability and environmental justice efforts. Prior coursework in archaeology is not required to appreciate this class or do well, but would be helpful.
The year 2020 has witnessed a series of crises in which protest has been both effectively and creatively used and also, at times, demonized. This class examines themes in the visual language of protest in the United States since the 1960s, with particular emphasis on recent political movements and topics that will include climate change and global climate justice and responses to police violence, prisons, and antiblackness, and may also include Indigenous sovereignty, antifascism, disability and trans rights, activism around Covid19, and other efforts. We will bear in mind relationships to more traditional forms of art like painting and sculpture as well as print media and social media; we will also discuss theories of collective action and questions of force and violence as well as nonviolence, but the main focus is on modes of creativity connected to protest. The organizing principle will be specific tropes and media of protest: for example, tree-sitting, tents and occupations; the megaphone, sound, and music; bicycles, automobiles, pushcarts, floats, and other vehicles; the mask; giant puppets; parties and pleasure; coffins, memorials, and the Grim Reaper; stenciling, graffiti, murals, and mark-making; video and social media; and other modes of performance and strategies for producing visibility. Class will be held remotely; if possible, we may have one or two optional socially distanced field trips. Following a short sequence of introductory readings, students in small groups will participate in researching imagery and themes that they will present to the class as a whole for group discussion. The final project will involve small groups each making contributions to the curating of a collective "guidebook" of protest imagery, format to be determined. Work will be assessed both collectively and individually.
This course studies the growth of populations and their interactions in ecological communities. Topics include: the ecological niche; projections of population growth, including the history of human growth, harvesting populations, and population viability analysis of endangered species; interactions among species, including competition, predation, and disease transmission; measuring the diversity of ecological communities; the effects of diversity on energy flow. More advanced topics will also be addressed, including the biodiversity-stability relationship, the economic values of biodiversity and ecosystem function, and the biology and management of metapopulations in fragmented habitats. Recommended Background: MATH 220
Environmental science is the interdisciplinary study of how humans interact with the living and nonliving parts of their environment. In this course, we will examine current environmental challenges, such as the conservation of biodiversity, the sustainable production of energy, and the implications of human population growth. A case study approach will be used to emphasize the processes of scientific inquiry and discovery.
Global environmental change has significant impacts on social and ecological systems around the world. Global Change Ecology is an emerging field that aims to understand the ecological implications of environmental change, especially anthropogenic climate change, and to assess risks under future global change. In this course, students will review the basics of the earth system and climate change before investigating how organisms in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems respond to climate change. Finally, we will consider the impacts of future climate change and the implications for conservation policy and adaptation management.
Rising seas, extreme temperature variations, and life-threatening storms: these are among the building blocks of Climate Fiction (Cli-Fi), a new literary genre that takes up the challenge of climate change in the Anthropocene, the proposed epoch in which human beings significantly impact the geological and ecological systems of the planet, to imagine the future to which climate change might give rise and the human beings who will confront it. Climate change novels ask: how might climate change transform the world in which we live? What will the world be like in the future, and what will it mean to the human beings who live in it? The alternative visions of the future elaborated in the works of Cli-Fi often combine characteristics of science fiction with elements of other genres, including the romance, the thriller, and the adventure tale. In addition to inquiring into the issue of how and with what literary means these novels manage to imagine the future, we will also seek to understand: if and how literature imagines a process as widely taken to be "unimaginable" as is climate change, whether fiction might further human knowledge or awareness or if it might modify human actions in the world. We will engage in close and detailed reading of some of the most compelling contemporary Cli-Fi novels and learn to write critically about them.
Gbl Health 301-0-20 Intro to International Public Health
This course introduces students to pressing disease and health care problems worldwide and examines efforts currently underway to address them. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the course identifies the main actors, institutions, practices and forms of knowledge production characteristic of what we call "global health" today, and explores the environmental, social, political and economic factors that shape patterns and experiences of illness and healthcare across societies. We will scrutinize the value systems that underpin specific paradigms in the policy and science of global health and place present-day developments in historical perspective. Key topics will include: policies and approaches to global health governance and interventions, global economies and their impacts on public health, medical humanitarianism, global mental health, maternal and child health, pandemics (HIV/AIDS, Ebola, H1N1, Swine Flu), malaria, food insecurity, health and human rights, and global health ethics.
GBL HEALTH 301-0-21 Intro to International Public Health
This course introduces students to pressing disease and health care problems worldwide and examines efforts currently underway to address them. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the course identifies the main actors, institutions, practices and forms of knowledge production characteristic of what we call "global health" today, and explores the environmental, social, political and economic factors that shape patterns and experiences of illness and healthcare across societies. We will scrutinize the value systems that underpin specific paradigms in the policy and science of global health and place present-day developments in historical perspective. Key topics will include: policies and approaches to global health governance and interventions, global economies and their impacts on public health, medical humanitarianism, global mental health, maternal and child health, pandemics (HIV/AIDS, Ebola, H1N1, Swine Flu), malaria, food insecurity, health and human rights, and global health ethics
Global health is a popular field of work and study for Americans, with an increasing number of medical trainees and practitioners, as well as people without medical training, going abroad to volunteer in areas where there are few health care practitioners or resources. In addition, college undergraduates, as well as medical trainees and practitioners, are going abroad in increasing numbers to conduct research in areas with few health care resources. But all of these endeavors, though often entered into with the best of intentions, are beset with ethical questions, concerns, and dilemmas, and can have unintended consequences. In this course, students will assess these ethical challenges. In so doing, students will examine core ethical codes, guidelines, and principals - such as solidarity, social justice, and humility - so they will be able to ethically assess global health practices in a way that places an emphasis on the core goal of global health: reducing health inequities and disparities.
Global health is a popular field of work and study for Americans, with an increasing number of medical trainees and practitioners, as well as people without medical training, going abroad to volunteer in areas where there are few health care practitioners or resources. In addition, college undergraduates, as well as medical trainees and practitioners, are going abroad in increasing numbers to conduct research in areas with few healthcare resources. But all of these endeavors, though often entered into with the best of intentions, are beset with ethical questions, concerns, and dilemmas, and can have unintended consequences. In this course, students will explore and consider these ethical challenges. In so doing, students will examine core global bioethical concerns - such as structural violence - and core global bioethical codes, guidelines, and principals - such as beneficence and solidarity - so they will be able to ethically assess global health practices in a way that places an emphasis on the central goal of global health: reducing health inequities and disparities. With an emphasis on the ethical responsibility to reduce disparities, we consider some of the most pressing global bioethical issues of our time: equity, fairness, and climate change. Particular attention is given to the ethics of research during a pandemic and access to vaccines and therapies for Covid-19.
This lecture course uses the Covid-19 pandemic - including its socio-economic and racial dimensions - as a point of departure to study the history of global health and biomedicine in comparative terms. We will break up the quarter into four segments during which we will consider: 1) when and why infectious diseases "unified" the globe and with what consequences; 2) how empires, industries, war, and revolutions helped spread biomedical ideas, experts, and tools around the world; 3) what function institutions of transnational and global health governance have played in setting medical priorities and sustaining health norms across continents; and 4) why and how clinical trials, the pharmaceutical industry, and narcotics have become so intimately intertwined. Because the world around us has already been radically altered by SARS-coV-2, you will have an opportunity to place in historical context this pandemic's roots and its ongoing cycles. You will also be given a chance to apply insights from the readings - about histories of racial segregation, reproductive politics, militarization, and police powers - to this pandemic. Lectures and readings cover all world regions: Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, Asia, Europe, and the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
This course draws on perspectives from anthropology and related social scientific fields to provide a comparative overview of the impact of armed conflict on public health and health care systems worldwide. Drawing primarily on examples from recent history, including conflicts in the Balkans, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East, we will explore warfare as a crucial sociopolitical determinant of global health disparities and consider organized efforts to respond to the health impacts of mass violence. Key topics that we will consider include variations in the relationship between warfare and public health across eras and cultures; the health and mental health impacts of forced displacement, military violence, and gender-based violence; and the roles of medical humanitarianism and humanitarian psychiatry in postwar recovery processes. Through close readings of classic and contemporary social theory, ethnographic accounts, and diverse research on war, health, and postwar humanitarian interventions, this course will encourage you to build your own critical perspective on war and public health anchored in history and the complexities of real-world situations.
Gbl Health 322-0-1 The Social Determinants of Health
This upper-level seminar in medical anthropology examines the role of social markers of difference including race, class, nationality, gender, sexuality, age and religion in current debates and challenges in the theory and practice of global health. We will explore contemporary illness experiences and therapeutic interventions in sociocultural and historical context through case studies from the US, Brazil, and South Africa. Students will be introduced to key concepts such as embodiment, medicalization, structural violence, the social determinants of health, and biopolitics. Central questions of the seminar include: How do social categories of difference determine disease and health in individuals and collectivities? How is medical science influenced by economic and political institutions and by patient mobilization? How does social and economic inclusion/exclusion govern access to treatment as well as care of the self and others? The course will provide advanced instruction in anthropological and related social scientific research methods as they apply to questions of social inequality and public health policy in both the United States and in emerging economic powers. The course draws from historical accounts, contemporary ethnographies, public health literature, media reports, and films.
Gbl Health 325-0-01 History of Reproductive Health
The history of reproduction is a large subject, and during this course we will touch on many, but by no means all, of what can be considered as part of this history. Our focus will be on human reproduction, considering the vantage points of both healthcare practitioners and lay women and men. We will look at ideas concerning fertility, conception, pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, birth control, abortion, and assisted reproduction. Because, at a fundamental level, reproduction is about power - as historian Amy Kaler (but by no means only Kaler), pointed out, "[c]ontrol over human reproduction is eternally contested, in zones ranging from the comparative privacy of the conjugal bedroom to the political platform and programs of national polities" - we will pay attention to power in reproductive health. And, since the distribution of power in matters of reproduction has often been uneven and unequal - between men and women, between colonizing and Indigenous populations, between clinicians and lay people, between those in upper socioeconomic classes and those in lower socioeconomic classes - we will pay particular attention during this class to struggles over matters of reproduction as we explore historical changes and continuities in reproduction globally since 1900.
The history of reproduction is a large subject, and during this course we will touch on many, but by no means all, of what can be considered as part of this history. Our focus will be on human reproduction, considering the vantage points of both healthcare practitioners and lay women and men. We will look at ideas concerning fertility, conception, pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, birth control, abortion, and assisted reproduction. Because, at a fundamental level, reproduction is about power - as historian Amy Kaler, but by no means only Kaler, pointed out, "[c]ontrol over human reproduction is eternally contested, in zones ranging from the comparative privacy of the conjugal bedroom to the political platform and programs of national polities" - we will pay attention to power in reproductive health. And, since the distribution of power in matters of reproduction has often been uneven and unequal - between men and women, between colonizing and Indigenous populations, between clinicians and lay people, between those in upper socioeconomic classes and those in lower socioeconomic classes - we will pay particular attention during this class to struggles over matters of reproduction as we explore historical changes and continuities in reproduction globally since 1900.
GBL HEALTH 390-0-24 Native Nations, Healthcare Systems and U.S. Policy
Healthcare for Native populations, in what is currently the U.S., is an entanglement of settler colonial domination and the active determination of Native nations to uphold their Indigenous sovereignty. This reading-intensive, discussion-based seminar will provide students with a complex and in-depth understanding of the historical and contemporary policies and systems created for and by Native nations. We will focus on the legal foundations of the trust responsibility and fiduciary obligation of the federal government outlined in the U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court decisions. To gain a nuanced perspective, students will study notable federal policies including the Snyder Act, the Special Diabetes Programs for Indians, Violence Against Women Act, and Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Additionally, state policy topics will include Medicaid expansion and tobacco cessation and prevention.
Gbl Hlth 301-0 Intro to International Public Health
This course introduces students to pressing disease and health care problems worldwide and examines efforts currently underway to address them. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the course identifies the main actors, institutions, practices and forms of knowledge production characteristic of what we call "global health" today, and explores the environmental, social, political and economic factors that shape patterns and experiences of illness and healthcare across societies. We will scrutinize the value systems that underpin specific paradigms in the policy and science of global health and place present-day developments in historical perspective. Key topics will include: policies and approaches to global health governance and interventions, global economies and their impacts on public health, medical humanitarianism, global mental health, maternal and child health, pandemics (HIV/AIDS, Ebola, H1N1, Swine Flu), malaria, food insecurity, health and human rights, and global health ethics.
Global health is a popular field of work and study for Americans, with an increasing number of medical trainees and practitioners, as well as people without medical training, going abroad to volunteer in areas where there are few health care practitioners or resources. In addition, college undergraduates, as well as medical trainees and practitioners, are going abroad in increasing numbers to conduct research in areas with few health care resources. But all of these endeavors, though often entered into with the best of intentions, are beset with ethical questions, concerns, and dilemmas, and can have unintended consequences. In this course, students will assess these ethical challenges. In so doing, students will examine core ethical codes, guidelines, and principals - such as solidarity, social justice, and humility - so they will be able to ethically assess global health practices in a way that places an emphasis on the core goal of global health: reducing health inequities and disparities.
Gbl Hlth 322-0-1 The Social Determinants of Health
This upper-level seminar in medical anthropology examines the role of social markers of difference including race, class, nationality, gender, sexuality, age and religion in current debates and challenges in the theory and practice of global health. We will explore contemporary illness experiences and therapeutic interventions in sociocultural and historical context through case studies from the US, Brazil, and South Africa. Students will be introduced to key concepts such as embodiment, medicalization, structural violence, the social determinants of health, and biopolitics. Central questions of the seminar include: How do social categories of difference determine disease and health in individuals and collectivities? How is medical science influenced by economic and political institutions and by patient mobilization? How does social and economic inclusion/exclusion govern access to treatment as well as care of the self and others? The course will provide advanced instruction in anthropological and related social scientific research methods as they apply to questions of social inequality and public health policy in both the United States and in emerging economic powers. The course draws from historical accounts, contemporary ethnographies, public health literature, media reports, and films.
The history of reproduction is a large subject, and during this course we will touch on many, but by no means all, of what can be considered as part of this history. Our focus will be on human reproduction, considering the vantage points of both healthcare practitioners and lay women and men. We will look at ideas concerning fertility, conception, pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, birth control, abortion, and assisted reproduction. Because, at a fundamental level, reproduction is about power - as historian Amy Kaler (but by no means only Kaler), pointed out, "[c]ontrol over human reproduction is eternally contested, in zones ranging from the comparative privacy of the conjugal bedroom to the political platform and programs of national polities" - we will pay attention to power in reproductive health. And, since the distribution of power in matters of reproduction has often been uneven and unequal - between men and women, between colonizing and Indigenous populations, between clinicians and lay people, between those in upper socioeconomic classes and those in lower socioeconomic classes - we will pay particular attention during this class to struggles over matters of reproduction as we explore historical changes and continuities in reproduction globally since 1900.
Gbl Hlth 390-0-20 Native American Health Research and Prevention
Native nations in what is currently the United States are continuously seeking to understanding and undertake the best approaches to research and prevention with their communities. This course introduces students to the benefits and barriers to various approaches to addressing negative health outcomes and harnessing positive social determinants of health influencing broader health status. Important concepts to guide our understanding of these issues will include settler colonialism, colonialism, sovereignty, social determinants of health, asset-based perspectives, and decolonizing research. Students will engage in a reading-intensive, discussion-based seminar, drawing upon research and scholarship from a variety of disciplines including public health, Native American and Indigenous Studies, anthropology, sociology, history, nursing, and medicine.
Gndr St 101-6-20 Intersectionality: Key Terms in Gender & Sexuality Studies
What does it mean to describe race, gender, sexuality and class as "intersecting" identities or categories? What new forms of knowledge and ways of knowing, political tools and ways of doing politics does this insight make possible? And how can we use these to make sense of and respond to the urgencies of the present moment? In this seminar we will focus on "intersectionality" as a mode of feminist critical inquiry and activist practice (or "critical praxis") forged by Black feminists. As Patricia Hill Collins explains, "The term intersectionality references the critical insight that race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, and age operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but as reciprocally constructing phenomena that in turn shape complex social inequalities." Together we will read foundational texts by Collins and other Black feminist scholars and activists to understand and explore this critical insight and the coalitional politics that an intersectional analysis both demands and makes possible. We will pair this work with collective research into ongoing projects that engage this form of Black feminist "critical praxis" to respond to the complex social inequalities exposed and exacerbated in and by this political moment, including Black Lives Matter, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, and the Poor People's Campaign.
Gndr St 220-0-20 Sexual Subjects: Intro to Sexuality Studies
This course is an introduction to the ways humanist scholars over the past thirty or so years have revolutionized our understanding of sexuality not as something we do but rather as an extraordinarily dense, historically contingent way of understanding and controlling human subjectivity. Not sure what that means? Take this class! TRIGGER WARNING: Our conversation will likely venture into areas you have not previously associated with the word "sexuality." Some of it, such as primary sources in which people use vernacular, racist, or sexist terms to describe their own or other people's practices and identities, may be upsetting.
Gndr St 322-0-21 Health, Activism, Gender, Sexuality and Health
How do conceptions of "health" relate to ideological assumptions about gender, sexuality, and race? In this course we will explore these questions through a close examination of historic and current activist movements that have attempted to challenge contemporaneous conceptions of health and models of disease. Case studies will include the 1970s-era Women's Health Movement(s), including an examination of its relationship to the 19th century Birth Control Movement and its transformation with the emergence of a Reproductive Justice Movement in the 1990s; AIDS activismfrom beginning of the AIDS crisis and the formation of ACT UP to present activist campaigns that contest both the inequitable distribution of medical knowledge and resources and the (bio)medicalization of "sexual health"; the several strands of breast cancer activism that emerged in the 1990s and the increasing overlap between breast cancer activismand current environmental activism; mental health activism and its evolution in response to the rise of psychopharmacology; and current trans activism which critiques both the diagnostic categories and medical protocols that institutionalize the gender binary and the production of what Dean Spade refers to as "an inequitable distribution of life chances." In each case, we will consider how activists frame the problem, the tactics they use to mobilize a diverse group of social actors around the problem, and their success in creating a social movement that challenges contemporary medical models and the ideological assumptions that inform them. The course also introduces students to recent interdisciplinary scholarship on social movements.
Gndr St 331-0-20 Sociology of Gender and Sexuality
This class will investigate how gender shapes politics and policy, and how these in turn shape gender, with a focus on the United States, placed in comparative and global contexts. Gender is conceptualized as a set of relations, identities and cultural schema, always constituted with other dimensions of power, difference and inequality (e.g., race, class, sexuality, religion, citizenship status). We will analyze the gendered character of citizenship, political participation and representation, social rights and economic rights. 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, to shape gender relations? How do gender relations influence the nature of policy and citizenship? How has feminism emerged as a radical challenge to the androcentrism and restricted character of the democratic public sphere? And how has anti-feminism come to be a significant dimension of politics? We expand on conventional conceptions of political participation and citizenship rights to include the grassroots democratic activism that gave birth to modern women's movements. We explore how women's political efforts have given rise to the creation of alternative visions of democracy, social provision and economic participation, as well as reshaping formal politics and policies. And, finally, we will take advantage of the fact that we are in the middle of a Presidential election to examine the gendered aspects of the political landscape in the contemporary United States. The course readings feature different types of materials - original documents, scholarly books and articles, a textbook, policy reports, popular non-fiction work on aspects of gender, policy, politics and society. These are supplemented by films and online resources.
Gndr St 341-0-21 Trans Surgeries in Transnational Contexts
This course is situated at the intersection of theoretical, cultural, medical, and commercial online discourses concerning the burgeoning Gender Affirmation-related surgeries presented online and conducted in Thailand. Using Gender, Queer, Trans, Asian American, and Digital Humanities Theories, we will discuss the cross-cultural intersections, dialogues, refusals, and adaptions when thinking about medical travel to Thailand for gender/sex related surgeries. We will examine Thai cultural/historical conceptions of sex and gender, debates concerning bodies and diagnoses, and changes in presentations of sex/gender related surgeries offered online. We will also explore how digital archives are created and managed. Investigating transcripts of live interviews, medical discourses, and an archive of web images offering GAS surgeries produced by Thais for non-Thais will serve as axes for investigating this topic. Co-listed at Asian Am St 360-0-21
GNDR ST 350-4-20 Coalitional Politics in the Second Wave
In recent years, the "second wave" of feminism has increasingly been conflated with "white, middle-class feminism" and critiqued as an exclusionary form of feminist politics in contrast to the more intersectional feminist politics of the "third" and "fourth" waves of feminism. Numerous historians of the period have challenged us to reconsider this claim, which elides "feminism's deeply questioning, queer, coalitional and anti-imperialist past" and risks missing "some ways that feminist, lesbian, and queer of color and trans activists grappled hard to develop critical insights and knowledges that move us today" , Enke 2018. In this course, we will begin by examining how the "second wave" of feminism is being framed in 2021 and explore which projects, groups, and concerns have come to define the "second wave" of feminism in the United States in our collective memory. We then turn to recent histories of the "second wave" that challenge us to reconsider what counts as "feminist politics" during this period. For example, histories that focus on the formation of broad-based coalitions across and between liberation movements around issues of economic justice, reproductive rights, and the right to "self-defense" against both state and interpersonal violence during this period, challenge us to expand our conception of feminist activism. In the process, they require us to incorporate the "critical insights and knowledges" of labor and welfare rights activists, sex workers and gay liberationists, Black, Chicana, Puerto Rican and Indigenous liberation movement members as central to the feminist politics of the period. As we grapple with the urgencies of the present, what are the politics (and promise) of telling more complex and nuanced stories of activism and social change?
Gndr St 374-0-20 Imagining the Internet: Fiction, Film, Theory
Much recent fiction, film and theory are concerned with representing the internet and the World Wide Web. Sometimes cyberspace is depicted as a continuation of previous media such as television, cinema or telephone, but often it is envisioned as a new frontier. This course will examine the ways in which virtual media appears in cultural discourses. We consider how technological objects and tools participate in shaping elements of our culture that may appear natural, logical, or timeless. Our guiding questions will include the following: In what ways are these narratives shaping collective perceptions of the internet? How have virtual technologies challenged experiences of language, gender, community and identity? We will focus on social networking, gaming, artificial intelligence, and literary and filmic representations of these. Following a Cultural Studies model for inquiry, this course will be project-based and experiential. Your attendance and participation are mandatory. No experience needed, only a willingness to take risks and share work.
Hist 102-6-20 Parks and Pipelines: An Indigenous Environmental History
From the building of dams and pipelines to the creation of National Parks and wilderness areas, the environmental history of the United States is deeply tied to its history of colonialism. This seminar explores how the relationship between the United States and Indigenous people has shaped the environments, ecosystems, and physical landscapes we live in today. We will learn how the environment of what is now the United States was managed by Indigenous people before and throughout colonization, how Indigenous people have been impacted by the environmental policies of the United States, and how Indigenous resistance and activism have shaped both the environmental movement in the U.S. as well as contemporary Indigenous political thought. In discussion, we will break down the politics, economics, and ethics of this history, challenging ourselves to think critically about the land we live on and its future.
From the changing seasons, to frigid ice ages, to violent cyclones, to global warming, the phenomena of weather and climate have been crucial sites of interaction between humans and our environments. In this first-year seminar, we will ask: how have climatic changes across space and time shaped human societies, politics, and histories? And how have our ways of explaining and predicting the weather reflected changing approaches to nature's uncertainties? Moving from antiquity to the present, we will study the evolution of meteorological science from the study of meteors' to variable weather,' alongside the conceptual shift from a globe of many 'climates' to a singular, 'global climate.' Using a range of case studies from the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia, and sources including almanacs and weather proverbs, we will explore how in different ways across geographies and cultures, climate functioned both as a force of history and as an object of scientific fascination. By the end of the course, students will be able to situate the current climate crisis in an age many scholars call the Anthropocene, within a centuries-long history of adaptations and negotiations with our planet's atmosphere, and with one another.
HIST 300-0-32, SHC Core-List A Modern Science in the Global South
Science has drawn special authority in modern times from the claim that it represents universal knowledge of nature. But as historians of science over several decades have shown, the theories, methods, and subjects that fit under the umbrella of science have not been always and everywhere the same, not even in Europe and the United States. People have framed questions about nature very differently in different contexts. Moreover, our dominant stories about the development of modern science do not adequately recognize contributions and perspectives from Asia, Africa, and the Americas. What does the history of modern science look like from the Global South? With these challenges in mind, we will tackle a wide range of subjects, including: prediction, ecology, medicine and pharmacy, the scientific revolution, indigeneity, translation, elite and popular science, science fictional imaginaries, and Cold War development. Together, we will generate tools and problems that will broaden the narrative of modern science.
Hist 322-2-20 Development of the Modern American City: 1880-Present
This is the second half of a two-quarter course dealing with urbanization and urban communities in America. The second quarter deals with the period from 1870 onward. Topics include the role of cities in the formation of an industrial society, the influence of immigration and rural-urban migration, racial discrimination, political machines, professional planning, the automobile, electronic media, and the expansion of the federal role in city government. History 322-1 is NOT a prerequisite for 322-2.
We are currently living through a technological revolution that is radically reshaping every aspect of our social world. Yet Americans have long defined themselves and their nation through the material things they own, make, design, and use. This class examines the two-century debate over what America is and should be by studying its technology. Each lecture is organized around the history of a single "representative" technology. The core assignment of the course, guided by a series of workshop sections, is for students to write an original research paper on the social history of an artifact of their choice.... From the telegraph to social media, from the bicycle to the Apollo mission, from the teapot to the Internet of Things, Americans have identified technology as central to their personal and national destiny. We will consider the perspectives of engineers, consumers, managers, factory workers, enslaved people, housewives, and hackers, among others. We will consider the way technology has been shaped by the rise of managerial capitalism, global trade, and intellectual property law. And we will develop a set of tools for analyzing technological change: systems theory, network analysis, evolutionary theory, social construction, and technological determinism. This class treats technology as an expression of social values, and it guides students as they undertake a research project of their own design.
Hist 376-0-20 Global Environments and World History
Environmental problems have become part and parcel of popular consciousness: resources are being depleted at a record pace, human population levels just crossed the seven billion threshold, extreme poverty defines the majority of people's daily lives, toxic contaminants affect all ecosystems, increasing numbers of species face extinction, consumerism and the commodification of nature show no signs of abating, climate changes are wreaking havoc in different places every year, and weapons and energy systems continue to proliferate that risk the planet's viability. This introductory lecture course is designed to help students understand the relatively recent origins of many of these problems, focusing especially on the last one hundred and fifty years. Students will have an opportunity to learn about the environmental effects of urbanization, industrialization, population growth, market economies, empire-building, intercontinental warfare, energy extraction, and new technologies. They will also explore different environmental philosophies and analytic frameworks that help us make sense of historical change, including political ecology, environmental history, science studies, and world history. Finally, the course will examine a range of transnational organizations, social movements, and state policies that have attempted to address and resolve environmental problems. This year, we will also explore questions of environmental health, disease ecologies, spillover events, and Covid-19.
Hist 392-0-26 The Black Death and Historical Plagues
From the Plague of Athens to the final major outbreak of bubonic plague in Marseille in 1720, infectious disease had a profound impact on preindustrial Europe. This course offers an introduction to the study of disease in human history. While it focuses primarily on the cultural, economic, and religious effects of the Black Death and subsequent outbreaks of plague, this course will also cover the plagues of classical antiquity. Specific topics include the biological and environmental conditions which facilitated the spread of plague, the impact of plague on medicine and public health, and the development of new rituals and practices designed to promote community resilience. Throughout this course, there will be a strong emphasis on primary sources and the various ways in which historians have used these to shed light on the impact of disease. We will also discuss how contemporary observers have used these historical events to discuss the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
This seminar guides students as they research and write the social history of an artifact of their choice. Students will learn multiple approaches to the study of material culture; the diverse ways that people imbue objects with meaning, and how these objects mediate such differences among people as class, race, gender, age, and national culture?as well as the roles of capitalism, state-power, science, and environmental regulation in shaping the kinds of artifacts we design, sell, buy, and use. The student's chosen artifact may hail from any time or place, and exist at almost any scale of "materialization" so long as it can be framed as a research question: from the Atlas V rocket to Raggedy Ann dolls, and from police body cams to computer algorithms.
History 251-0-20 The Politics of Disaster: A Global Environmental History
The term "natural disaster" conjures images of tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes, and other powerful forces of nature that strike without warning, inflicting massive suffering on a powerless and unsuspecting populace. We now have several decades' worth of research from the social sciences and humanities showing that so-called "natural" disasters are not very natural at all. Instead, they are deeply political and profoundly man-made. This course adopts a historical and global approach in order to denaturalize disaster. From famines in British India to earthquakes in post-colonial Peru, from floods in New Orleans to nuclear disaster in Japan, we will see how disasters expose and exacerbate pre-existing inequalities, inflicting suffering disproportionately among those groups already marginalized by race, class, gender, geography, and age. These inequalities shape not only the impact of the disaster but the range of responses to it, including political critique and retrenchment, relief and rebuilding efforts, memorialization, and planning - or failing to plan - for future disasters of a similar kind. The course culminates in a unit on the contemporary challenge of anthropogenic global climate change, the ultimate man-made disaster. We will consider how memories, fears, and fantasies of past disasters are being repurposed to create new visions of what climate change will look like. Co-listed as Envr Pol 390-0-25
This lecture course uses the Covid-19 pandemic - including its socio-economic and racial dimensions - as a point of departure to study the history of global health and biomedicine in comparative terms. We will break up the quarter into four segments during which we will consider: 1) when and why infectious diseases "unified" the globe and with what consequences; 2) how empires, industries, war, and revolutions helped spread biomedical ideas, experts, and tools around the world; 3) what function institutions of transnational and global health governance have played in setting medical priorities and sustaining health norms across continents; and 4) why and how clinical trials, the pharmaceutical industry, and narcotics have become so intimately intertwined. Because the world around us has already been radically altered by SARS-coV-2, you will have an opportunity to place in historical context this pandemic's roots and its ongoing cycles. You will also be given a chance to apply insights from the readings - about histories of racial segregation, reproductive politics, militarization, and police powers - to this pandemic. Lectures and readings cover all world regions: Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, Asia, Europe, and the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Co-listed as Gbl Health 309-0-1.
ISEN 230-0-20 Climate Change and Sustainability: Ethnical Dimensions
This course is about our ethical responsibilities in the face of anthropogenic climate change. The course begins with an introduction to philosophical ethics, the scientific evidence in support of an anthropogenic role in climate change, and some advanced technological approaches to mitigating the effects of climate change. After these introductory sessions the class is split into two parts. We will begin with an exploration of how far reaching our ethical responsibilities are by questioning which things matter morally: are future-human beings, non-human animals, and ecosystems morally important? How do they compare morally to humans alive today? In the second part of the course we will focus on how individually specific our ethical responsibilities are. We will focus on a range of common behaviors relevant to climate change and ask whether and how we can ethically justify our individual participation or lack of participation in these behaviors. We will conclude the course by asking how our moral responsibilities with respect to climate change fit with our other moral responsibilities.
Pragmatism is probably the first, but certainly the most important genuinely North American philosophical tradition. The classical writings of Peirce, James, Dewey set the stage for a completely new orientation in epistemology, moral and political theory, psychology and many other fields. Basic to all Pragmatist writers is the belief that the active and interactive human being in its natural and social environment has to stand at the center of reflection. They thus emphasize volitional, procedural, social, and evolutionary aspects of knowledge of any kind. Given this focus on practically involved intelligent agents, political pragmatists like Dewey, Addams, Locke explore the natural origins, revisability and legitimacy of moral and political norms. They develop the idea of a critical use of knowledge and its connection to non-violent democratic conduct. Neopragmatists (Rorty and Putnam) explore the philosophical and political implications of critical thinking.
This class introduces students to a variety of philosophical problems concerning gender and politics. Together, we'll read classic and contemporary texts that examine questions such as: what is gender and how, if it all, does it relate to or differ from sex? What does it really mean to be a woman or a man and are these categories we are born into or categories that we become or inhabit through living in a particular way under specific conditions? Human history all the way up to the present seems to be rife with asymmetrical relations of power that relegate those marked out as women to a subordinate position, what explains this? What would it mean to over turn this state of affair, and which strategies are most likely to accomplish this task? And to what extent is it possible to grapple with all of the above questions, questions of gender, sex and sexuality, without also, at the very same time, thinking about how they relate to questions of class and race? Readings will include selections from Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Marion Young, Sandra Bartky, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Judith Butler, Talia Bettcher, and others.
Phil 254-0-20 Introduction to the Philosophy of Natural Science
The course will introduce students to deep philosophical issues raised by modern natural science of metaphysical and epistemological nature. From a reflection on methodological questions, it will approach the question of realism. We will be guided by nested "what does it take"-questions. For example: What does it take for a system of sentences to count as a good scientific theory? What does it take for a scientific theory to be testable by observational and experimental data (and, by the way: what does it take for certain series of experiences to count as data or observations?)? What does it take for a given theory to be better supported by the available evidence than its competitors? What does it take for a given theory to explain the known phenomena in an area of knowledge? What does it take for an explanatory scientific theory to be credited with reference to underlying structures of reality? We will begin with a brief overview of the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17 th century, and then turn to the treatment of certain problems in the contemporary literature, like the problem of induction, the problem of the underdetermination of theory choice by the available data, the problem of rationality and conceptual change, the problem of realism.
This course is an analysis of ethical and political issues that arise in medicine, with particular attention to questions posed by developments in biotechnology. Topics to be considered include human research, abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering, and the allocation of medical resources.
This course offers an overview of the work of one of the most influential late-twentieth-century French philosophers, Michel Foucault. Focusing on his studies of madness, sex, the medical gaze, prisons and other disciplinary institutions, the search for truth, knowledge, and liberation, students will gain an understanding of Foucault's most important concepts - concepts that over the last four decades have become central categories of inquiry and critique in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. These include archaeology, discipline, biopolitics, power-knowledge, resistance, governmentality, and genealogy. The course is reading intensive. In addition to weekly excerpts, you should plan to read two of Foucault's major texts throughout the quarter.
Physics 110-6-2 Breaking the Laws of Nature: Physics in Speculation
November 2015 marks the exact 100th anniversary of Einstein's theory of General Relativity. This seminar will explore the history of the birth and development of Einstein's theory, as well as some of its most intriguing implications. We will read and talk about warped spacetime, big bang cosmology, black holes, wormholes, and time machines, all at a nontechnical level requiring only basic high-school-level notions of physics and geometry.
That is what Americans are experiencing as a result of the corporate media mergers that took place in the closing years of the last century. Today there are six major companies that control much of what people read, hear and see. Those firms are AOL-Time Warner, General Electric, Walt Disney, News Corporation, Viacom/CBS, and Bertelsman. This course will examine the monetary forces that are driving the industry away from its primary mission of information. Critics contend that the drive for higher ratings, circulation and web page clicks is coming at the expense of the quality of news on television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet. Charges of Fake News combined with the ever-diminishing number of news providers is threatening democracy by limiting the number of voices that can be heard in our society.
Technologies that rely on data science and the internet are rapidly re-shaping our world. In this seminar, students will investigate the range of normative political issues raised by this complex, fast-changing situation characterized by social media, e-commerce, big data, artificial intelligence and the internet of things. Topics may include how we think about and experience personhood, citizenship, free speech, participation, inclusion, bias and inequality as well as the rise of issues such as data rights and disinformation. Synchronous class meetings will include discussion of common materials (readings and viewing) and student progress reports on their projects. Final projects can be submitted in the form of 2500-word research report, expository writing enhanced with links and illustrations, or a video or audio essay.
Pol Sci 395-0-28 The Coronavirus Pandemic & the Question of Sovereignty
The Coronavirus knows no political boundaries. Humanity's efforts to defend itself against the virus, by contrast, are contained and constrained by the boundaries that humanity has inflicted upon itself in order to assure the political autonomy of its various national communities. These communities are, by law and by normative understanding, "sovereign." "Sovereignty" is a good thing, and is portrayed as a good thing, to the extent that it provides each community with the autonomy and freedom to forge its own destiny. But it is, arguably, a bad thing when it causes humanity to trip over itself while trying to address urgent global threats. The current pandemic is one of these, but only the first of many - the "first act" in the drama that has already begun to unfold of humanity's disorder and disarray as it confronts global perils that are placing its very survival in question. In this seminar we do three things. First, we read several theoretical works on the concept of sovereignty: what is it, why do we have it, and can we imagine a world without it? Second, we read narratives about pandemics in other places and times. Comparisons are always informative. Third, students do individual research on our current Covid-19 pandemic and how sovereignty has affected its development. Students report back to the class weekly on their findings. Students draw on all three elements - conceptual definition, comparison, and research - to write a 5000-word research paper related to the pandemic and the question of sovereignty.
Psych 101-6-20 Mental Health Diagnosis & Treatment
While those going into the field of mental health typically think about it as a "helping profession", there is much more than meets the eye when it comes to the psychological, economic, and political forces that have defined the development of the field. The course will focus on the contemporary framework for defining mental illness - the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (now in its 5th edition) - with a particular focus on some of the problems that have emerged from the disease-based framework utilized in the manual, and the assumptions that it makes about disorders and typical development. As part of this discussion, there will be particular focus on the controversial application of the diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Then we will shift to an exploration of the role of state mental hospitals in the U.S. in the early to mid-20th century, and we will examine the political forces that drove the de-institutionalization movement of the 1970s and 1980s, with additional consideration of the contemporary implications of the closing of state hospitals. Finally, the course will focus on the evolution of psychotherapy in the modern marketplace, and some of the challenges posed by the demands of the health insurance industry and academic research. The aggressive way in which the DSM has been marketed internationally and the implications of culture for diagnosis will also be discussed. Along the way, we will explore critiques of the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance industry, and modern psychiatry. Some of these themes will also be explored through analysis of popular films and other media. This class will be conducted remotely with synchronous class meetings. Students will be evaluated on the basis of class attendance and participation, co-leading a class discussion with peers, and writing assignments including short reaction papers and a longer research paper.
This course will examine major utopian and dystopian texts in relation to social justice issues in the twentieth and twenty-first century, while following the stories of artists, organizers, and communities that have used speculative world-building to imagine livable, sustainable futures. We will focus on how feminist, anarchist, LGBTQ, and Afrofuturist art and activism have contributed to a substantial critical discourse on the intersections of science, technology, ecology, war, race, gender, sexuality, health, and ability. We will further examine how artists and activists have understood religion as both impediment and partner to social justice work, while alternatively embracing, subverting, and defying religious authority. We will attend to how religious myths and imagery are sampled and remixed by science fiction authors to plot an alternative course for world history.
This course will explore intersections of media and environment, considering media about the environment, media in the environment, and media as environment. It will cover a variety of media forms and examine how they shape our perception of the environment and foster environmental action. We will consider topics such as theories of media ecology; definitions of the "Anthropocene" epoch; the materiality of media infrastructure; media's role in raising environmental consciousness and promoting environmental justice; advertising and consumer culture; wildlife documentary; ecocritical aesthetics; environmental history; indigenous media; representations of landscape and soundscape; and animals as media performers. We will assess multiple forms of media, film, television, videogames, podcasting, sound art, infographics, and more, from a range of critical frameworks. We will consider numerous genres of environmental media as well, including apocalyptic and eco-disaster narratives, eco-comedies, "toxic" dramas, environmental melodrama, conspiracy thrillers, documentary, and animation.
This class will explore the nature of race in an effort to understand exactly what race is. It seeks to understand why race is such a potent force in American society. Close attention will be paid to the relationship between race, power, and social stratification. The course will examine the nature of racial conflict and major efforts to combat racial inequality.
Overview of the interactions between societies and the natural environment. Examines both key environmental problems, like climate change and oil spills, and possible solutions, and the roles played by different social structures and groups in shaping both issues. Co-listed as Envr Pol 212-0-1
This course examines some of the guiding themes of sociological analysis as they were originally formulated by four influential "classical" social thinkers: Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Drawing on some of these theorists' major writings, the purpose of the course is to unpack each thinker's major concepts and consider how he fused them in order to craft a distinctive lens through which to view the social world at his own time and today.
Social theory provides a lens to understand how power operates in modern societies. It helps us examine not only the production of socio-economic and political inequalities but also the reproduction of social order, namely, how society holds together despite all the antagonisms such disparities create. In this course, we will study three strands of social theory, emancipatory, positivist, and critical. Emancipatory theorists, most notably Marx, "speak truth to power" to emancipate oppressed groups. They hope their theories will arm the oppressed against their oppressors in their struggles for freedom. Mainstream, positivist theorists, in contrast, take the point-of-view of the social planner and seek to use science to reform society. Finally, critical theorists, such as Frederic Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Michel Foucault, share positivists' skepticism toward emancipatory theorists. Yet, they do not try to base their authority on science, as they see science as just another way power operates. Moreover, they believe power to be intrinsic to social relations and think emancipation is simply not possible. Instead, they seek to reconfigure power relations to create more ethical social structures.
This course is a critical sociological look at education in the United States with a focus on contemporary debates and issues. The course will cover how sociologists have both theoretically and empirically looked at schooling practices, what students learn, and how schools fit into the larger society including how the educational system in the U.S. interacts with political, economic, familial, and cultural institutions. We will also spend much time examining how educational experiences and opportunities are shaped by multiple social statuses including gender, socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity. We will focus on K-12 and higher education including the transition to higher education. Throughout all of these issues and topics, we will consider how schools both challenge and support existing systems of inequality.
This course explores the economic and social changes that have constituted "development," and that have radically transformed human society. The course focuses on both the historical experience of Europe and the contemporary experience of countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In the historical discussion, we explore the birth of the "nation state" as the basic organizing unit of the international system; the transition from agrarian to industrial economic systems; and the expansion of European colonialism across the globe. In our discussion of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, we consider the legacies of colonialism for development; the ways in which countries have attempted to promote economic development and industrialization; and issues of inequality and human welfare in an increasingly globally connected world.
This course examines law in the context of recent trends which have increasingly integrated the world's social and economic systems. Globalization means greater interdependence and less national autonomy. It occurs as international flows of capital, goods, services, and people increase. Transactions, interactions and relationships that formerly occurred within national boundaries now occur across them. But transactions and relationships involving capital, goods, services and people are not self-sustaining. Rather, they are supported and regulated by an institutional foundation that typically centers on the legal system. As part of globalization, particular legal and institutional forms are also spreading throughout the world. Because the legal and institutional frameworks that support these transactions exist primarily at the level of the nation-state, a governance mismatch has emerged. Globalization means that more is going on between national jurisdictions than within them, and tensions arise between competing institutional models. Thus, globalization motivates both an extension of legal systems, and a confrontation between different legal systems that can be resolved conflictually or concordantly. Either outcome leads to institutional convergence. We consider a number of different kinds of law but focus especially on commercial law, quasi-legal trade agreements (e.g., WTO), and commercially-relevant quasi-legal institutions. We pay attention to legal developments in developing and transitional economies, and also consider how the international community deals with significant common problems like economic inequality and global climate change.
Soc 336-0-20 The Climate in Crisis, Policies and Society
Climate change is the worst environmental problem facing the earth. Sea levels will rise, glaciers are vanishing, horrific storms will hit everywhere. After looking briefly at the impacts of climate change on natural and social environments both in the present and near future, we then consider how to best reduce climate change and how to adapt to its impacts. Issues of climate justice, divides between the global North and South, social movements, steps taken in different countries and internationally, and the role of market and regulations are addressed. Co-listed as Envr Pol 336-0-01.
This course introduces some of the main topics of medical sociology: the social construction of health and illness; inequalities in the distribution of illness and health care; the globalization of health care; and the organization of health care work, the medical professions, and the health care system. Students will learn about variations in who gets sick and why, how the health professions evolved in the United States and how the health care "turf" has been divided among professions, whether and when patients and their families participate in medical decision making, why physicians have more authority and receive higher incomes in the U.S. than elsewhere, what doctors do when interns and residents make mistakes, what the relationship is between hospitals and other health care organizations and how that relationship has changed over time, how the American healthcare system compares to other healthcare systems, how expenditures on preventive medicine compare with expenditures on high-tech cutting- edge medicine, and why the U.S. invests so much in high-tech medicine.
Sexuality shapes the cultural, economic, political, and social organization of the U.S. The ways we define and think about sexuality are deeply entangled in science and technology, regulation and governance, and social practices of exclusion and inclusion. This course examines the complex relationships between sexuality, technoscience, and the law?including those that guide sexuality-related identities, meanings, and interactions; sexual citizenship, feminist and queer health movements; investigating and controlling sexual crimes; digital expressions of sexuality, privacy, and algorithmic justice.
This discussion-based seminar is an introduction to the social scientific study of empire. We will pay special attention to formal settler colonialism, formal overseas colonies, and informal empire. We will discuss how politicians and elites conquer territory, draw boundaries, exercise political and economic control, and define the people of conquered places. We will explore the material consequences that result from such processes, especially as they relate to race, citizenship, and rights. While the primary focus of this course is on forms of U.S. empire, we will place the U.S. empire in a global and transnational context. There will be comparative readings to other empires and colonies. Finally, each student will conduct an individual research project that brings the concepts they learned in class to bear on another case of imperial rule.
Cryptology is the study of secret writing, or more generally secure communication. We will discuss classical methods of cryptography, followed by the use of the German Enigma machine during World War II, and end by discussing modern cryptosystems such as RSA and PGP, digital signatures, and their use in internet security.
