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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 381-0-20 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
