This course is an introduction to three of the leading theories about the nature and meaning of myth: psychoanalytic, functionalist, and structuralist. Each of these three approaches will be considered primarily through the writings of their respective founders: Sigmund Freud, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Claude Levi-Strauss. Lectures will be primarily concerned with explaining these three theories. Examples of how these theories can be applied to the analysis of specific myths will largely be drawn from the Old Testament Book of Genesis.
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 390-023 Archaeology 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.
This seminar will apply a linguistic anthropological approach to understanding how social facts are determined by historical trajectories and, in parallel, how events in the past are narrated into history via a set of specific discursive and social processes. We will identify historical ideologies embedded in understandings of colonization in the Caribbean, the struggle for Indigenous rights in the Andes, and radical political thought in the US, and find points of intersection between them. We will consider their impact in subject formation by attending to their social, political, and economic effects. Because a monopoly over truth (and especially historical truth) has been central to the forms of power and authority that undergird ongoing systems of neocolonialism, we will consider the actors and institutions that develop, codify, and transmit notions that individuals—as members of different social collectivities—believe to be true. What can we learn about how "truth" settles, and thus unlearn some of the exclusionary practices embedded within the production of knowledge? The course will seek to develop a methodology that pairs linguistic and discursive analyses with basic ethnographic approaches. Focus topics will include colonization, social media, and governance.
Asian Am St - 303-0-20 Race, Mental Health and Healing Justice
Race, Mental Health, and Healing Justice explores how constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality are intimately connected to issues of mental health and chronic illness in a range of institutional and societal settings. Readings for the coursework include Frantz Fanon, Esme Weijun Wang, Aurora Levins Morales, Mariame Kaba, DSM-V, and Alternatives to Calling Police During Mental Health Crisis. Drawing from postcolonial, black feminist theory, women of color theory, critical refugee studies, and disability justice, this course focuses on how healing justice as a theoretical and methodological framework offers openings to address issues of state violence and cultural disease to imagine and manifest healthier sustainable futures.
Environmental (justice) events continuously pepper the headlines - including these from the past week: "Chemical Giant Escaped Paying for Its Pollution", "Dozens Drown in India and Nepal as Monsoon Season Fails to End" and "As Drought Conditions Worsen, California Expands State of Emergency." These occurrences and others - including local ones - will be foregrounded in class readings, discussions, field trips, and assignments. What sustainable solutions are available to mitigate such disasters? What actions can we take to prevent future ones? How can the 12 Principles of Green Chemistry and Engineering be utilized to create a more sustainable future for all? Students will examine behaviors of individuals and institutions, analyzing how those actions contribute to the success or failure of a sustainable and environmentally just future. Students will use various forms of media to communicate their findings to the Northwestern community and beyond, culminating in student-directed projects and presentations.
Current problems in public and environmental health, such as the worldwide burden of major infectious diseases, emergence of new pathogens, and environmental reservoirs of infectious organisms.
Comm St 295-0-20 Black Feminist Health Science Studies
Black feminist health science studies is a critical intervention into a number of intersecting arenas of scholarship and activism, including feminist health studies, contemporary medical curriculum reform conversations and feminist technoscience studies. We argue towards a theory of Black feminist health science studies that builds on social justice science, which has as its focus the health and well-being of marginalized groups. Students will engage feminist science theories that range from explorations of the linguistic metaphors of the immune system, the medicalization of race, to critiques of the sexual binary. We will use contemporary as well as historical moments to investigate the evolution of "scientific truth" and its impact on the U.S. cultural landscape.
We are surrounded by technologies that support our everyday interactions. Facebook and Twitter provide persistent services for exchanging personal information, Snaps can be compiled into stories that provide insight about your last 24 hours, ubiquitous and tangible computing environments allow objects to adapt to our everyday experiences, and new collaboration technologies enable people to work together on projects when they are thousands of miles apart. The design of such systems, however, is not simply a technical question. In order to successfully create these systems, we need to understand how people work, play, and communicate with one another in a wide variety of situations. This course illustrates the practice of understanding human interactions that take place both with and through technology; and it explores the design, creation and evaluation of technologies to support such interactions. Course topics include: design processes, prototype construction and technology evaluation techniques. Specialized topics may include social software and collaborative systems, value-sensitive design, and agent-based technologies. No programming experience is necessary. There will be occasional labs to explain technical content. Course requirements include short hands-on exercises, two exams, and a group project.
Comm St 394-0-20 Media Messages, Ideology and Formation of Popular Culture
We live in an increasingly mediated world. From the ways we socialize with friends and family, to the way we engage in work and leisure, to the way we procure food— media and technology play a key role in structuring our everyday lives and activities. In turn these media objects, and the messages which they communicate, play a key role in shaping our understanding of the social, political, and economic systems around us. But how, in what ways, and to what extent does media structure our social realities? And further, what role do we as individuals and as audiences play in both getting meaning from and giving meaning to the media messages? Throughout this course, we will attempt to answer these questions as we examine the way mass media messages get constructed, circulated, and repurposed throughout popular culture; as well as the way these media messages help structure popular understandings of ideology within society. Beginning with early theorization on the relationship between media and society and the concept of media effects and medium theory, we will trace the way theories about the relationship between mass media and the audience have evolved within the field of communications studies, from a one-sided theory of media effects, to a cultural exchange between the needs and wants of audiences as specifically-socially located agents. Throughout this course, we will also interrogate how media messages become ‘popular' and what characteristics of media messages lend themselves to popular, pleasurable, and negotiated readings. In line with the goals of this Communications Studies 394 writing seminar, throughout the course students will also be learning how to go about conceiving, developing, and crafting their own original research papers. Students will engage in in-class peer review workshops and short writing assignments that will help guide them in the research and writing process. In addition, students will learn skills that they will be able to apply in their future academic work and writing.
Whether we are working, communicating with friends, seeking romance, reading the news, or simply amusing ourselves, we now often rely on computational tools to support our everyday lives. This reliance will only grow deeper with the expansion of artificial intelligence and other new technologies. But what happens when computers fail us? This course explores the hazards of computing, particularly with respect to exacerbating broader societal issues such as discrimination, inequity, public health, and the climate crisis. Each week will explore a different type of hazard through historical and contemporary examples. Students will write a final research paper analyzing the role of computers in a hazard or disaster of their choice, from any time (past, present, or future) and at any scale (personal, communal, or societal).
Comp Lit 202-0-24 Race, Mental Health and Healing Justice
Race, Mental Health, and Healing Justice explores how constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality are intimately connected to issues of mental health and chronic illness in a range of institutional and societal settings. Readings for the coursework include Frantz Fanon, Esme Weijun Wang, Aurora Levins Morales, Mariame Kaba, DSM-V, and Alternatives to Calling Police During Mental Health Crisis. Drawing from postcolonial, black feminist theory, women of color theory, critical refugee studies, and disability justice, this course focuses on how healing justice as a theoretical and methodological framework offers openings to address issues of state violence and cultural disease to imagine and manifest healthier sustainable futures.
Earth Sciences - 102-6-02 Earth is Out to Kill You
In this seminar, we will learn about some of the most devastating natural disasters in Earth's recorded history. We will explore the science and the human toll of earthquakes and volcanoes - frequent reminders from our dynamic planet that it has little respect for human life. We will cover current events, as exemplified by recent destructions in Haiti and Spain, as well as historical events such as the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 which kicked off the Age of Enlightenment, and the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 which led to the Year Without a Summer, and which gave us Dracula and Frankenstein. There will be several writing assignments on science-related topics. In the words of Voltaire, bemoaning the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755: "Come, ye philosophers, who cry, "All's well," And contemplate this ruin of a world."
Earth Sciences 114-0-01 Evolution and the Scientific Method
The scientific method is explored through the role it has played in the development of evolutionary thought. The course tracks the history of evolutionary theory from its earliest origins to the modern consensus, and in so doing, provides examples of scientific method as practiced in biology, geology, physics, and chemistry. It is the story of one of the greatest paradigm shifts in the history of human thought, and is designed to serve the needs of a broad spectrum of non-science majors seeking to satisfy the Area I distribution requirement.
This course examines economic development over the long-run, with a focus on the transition to modern economic growth in the Western world. Topics include Malthusian stagnation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the demographic transition, and globalization and the great divergence. Along the way, we will discuss long-run changes in inequality, technology, and labor force participation, as well as the role of institutions in economic development, and the interaction between economic conditions and political power. Much of the class will be focused around analyzing recent research on these topics. The class will also involve a writing component aimed at improving students' ability to write critically and concisely about economic topics.
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.
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. By the end of the quarter you hopefully will have a solid microeconomic framework within which to analyze important issues in economics from a gender perspective. There will be a series of empirical papers to read for this course.
English 101-6-24 Bioinsecurities: Race, Empire and Postcolonial
This reading-intensive first year seminar will consider how colonialism and contagion together produce racialization in science fiction. In the year of the pandemic, European nations voted for strict vaccine export control measures, effectively slowing down access to medications for the Global South. Phrases like "vaccine nationalism" as well as "vaccine passports" have become commonplace. This twilight zone of deepening crises, and the imperial paranoid imaginary of what Neel Ahuja calls "bioinsecurities," have long been represented by science fiction authors. Keeping a firm eye on epidemiology, race, and imperialism, this course charts a path along genre-bending, speculative fictions that imagine contagion and infection from the late-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. Contagion emerges not just as a moral panic or embodied paranoia about infection, but as a method of relationality that draws tightly controlled, governmentalized worlds around raced and differentiated bodies. We will think about how these fictional netherworlds produce new subjectivities of life, death, and living death. Alongside science fictional as well as speculative novels, spanning postcolonial as well as US writing, we will also watch films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, District 9, Arrival, World War Z, and Contagion.
English 338-0-21 Early Modern Sexuality: Studies in Renaissance Literature
This course explores the history of sex and sexualities -- in all their variety -- in English Renaissance literature and culture. Before the homo/hetero divide, before what Michel Foucault calls as "the implantation of the perverse," before genders in their modern forms, what were the routes, locations, effects, and politics of sex and desire? To what extent can we discuss "sexuality" in relation to "identity" in the pre-modern era? To address these complex questions, and to begin to ask new ones, we will concentrate on a range of exemplary literary and historical texts from around 1600 in England. We will be interested to explore both the multiple forms and functions of desire, eroticism, sex, asexuality, gender, gender-identification, etc. in this culture, as well as the terms, methods, and theories we now use to read the sexual past. We will gain fluency in the seemingly familiar but simultaneously foreign languages of early modern identities and desires: sodomy, tribadism, friendship, marriage; bodies, their parts, and their pleasures. We will interrogate sex/gender's intersections with such categories as race, religion, social class, and nation, and we will think through some new scholarship on trans* identities in early modern culture.
English 381-0-20 Illness and Feminity: Fictions and Facts
Ill women are scattered across the pages of literature, from swooning ladies in sentimental novels to cancer patients in popular fiction. Illness acts as narrative momentum, as a metaphor for social "ills," and as a signifier of tragic virtue in an individual character. From the 19th century to the present, this class will examine how the tropes of illness in popular literature pertains to our broader cultural assumptions about illness and gender. How do traits associated with femininity resemble literary representations of illness, and vice-versa? How have these associations changed over time? How has the construction of ill femininity been bound up in whiteness, and how has this contributed to systemic and medical racism? What is the relationship between the representation of ill femininity and contemporary "wellness culture"? How might we locate or analyze femininity in representations of ill men? What about mental illness? Our readings will be split between popular representations of illness in novels and writings by ill authors, and we will consider how literary tropes are or are not reappropriated by the latter.
English 385-0-20 Science and Representation: Topics in Combined Studies
When you write up a lab report, you probably don't approach it as a literary exercise. Today we take science writing as an objective, transparent transcription of experimental data. However, during the Scientific Revolution in Europe and Britain, literary form was vital to the transmission and popularization of new experimental methods. Indeed, literary representation was necessary to help people conceive new sensory worlds at microscopic, sub-microscopic, or planetary scale. In HUM 370/ ENG 385, we will explore the centrality of literary representation to pivotal new technologies in the early modern emergence of experimental science: the microscope, the air-pump, the telescope, and the distillation apparatus. These technologies did not only challenge fervently held convictions about the natural world endorsed by the Bible, Aristotle, and Ptolemy, among other authorities. They also demanded new representational modes able to communicate concepts and vivify experiences inassimilable to old ways of understanding. How can the pervasive agency of atmospheric pressure be figured in language? What words make the magnified body of a flea familiar, even beautiful? Why poeticize the chemical reactions involved in refining a new global commodity, sugar? What political viewpoints accompany Copernican visions of possible planetary worlds?
We will explore how literary technology was as integral to the New Science as experimental technology. Throughout, we will approach western science not as universal knowledge but as highly situated practice, whose multifarious economic, extractive, and imperial investments are woven into the fabric of its literary representation. We will dedicate significant time to satires of the new science, whose critical counter-representations of the frivolity, futility, or cruelty of experimental method illuminate the deep and ongoing stakes of science's relation to literature,
English 385-0-21 Literary Animals from Noah's Ark to Shakespeare
Before the nineteenth-century ideas of extinction and evolution, writers considered the earth's number of species to be unchanging. How were relations across this fixed set of creaturely kinds understood, and how was the diversity of these life-forms explained? What claims did these creatures have on humans, and what might earlier understandings of their entitlements reveal about assumptions concerning "us" and "them" now? Focusing on English Renaissance literature, this course will explore the teeming possibilities for thinking across species - before a starker "the human/animal divide" took shape. We'll map different approaches to natural history, ranging from re-readings of Genesis, to lawsuits filed against insects, to complaint poetry written in animal voices, to the night-rule of cats on the rooftops of London, to Shakespeare's animals (in their natural habitats of forest, field, and fantasy too), and then to the explicit pursuit of "human empire" over creatures with rise of seventeenth-century science. Finally, to consider what animals might say about all this, we'll end by analyzing a 2014 production called King Lear with Sheep (a staging of King Lear ... yes, with real sheep).
This course will survey American history from the colonial era to the present with two premises in mind: that the natural world is not simply a passive background to human history but rather an active participant, and that human attitudes toward nature are both shaped by and in turn shape social, political, and economic behavior. The course will cover formal schools of thought about the natural world - from transcendentalism to the conservation and environmental movements - but also discuss the many informal intersections of human activity and natural systems, from European colonialism to property regimes, migration and transportation, industry, consumer practices, war, technological innovation, political ideology, and food production.
The world's oceans are essential to life on earth, yet ever-more increasingly imperiled by an array of anthropogenic stressors, including pollution, overexploitation of resources and climate change. This class will focus on both the threats posed to ocean and coastal ecosystems, as well as the impacts on marine living resources. The course will also examine the role of national (with a focus on the United States) and international law in addressing threats to the world's oceans.
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. We will also cover other aspects of Native American food sovereignty happening across the United States and Canada. Students will work in groups, to collect data from three maple species on campus and examine sugar ratios, sap flow rates, and ambient temperature and precipitation: along with a focus on species differentiation, soil nutrients, and campus micro-climates. The final product for the class would be a group data report. A copy of the report will go to facilities management to be added to their campus tree inventory.
Env Pol 390-0-24 Science and Knowledge in Global Climate Governance
Despite decades of climate science research, current climate action remains limited in its ability to effectively mitigate the impacts of climate change. Efforts to reduce emissions are well-intentioned attempts to avoid the most severe effects of climate change, but have yet to spur the magnitude of action required. In this course we will explore the intersections of climate science, traditional ecological knowledge, and climate justice to unpack how different knowledge systems inform and impact effective climate governance and policy. Often unrecognized in science and policy arenas, traditional ecological knowledge generates insights for strengthening efforts to effectively address climate change. In this course, we ask: to what extent and how do different knowledge systems gain and lose traction in different climate policy arenas? How, why, and with what effects are the science and policy of climate change far removed from the people most vulnerable to its impacts? Is the exclusivity of science—marginalization of knowledge systems and extricating climate science from climate change experiences—the greatest threat to effective climate action? And, how might policy arenas facilitate the introduction, deliberation, and circulation of plural worldviews and knowledge systems?
Climate change is the keystone environmental issue of this generation, and most likely for many generations to come. While the world community and individual countries have formulated policies to address climate change, these policies are almost universally recognized as being wholly inadequate to effectuate the objective of the Paris Agreement to hold global temperatures to well below 2ºC above pre-industrial levels, and pursue efforts to limit increases to 1.5ºC. This has led to increasing calls for research and development, and potential deployment, of so-called "climate geoengineering" options, defined as "deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth's natural systems to counteract climate change." This includes "solar radiation management" (SRM) approaches that seek to cool the Earth by deflecting income solar radiation back to space by approaches such as dispersing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere and brightening clouds, as well as carbon dioxide removal (CDR) approaches that seek to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it, or utilize it for production of products or energy. These options include nature-based solutions, e.g. tree planting or enhancing soil uptake of carbon, direct air capture through the use of filtration systems, and ocean-based approaches.
Env Pol 390-0-26 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.
Env Pol 390-0-27 Parks and Pipelines: Indigenous Environmental Justice
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. Through engagement with a variety of digital resources including maps and digital media, 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. In lieu of a final paper, this course will include a digital, public-facing final assignment.
This course examines how socioeconomic and environmental factors work together to cause hazards and disasters in human society. In this course we learn the main concepts about disaster such as preparedness, vulnerability, resilience, response, mitigation, etc. We learn that a disaster does not have the same effect on everyone (all groups of people), and factors of social inequality such as race, ethnicity, class, and gender, make people more vulnerable to impacts of disasters. Also, this course, with an interdisciplinary perspective, analyzes disasters in the global North and South. This is a discussion-intensive course for advanced undergrad students. The classes are the student-centered with an emphasis on collaborative learning. The class meetings will consist of lecture, discussion, presentations, teamwork, activities, video/audio materials and projects.
Gbl Hlth 322-0-20 The Social Determinants of Health
The human body is embedded into a health framework that can produce hypervisibility, invisibility, or both. This upper-level course in social science and medical anthropology examines the role of social markers of difference, including race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and religion, in current debates and challenges in the theory and practice of global health. We will explore recent illness experiences, therapeutic and self-care interventions, and health practices and behaviors in socio-cultural and historical context through case studies in the U.S., Brazil, and South Africa. The purpose of this course is to introduce students to key concepts such as embodiment, medicalization, structural violence, social determinants of health, biopolitics, health equity, and an ethic of care. Central questions of the course include: How do categories of "Othering" determine disease and health in individuals and collectives? How is medical science and care influenced by economic and political institutions and by patient trust? How do social and economic inclusion/exclusion control access to health treatment and self-care and care of others? This course focuses on the linkages between society and health inequalities in the U.S. and economic powers. It offers a forum to explore policy application with a particular emphasis on definitions that form social factors. This course utilizes historical accounts, contemporary ethnographies, Twitter threads of health experiences, public health literature, media reports, TedTalks, and films to bring to life the "why's" of health differences.
Gbl Hlth 390-0-22 Native Nations, Healthcare Systems and US 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 (ACA). Additionally, state policy topics will include Medicaid expansion and tobacco cessation and prevention.
Gbl Hlth 390-023 Silent But Loud: Negotiating Health
To be "healthy" is a complex obstacle course that many individuals living in certain bodies have to navigate. Black bodies, for example, are often the tied to (un)health because they are stereotyped as in need to be controlled, managed, and "guided" into healthfulness. In the U.S., these narrow stereotypes are just a few of the ways Black bodies get defined. In this course, we will move beyond those restrictive stereotypes, guided by questions such as, "How does culture define health?", "How does the food pipeline affect the health of certain bodies?" and "What does it mean to live in an obesogenic environment?" In this course, we examine the connection between health, culture, food, and environment with a focus on what is silenced and what is loud when generating "fixes" for "diseased" bodies. Silence refers to the disregard and dismissiveness of the narratives and experiences around the oppressions attached to the health of certain bodies. Yet, this silence echoes as Loud when connected to their culture, food, and environment when discussing diseases highlighted in Black bodies such as obesity, hypertension, and diabetes.
This course examines how socioeconomic and environmental factors work together to cause hazards and disasters in human society. In this course we learn the main concepts about disaster such as preparedness, vulnerability, resilience, response, mitigation, etc. We learn that a disaster does not have the same effect on everyone (all groups of people), and factors of social inequality such as race, ethnicity, class, and gender, make people more vulnerable to impacts of disasters. Also, this course, with an interdisciplinary perspective, analyzes disasters in the global North and South. This is a discussion-intensive course for advanced undergrad students. The classes are the student-centered with an emphasis on collaborative learning. The class meetings will consist of lecture, discussion, presentations, teamwork, activities, video/audio materials and projects.
This class will take a look at the life and work of the groundbreaking Viennese psychologist Sigmund Freud from a comparative and interdisciplinary angle. Almost 80 years after his death, Freud's legacy continues to be controversial: some claim that his theories are no longer relevant in the light of new research, whereas others defend his theories and/or expand upon the implications and influence of his ideas, in the realm not only of psychology, medicine, and neuroscience, but also in the fields of sociology, cultural studies, philosophy, literary studies, criminal justice, queer and gender studies, communications, and many more. What is certain, however, is that, one way or another, Freud's theories and ideas have marked the world for all time. This class will read fundamental texts from Freud's body of work in dialogue with texts by Freud's near and distant predecessors and followers, both to situate Freud in his historical and cultural context, and to think through the many different kinds of questions that Freud's work addresses.
Christian theorists were convinced that human sexuality underwent an irreversible debasement as a result of the sin of Adam and Eve. Their negative assessment has remained with us until the present day. This course will grapple with the both the origins of this negative bequest as well as some of the anomalies of the medieval tradition. For example, despite the insistence that heterosexuality was ordained by God, the disparagement of physicality and women led to the institutionalization of clerical celibacy in the West. This, in turn, fostered a gay subculture. Likewise, despite the theoretical insistence on a separation between the sexes that was even present in the afterlife, these same theorists not only praised "virile women," but occasionally celebrated cross-dressing in female saints! This course will examine the institutions and ideas that dominated the construction of gender in the Middle Ages. It will also lend insight into not one, but many "sexualities."
Gndr St 332-0-20 Black Feminist Health Science Studies
Black feminist health science studies is a critical intervention into a number of intersecting arenas of scholarship and activism, including feminist health studies, contemporary medical curriculum reform conversations and feminist technoscience studies. We argue towards a theory of Black feminist health science studies that builds on social justice science, which has as its focus the health and well-being of marginalized groups. Students will engage feminist science theories that range from explorations of the linguistic metaphors of the immune system, the medicalization of race, to critiques of the sexual binary. We will use contemporary as well as historical moments to investigate the evolution of "scientific truth" and its impact on the U.S. cultural landscape.
Gndr St 361-0-21 Illness and Feminity: Fictions and Facts
Ill women are scattered across the pages of literature, from swooning ladies in sentimental novels to cancer patients in popular fiction. Illness acts as narrative momentum, as a metaphor for social "ills," and as a signifier of tragic virtue in an individual character. From the 19th century to the present, this class will examine how the tropes of illness in popular literature pertains to our broader cultural assumptions about illness and gender. How do traits associated with femininity resemble literary representations of illness, and vice-versa? How have these associations changed over time? How has the construction of ill femininity been bound up in whiteness, and how has this contributed to systemic and medical racism? What is the relationship between the representation of ill femininity and contemporary "wellness culture"? How might we locate or analyze femininity in representations of ill men? What about mental illness? Our readings will be split between popular representations of illness in novels and writings by ill authors, and we will consider how literary tropes are or are not reappropriated by the latter. -- Readings Include: Anonymous, The Woman of Colour (1808); Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813); Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939); Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993); David Chariandy, Soucouyant (2007). We will also read personal essays, poetry, portions of memoirs, or short stories by authors including Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Eula Biss, Anne Anlin Cheng, Suleika Jaouad, Audre Lorde, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michelle Zauner.
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.
This first-year seminar will consider the history of the internet from the mid-twentieth century to the present. This will not be a technical history of the computer science or actual infrastructure that constitute the internet, but rather a history of the social and political ideas contributing to a worldwide system of networked computers and protocols. In particular, the course will discuss the culture surrounding the internet - the ways that the Cold War, the counterculture, libertarianism, and environmentalism all fostered a set of beliefs that helped define Silicon Valley and continue to shape companies that call for revolution one day and place their trust in the market the next.
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.
History 275-2-20 History of Modern Science and Medicine
Science has profoundly shaped the world we live in: it impacts the food we eat, our interactions with one another, the ways in which we relate to our bodies, the manner of our travel and communication, and our personal views of humanity's place in the universe. Over the course of the modern period, science has earned widespread authority as 'objective' knowledge about the natural world. Yet as most scientists today will freely admit, decisions about which research questions earn attention (and funding) and how research is carried out are influenced by powerful institutions, political considerations, business interests, technological changes, imperialism, and societal expectations. Science is, after all, a human activity. With this lesson in mind, our course surveys the history of science from the Enlightenment until the Cold War, in a series of units examining medicine, physics, biology, and earth sciences. We will be guided by questions including: What counted as science in different times and places? How did scientific researchers earn a living, and which institutions supported them, or didn't? Above all, what changing values has science reflected over the course of the modern period?
Why does American medicine look the way it does? The United States spends more on health care than any other country in the world, but is almost singular in its lack of universal health care. American medicine is at once distinguished by its capacity for research and innovation and by its inability to resolve the profound health inequalities that shape this country. Which historical processes produced this unique set of circumstances? When and how have activists, patients, and politicians agitated for change? What alternate futures might we imagine? This course traces the history of American medicine from the nation's founding to the present day. We will learn about the formation of the medical profession, track changing understandings of health and disease, discuss the development of drugs and medical technologies, and investigate the role of professional organizations in combatting efforts to nationalize healthcare. At the same time, we will hear about efforts to reform American medicine in the name of anti-racism, gender equality, decolonization, disability rights, and social justice. By studying these complex histories, we will ask questions about the relationship between health, power, bodies, and knowledge and consider what it has meant to provide care and pursue health throughout American history.
This course will survey American history from the Colonial Era to the present with two premises in mind: that the natural world is not simply a passive background to human history but rather an active participant in historical change, and that human attitudes toward nature are both shaped by and in turn shape social, political, and economic behavior. The course will cover formal schools of thought about the natural world—from Transcendentalism to the conservation and environmental movements—but also discuss the many informal intersections of human activity and natural systems, from European colonialism to property regimes, migration and transportation, industry, consumer practices, war, technological innovation, political ideology, and food production.
History 322-2-20 Development of the Modern Amercian City
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.
This course offers a cross-disciplinary approach to our understanding of alternatives, choice and dialogue. Is there really such a thing as chance or choice? On what basis do we choose? How well can we predict the future? And how might we foster meaningful dialogue across the disciplines and among individuals? Professor Gary Saul Morson, a specialist in literature, and Professor Morton Schapiro, President of Northwestern and a labor economist specializing in the economics of higher education, will offer alternative approaches to these questions based on the presuppositions of their respective disciplines. If you want to dig into topics and questions like uncertainty, prediction, modelling, and judgment, this class is the perfect complement.
Humanities 325-4-20 Parks and Pipelines: Indigenous Environmental Justice
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. Through engagement with a variety of digital resources including maps and digital media, 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. In lieu of a final paper, this course will include a digital, public-facing final assignment.
When you write up a lab report, you probably don't approach it as a literary exercise. Today we take science writing as an objective, transparent transcription of experimental data. However, during the Scientific Revolution in Europe and Britain, literary form was vital to the transmission and popularization of new experimental methods. Indeed, literary representation was necessary to help people conceive new sensory worlds at microscopic, sub-microscopic, or planetary scale. We will explore the centrality of literary representation to pivotal new technologies in the early modern emergence of experimental science: the microscope, the air-pump, the telescope, and the distillation apparatus. We will explore how literary technology was as integral to the New Science as experimental technology. Throughout, we will approach western science not as universal knowledge but as highly situated practice, whose multifarious economic, extractive, and imperial investments are woven into the fabric of its literary representation. We will dedicate significant time to satires of the new science, whose critical counter-representations of the frivolity, futility, or cruelty of experimental method illuminate the deep and ongoing stakes of science's relation to literature.
This course provides a broad overview of philosophical discussions of race and racism in American culture. In this overview, we will focus on phenomenological issues concerning the experience of race (especially in the US), epistemological issues concerning racial distortions and racial ignorance, and ethical and political issues concerning racial oppression. Some of the central questions that we will address are: How should we understand the concept of race and the processes of racialization through which people come to see themselves as having a racial identity? What are the different kinds of racial injustice that we can identify, and the different kinds of exclusion, subordination, marginalization and stigmatization that can be part of racial oppression? How should racial oppression be resisted? How should racial violence be stopped? How should we build racial solidarity and fight for racial justice? We will also explore the connections between race and other identity categories such as gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, religion, and nationality.
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.
In this seminar, we will read some of Kant's works concerning human history and human nature. We will be concerned to understand and investigate Kant's defense of teleological explanation in biology - organic nature should be understood as organized purposively, parts or aspects of beings as directed towards ends - as well as his various claims concerning the nature of human history. For example: does history have a purpose, and if so, which, and how could we know of it? What kind of description, knowledge, understanding is appropriate to history as an object (are there laws of history, for example)? We will also investigate the relationship among these doctrines: given Kant's use of biological terminology in his history writings, on his view is historical investigation strongly akin to biological explanation, or based upon biological premises? Or does human freedom or rationality disrupt biology, rendering history distinct from nature? All of these doctrines intersect with Kant's well-known racism: he develops his biological theory of race while working on his philosophy of biology, and his racist claims in that context are connected to historical views concerning human cultural and moral development. Thus, we will also investigate whether or Kant's concept of race is a teleological-biological or historical concept (or both), and to what degree or how this concept, and Kant's racist commitments, are integral to his thinking concerning biology and history.
The scientific enterprise, over the centuries, has often interacted with human spirituality and religion. This interaction has at times been synergistic and at times antagonistic. This course will focus on recent developments. We will look at relevant writings of influential scientists, including mystics, believers, agnostics, and atheists. We will also look at research probing the physiology of spiritual experience. In-class discussion will at all times be respectful, to allow productive dialogue on these deeply personal topics.
Pol Sci 395-0-24 Science and Knowledge in Global Climate Governance
Despite decades of climate science research, current climate action remains limited in its ability to effectively mitigate the impacts of climate change. Efforts to reduce emissions are well-intentioned attempts to avoid the most severe effects of climate change, but have yet to spur the magnitude of action required. In this course we will explore the intersections of climate science, traditional ecological knowledge, and climate justice to unpack how different knowledge systems inform and impact effective climate governance and policy. Often unrecognized in science and policy arenas, traditional ecological knowledge generates insights for strengthening efforts to effectively address climate change. In this course, we ask: to what extent and how do different knowledge systems gain and lose traction in different climate policy arenas? How, why, and with what effects are the science and policy of climate change far removed from the people most vulnerable to its impacts? Is the exclusivity of science—marginalization of knowledge systems and extricating climate science from climate change experiences—the greatest threat to effective climate action? And, how might policy arenas facilitate the introduction, deliberation, and circulation of plural worldviews and knowledge systems?
Buddhism is most often considered a religion, but it is also very much a psychological system. The course also provides a concise introduction to key concepts in Buddhism (with minimal discussion of the evolution of different Buddhist schools and sects) and how these ideas relate to topics from main-stream Psychology. As students work through the material, we will examine how the critical Buddhist observation of interdependence, especially of all living beings and their environment, leads to an ethical system based on the view that harming others is also harming oneself. Implications of these foundational concepts will be investigated in relation to class materials.
What happens when religion goes digital? In this course we examine how religions are adapting to an increasingly digital world and how digital environments are shaping old and new religious practices. Through a series of case studies, we will consider how religious practitioners and the “spiritual but not religious” are using digital media to challenge established religious authority, create community, innovate devotional practices, and theorize their experiences. We will examine, for example, collage and hip hop, virtual pujas, mindfulness apps, user-generated gods, emoji spells, tulpamancy, transhumanism, and Slender Man. Through these case studies we will explore how digital natives and adopters are reimagining religious presence, mediation, community, ethics, and ontology. This class centers BIPOC, queer, and feminist voices, digital arts, memetics, lived religion, and social justice. Students will practice skills for digital humanities research, engage in ethical reflection, and apply course learning to creating their own digital artifacts.
This course approaches the study of sociological institutions--often referred to as "the rules of the game"--from a design perspective using in-class exercises and applications. We'll work to understand how these institutions emerge and address existing societal problems, ultimately analyzing the potential of different institutional configurations to encourage or discourage desired outcomes. We focus on both coordination-type dilemmas (e.g. how to parent, which side of the street to drive on, who provides health care) and collective-action dilemmas (e.g. how to police fishermen going over quota, funding of public radio). We end with a study of how institutions persist--possibly beyond their useful lifespan--such as the persistence of the intentionally inefficient 'QWERTY' keyboard, and a conversation about why it's difficult to enact policy change. The course has two overarching goals. This first is to develop a new way of approaching and analyzing social institutions. The second is to build skills in critical analysis though case studies and applications with a local Evanston institution.
The main emphasis in this course is on how sociological theory informs social research. We will read selections of classical social theory and then look at how various scholars have used that theory to help them analyze some aspect of society. We will keep moving between theoretical statements and applications or refinements of that theory. The course will be a mix of lectures and discussion.
Technology is an integral part of society: from the wheel, to the cotton gin, to the modern computer. Technology is everywhere and humans have always used technology to shape society and vice versa. How do people relate to technology? How has our culture been affected by technology? How has technology itself been shaped by societal norms, and values? This course gives an overview of the growing and important field of the Sociology of Technology. In this course we will explore the different ways that technology has affected our society through a sociological lens. We will examine how physical material combines with culture to create the distinct aspects of our society. Students may not receive credit for this course and for Sociology 392 'Technology, Work, Love, and Life in 2020.
Soc 376-0-3 Sociology of Illness: The Normal and Pathological
This course surveys a variety of topics in the sociology of illness and social studies of science and threads them together with a common goal: to unpack the entanglements of society with the science of human genetics and biomedical research. Through the readings, students will engage with themes that are central to sociological thought: identity, knowledge, power, categorization, race, politics, etc. albeit in the context of science and illness. By the end of the course students will be able to sharply interrogate how social and political conditions shape the production of claims about the genetic basis of illness and difference. While much of the scholarship we will consider is broadly sociological, some of it is drawn from other fields, and part of the goal of the course is to show what is gained when we think about health, disability, and illness from an interdisciplinary perspective. Students from other disciplines are welcome.
Many of the most significant social and cultural changes in modern history have been achieved through sustained collective action—through groups of people coming together around a common set of problems and fighting to change the status quo in ways that alleviate or at least mitigate those problems. These collectives—which we refer to as social movements—are fundamentally communicative in nature. Movements are formed through communication and it is through communication that they achieve much of their strategic objectives. Moreover, movements are inextricably linked to communications channels. As media and communication technologies have transformed, so too have the structures and the practices of social movements. This course explores the complex relationships between communication and social movements, bringing together theories from communication studies, sociology, and political science, as well as tracing historically how social movements have developed new practices of achieving social change.
