Freshman seminar for students in the NU Bioscientist Program that addresses the history, ethics, and longstanding challenges of research in human biology and health. Co-listed with Bio Sci 115.
This course is an introduction to the anthropological subfield of archaeology, its theories and methods, and the political and social issues that arise when we study human pasts. In this course, we look at the history of the discipline and its theoretical underpinnings, as well as methodological topics including how archaeologists create research designs, discover and excavate sites, and analyze artifacts and features. We will also explore how archaeology confronts and deals with contemporary issues critical to the archaeological project and the communities that archaeologists engage with: e.g. heritage preservation and Indigenous/community rights, Black lives and Black histories, environmental degradation and sustainability, feminist archaeology and gender equality. Throughout the course, students will learn about archaeological case studies from around the globe and from a variety of historical periods.
This class explores food in all its cultural and social dimensions. Lectures and readings will begin with the deep history and origins of our foods, with a focus on ancient foods of the Americas; then, we turn to the social, economic and political organization of the modern food industry, from industrial production and fast-food empires to small-scale local farms and restaurants; and last, the cultural significance of food, whether as cherished ethnic tradition or in the rise (and fall?) of celebrity chefs, cooking shows and competitions. Individual research projects will allow an in-depth study of a favorite (or least favorite) food, and experiential assignments will take students out of the classroom and into local and regional stores, restaurants, and markets to meet the people who make and sell our food.
Anthro 290-0-3 Technology, Power and Justice in the Anthropocene
Our lives are configured through the routinized functioning of infrastructures that mostly remain invisible until they break down. Material infrastructures such as roads, bridges, grids, and dams connect people, places, ideas, and things across time and space. They promise spatial and social connectivity, environmental control, technological modernization, and development in the age of Anthropocene defined as the era in which human activities play a dominant role in environmental changes. However, they also lead to uneven access to resources, prevent mobility, and produce injustices and socio-political conflicts. This course will scrutinize infrastructures to discuss their social, political, and environmental lives. We will read and discuss anthropological studies that examine how infrastructures are constructed, used, maintained, and repaired in everyday life. In this exploration, we will pay specific attention to power relations, social meanings, and environmental transformations that shape and are shaped by infrastructures. Conceptual themes include, among others, urban citizenship, state power, social conflicts, securitization, violence, community building, and ecology. These themes will be explored through the focus on water systems, renewable energy, road projects, waste facilities, oil extraction, housing, and other infrastructures. We will pay specific attention to infrastructure and its politics in the Global South, through readings and other course materials on regions such as the Middle East and North Africa, South East Asia, Africa, and South America. The course will also cover new understandings of infrastructure beyond material systems; we will discuss the new perspectives that approach social relations and nature as infrastructures that sustain human and non-human life.
This course provides an introduction to discussions of race and ethnicity within anthropology. We will discuss racialization - the process by which people are assigned to categories of race and the associated stereotypes and traits tied to those categories. Because race is a social construct, anthropology is well-situated to examine how racial categories are created and made impactful through historical and social practice. Throughout the course, will examine racial categories, where they come from, how they vary across societies, and what they are used to signify or mean. With readings from the four main subfields of anthropology, students will learn about ideas and conceptualizations of race through biological, cultural, linguistic, and archaeological approaches. The course will begin by complicating and contradicting the idea that racial categories are in any way natural, scientific, or innate. We will examine the history of these categories and the process of creating and maintaining racial categories. While the course does examine racial categories across globally situated projects, we will focus especially on the United States context. The course will conclude with some models and discussions of anti-racist approaches within anthropology.
Anthro 390-0-1 Nature, Culture and Environmentalisms
This course examines anthropological treatments of the concept of nature and human relations with the natural environment. We discuss how conceptions of nature are always shaped, transformed, and produced by social relations. Course materials focus primarily on ethnographies on the intersections of political ecology, science studies, and postcolonial critiques. Course topics include the history of the Western nature-culture opposition and its critics, as well as recent scholarship on such topics as food studies, the social life of forests, race and the genome, human-animal interactions, and interspecies relations.
This course surveys the social scientific study of misinformation in society. We will query the past to learn about how misinformation has evolved over time as a sociocultural feature of human societies. We will interrogate the present to examine how misinformation figures in the defining political, social, and economic problems of our time. And we will imagine the implications of misinformation for the future and explore our agency in shaping that future. We will draw on case studies, documentaries, and anthropological and social scientific literature on rumor and gossip, conspiracy theories, post-truth politics, deradicalization, and social media to explore topics and concepts such as "fake news," digital populism, algorithmic bias, weaponized disinformation, the "infodemic," deep fakes, and more. Case studies may include COVID-19, election, and climate change denialism; political conspiracy theories from the French Revolution to QAnon; troll farms and other tactics of information warfare; and the role of misinformation in current controversies over sexual and racial politics.
This course examines the role of photography in shaping and transforming ideas of Africa—its peoples, cultures, and geographies—from the late nineteenth century to the present. Across colonial and post-colonial contexts, we will examine how artists, amateur and professional photographers, exhibitions, and publications variously register and respond to social, cultural, and political changes on the continent. Through course readings, lectures, and study room visits to the Herskovits Library of African Studies and the Block Museum of Art, we will engage a range of forms including advertisements and popular magazines, colonial ethnography, film, modern and contemporary art, and photojournalism.
Art History 390-0-1 Resourcing Empire: Colonialism and Modern Architecure
This seminar will explore the entangled histories of colonialism and architectural modernism, from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1960s, at the onset of mass decolonization across the Global South. The course will look beyond the "laboratory" narrative of modernism as colonialism's import, paying close attention to the role of local aesthetic and material practices, building technologies, environmental knowledge, and labor in the design of the colonial environment. Exploring stylistic forms of modernism and design theory in the imperial metropole, this course will also trace the European appropriation of indigenous cultural and material traditions and technical innovations. Expanding the scope of analysis beyond the urban scale, the seminar will situate the unique territorial character of colonial expansion during this period, and its reliance on emerging transregional infrastructures, within the broader framework of the industrialized "resource frontier." Our inquiry into the built environment of the colonial past and its relationship to architecture's modernity will be guided by contemporary debates and critical discourse that offer nuanced perspectives on the interlocking struggles over reparation, restitution, and the politics of memory.
Asian Languages and Cultures 240-0-20 The End of a World: South Korean Fictions, Films
What does one talk about when one talks about disasters? Whose world ends in "end of the world" narratives? This course invites students to read and watch South Korean and diasporic narratives centered around disasters, both real and fictional, to engage questions of politics, representation, and inequalities that shape disaster narratives. Ranging from disasters of the past to more contemporary ones such as pandemics and Sewol ferry, the disasters examined in this course have sparked complex conversations surrounding a more just society and the doomed end of the "normal." Engaging scholarship on disasters, speculative fictions, critical race theory, and gender studies, the course introduces students to the varied academic and cultural responses to disasters and the underlying stakes that drive these responses. Students will be assigned a variety of texts to analyze, such as film, paintings, novels, webtoons, and news, as well as choosing a disaster narrative of their own interest to examine. No prior knowledge of Korean culture or language are required to take this course. Students are expected to actively participate in class and work in groups on collaborative projects as well as producing two short papers. Waitlist will be enabled for the course, and all inquiries to the instructor once the course is full should state relevant coursework and why you wish to take the course for permission number considerations.
Asian Languages and Cultures 322-0-20 Video Games in Japanese Culture
This course places video games in the context of Japanese cultural history from the 1990s to the present. It aims to furnish the historical and conceptual contexts necessary to interpret how games reflect upon the crises faced by Japan at the turn of the new millennium. The course centers on a series of dominant narrative paradigms and subcultural tropes—apocalyptic fantasy, world-type, survival, etc.—and asks how these are rendered in game form. While our focus is ultimately on games as a form of narrative, we aim also to understand how the active and interactive nature of the game medium shapes the meanings that these texts convey.
Bio Sciences 339-0-20 Critical Topics in Ecology and Conservation
This course will include reading and writing about conservation issues for both scientific and general audiences, as well as discussions around primary literature and popular media around conservation. Class activities will include small and large group discussions, and other opportunities for active learning, as well as lectures from the course instructors and guest lectures from experts in the different conservation fields.
Chemistry 105-7-01 Science and the Scientist: How We Communicate
Clear and concise communication is highly valued in many STEM fields. Whether conveying the technical details of an experiment for a colleague or translating the impact of a study for the public, scientists need to discuss complex ideas with different audiences. This course analyzes the goals of scientific writing by examining texts that represent different levels of communication, including how to use auditory podcasts and the visual language of comic books for conveying complex scientific ideas.
Classics 320-0-2 Ancient Medicine: Greek and Roman History
We will study the theory and practice of Greek and Roman medicine, looking at ancient texts in translation, ancient artifacts and materials, and some modern scholarship. As a term project, students will learn to think as ancient physicians, diagnosing and prescribing treatments for patients from the Hippocratic case studies. During class discussion, we will engage critically with primary sources and examine the differences between ancient and modern science from a balanced historical perspective. We will also investigate the social, cultural, and economic forces that have affected the development of western medicine throughout its history.
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 / health insurance system to other countries' systems? Students will learn that these issues are important in the current public policy discussion.
Economics 323-2-20 Economic History of the U.S. 1865 to Present
The course covers the economic and financial development of the United States since the Civil War to the present. Topics include race, education, gender, financial panics, the Great Depression, immigration, innovation, health and the World Wars, among others. The course looks at American economic history since 1865 from four different angles: first, by examining the causes and consequences of important historical events; second, by dissecting the phenomenon of historical persistence and economic scarring over time; third, by discussing whether and how one can draw "lessons from history"; and fourth, by analyzing to what extent economic history can serve as a "laboratory" to test economic theory. The class also seeks to introduce students to modern research designs in empirical economics.
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.
English 281-0-20 Topics in Postcolonial and Comparative Literatures
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.
Envr Policy and Culture 212-0-20 Environment and Society
Our climate is rapidly changing. Rising sea levels and increasing ocean acidity, higher temperatures, more droughts, melting glaciers, wilder weather patterns, and mounting environmental disasters mean that climate change is increasingly visible in our daily lives. What role does human society play in these changes, and what consequences does society suffer as these changes occur? This course is an introduction to environmental sociology during which we will employ an intersectional, sociological perspective to look beyond the scientific basis for environmental problems to understand the social roots of environmental issues. We will cover a variety of topics in environmental sociology, including new directions in sustainable development and how actors such as corporations, the media, and social movements impact public opinion and environmental issues. Further, we will critically examine the gendered, racial, and socioeconomic production of disparate environmental risks.
Gender St 235-0-20 Beyond the Binary: Transgender and Race
This course is a 200-level, introductory course that explores racial formation and the boundaries and binaries of gender. This course will overview approaches to understanding gender norms and categories, as well as consider experiences, living, and contestations beyond these binaries. Particularly through reading trans*, genderqueer, and gender nonconforming histories, identities, experiences, and politics, this class will consider the possibilities and problems of categorizing "the beyond." We will discuss shifting conceptualizations of "normal" gender, and what is assumed to defy this "normal" as embedded in the intersecting histories and legacies of race, class, sexuality, nationality, and ability. For instance, what is the relationship between race and gender that specifically shapes and forms the boundaries of gender in the US - both historically and in the contemporary moment? What is the enduring role and stakes of scholarship and discourses in the social sciences, such as anthropology, that seeks to frame the boundaries of gender? How does power in social, cultural, and political arenas impact these discourses? This course aims to recognize and understand these contested histories of gender through the lens of our current moment, and we will consider the potential and limits of visibility, representation, and inclusion that trans activism and liberation, particularly from the legacies of trans of color communities, has continued to challenge within coercive gender systems.
This class will investigate how gender shapes politics and policy, and how these in turn shape gender, primarily in the United States. I aim also to provide comparative and global context. Gender is conceptualized as a set of relations, identities and cultural schema, always constituted with other dimensions of power, difference and inequality (e.g., race, class, sexuality, religion, citizenship status). We will analyze the gendered character of citizenship, political participation and representation, social rights and economic rights.
How do developments in the life sciences affect our understandings of who we are, how we differ, and how social inequalities are created, perpetuated, and challenged? This seminar explores how scientific claims and technological developments help transform cultural meanings of race, gender, and sexuality. Conversely, we will consider how cultural beliefs about race, gender, and sexuality influence scientific knowledge and medical practice. By studying controversies, we will explore the dynamic interplay among expert findings, social identities, and political arguments.
Gender St 341-0-20 Trans-Related Medical Surgeries in Thailand
This course is situated at the intersection of theoretical, cultural, medical, and commercial online discourses concerning the burgeoning Gender Affirmation-related surgeries presented online and conducted in Thailand. Using Gender, Queer, Trans, Asian American, and Digital Humanities Theories, we will discuss the cross-cultural intersections, dialogues, refusals, and adaptions when thinking about medical travel to Thailand for gender/sex related surgeries. We will examine Thai cultural/historical conceptions of sex and gender, debates concerning bodies and diagnoses, and changes in presentations of sex/gender related surgeries offered online. We will also explore how digital archives are created and managed. Investigating transcripts of live interviews, medical discourses, and an archive of web images offering GAS surgeries produced by Thais for non-Thais will serve as axes for investigating this topic.
Gender St 382-0-20 Afro Feminist Futures: Race, Gender and Sexuality
This course invites students to explore feminist speculative fiction as a site for social justice advocacy. Students will read classic feminist and afrofuturist science fiction as they prepare their own original short stories for publication. Drawing heavily on the work of feminist afrofuturist Octavia Butler, students will engage imaginative narratives that allow them to think through solutions to the problems of our time. Students will explore the genre elements of short stories and speculative fiction, ultimately integrating these lessons into their own short stories. This is a writing and reading intensive class.
Gender St 390-0-20 Witches, Bots and Trolls: Misinformation
This course surveys the social scientific study of misinformation in society. We will query the past to learn about how misinformation has evolved over time as a sociocultural feature of human societies. We will interrogate the present to examine how misinformation figures in the defining political, social, and economic problems of our time. And we will imagine the implications of misinformation for the future and explore our agency in shaping that future. We will draw on case studies, documentaries, and anthropological and social scientific literature on rumor and gossip, conspiracy theories, post-truth politics, deradicalization, and social media to explore topics and concepts such as "fake news," digital populism, algorithmic bias, weaponized disinformation, the "infodemic," deep fakes, and more. Case studies may include COVID-19, election, and climate change denialism; political conspiracy theories from the French Revolution to QAnon; troll farms and other tactics of information warfare; and the role of misinformation in current controversies over sexual & racial politics.
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 underpinning specific paradigms in the policy and science of global health practice, and place present-day developments in historical perspective. As an introductory course on global health, the class delves into comparative health systems, including comparative health systems in high- and low-income countries. Key topics will include: policies and approaches to global health, key actors in global health, comparative health systems, structural violence, gender and reproductive health, chronic and communicable diseases, politics of global health research and evidence, and the ethics of global health equity.
Global Hlth 222-0-20 The Social Determinants of Health
The human body is embedded into a health framework that can produce hypervisibility, invisibility, or both. This 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.
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.
Global Hlth 310-1-20 Maternal Health in the 20th Century
Maternal health, in particular, maternal mortality, is a significant concern in global health, and in this class we will consider the historical roots of two areas of focus on improving maternal health and reducing maternal mortality: women having access to skilled birth attendants and birth control options. We will look at this broad international concern by focusing on the work of one organization in the 1960s-1970s, the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM), by examining their papers, held at the Wellcome Library and Archives in London. We will visit the library the week before classes start and this research will form the basis of the seminar course during the quarter. This class will culminate in a major paper using the primary sources from the ICM research done in London.
Global Hlth 324-0-1 Volunteerism and the Ethics of Help
Since the early 2000s, there has been an exponential increase in the number of foreigners volunteering in low-income communities, within orphanages, clinics, schools, and communities. This expansion has been echoed by locals, who are also providing voluntary labor in a variety of locales throughout their communities. This class explores the discourses and practices that make up volunteering and voluntourism, from the perspectives of volunteers, hosts, and a range of professional practitioners both promoting and critiquing this apparent rise in "the need to help". What boons and burdens occur with the boom of volunteer fervor world-wide? Why do people feel the need to volunteer, and what consequences do these voluntary exchanges have on the volunteers, and on those communities and institutions that are subject to their good intentions? What are the ethics and values that make up "making a difference" amongst differently-situated players who are involved in volunteering? Given that volunteers often act upon best intentions, what are the logics that justify philanthropy and the differential standards by which volunteers are judged based on where they go and how they engage in volunteering? This class seeks out some answers to these questions, and highlights why the increased concern for strangers that undergirds volunteering should also be, in itself, cause for our concern.
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 course examines how environmental problems reflect and exacerbate social inequality. In this course, we learn the definition of environmental (in)justice; the history of environmental justice; and also examples of environmental justice will be discussed. We will learn about environmental movements. This course has a critical perspective on health disparities in national and international levels. How environmental injustice impacts certain groups more than others and the social and political economic reasons for these injustices will be discussed in this course. This is a discussion-intensive course for advanced undergrad students. The classes are student-centered with an emphasis on collaborative learning. The class meetings will consist of lectures, discussions, presentations, teamwork, activities, video/audio materials and projects.
This course draws on perspectives from anthropology, related social scientific fields, and the humanities to explore the role of the arts and media narratives in shaping politics and experiences of mental health and illness around the world. We will consider forms of storytelling—including literature, film, and theater—across eras and cultures, tracking shifts in perspectives on normality and pathology and their consequences for the most vulnerable. How does the power of Western psychiatry intersect with that of global media to reinforce reigning paradigms and imperatives for how suffering is to be understood, classified, and experienced? Conversely, what counter-narratives are being produced by artists and their communities? What role can the arts play in individual and collective forms of healing—or in exacerbating pain and grievance? What kinds of voices seem to have power, and which are neglected? Where is the line between cathartic and exploitative representation of trauma and mental illness? How, in short, do the stories we tell about mental illness "get under the skin" and shape forms of suffering and care?
Global Hlth 390-0-19 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.
In this upper-level course exploring approaches to meld traditional data collection methods with alternative techniques, students will review decolonizing ways that Black/African American individuals have used to reveal their truths and construct and reconstruct images of themselves. Students will explore how these same processes can be applied in public health data collection to be inclusive and validate the methods and ways of knowing that have assisted underserved, underheard, and underrepresented communities in advocating for justice to survive. Course readings will consist of text that provides a critical lens to view qualitative data collection methods through and will include studies in historical and traumatic violence that underscore how people living in Black bodies work to survive by Joy DeGruy and the negotiating processes that Black individuals use to exercise agency and evaluate systemic oppressions that impede how they navigate life as articulated by authors such as Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Jean Stefancic.
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 390-0-27 Native American Health Research and Prevention
Native nations in what is currently the United States are continuously seeking to understand and undertake the best approaches to research and prevention within their communities. This course introduces students to the benefits and barriers to various approaches meant to address negative health outcomes among Native American individuals, groups and communities. This course also demonstrates how harnessing positive social determinants of health can affect broader health status among Native Americans. Important concepts to guide our understanding of these issues will include (settler) colonialism, sovereignty, social determinants of health, asset-based perspectives, and decolonizing research. Students will engage in a reading-intensive, discussion-based seminar, drawing upon research and scholarship from a variety of disciplines including public health, Native American and Indigenous Studies, sociology, history, and medicine.
From modern pandemics such as Ebola and COVID-19, to ancient scourges such as leprosy and the plague, epidemics have shaped human history. In turn, the response of human societies to infectious disease threats have varied wildly in time and across cultures. We are currently living such an event, and experiencing in dramatic fashion how disease reshapes society. This course will cover several prominent global epidemic episodes, examining the biology of the disease, epidemic pathways, sociopolitical responses and public health measures, and the relationship between the scientific and the cultural consequences of these outbreaks.
Global Hlth 390-0-29 Global Circulations and Human Health
Human beings and human parts/products are on the move across the globe, shaped by inequities that drive poor health outcomes for many involved in these circulations. More human beings are being forced from their homes than ever before in history; more and more are being turned away as they seek resettlement. Global economic migration is poorly regulated and rife with exploitation. The flow of human organs for transplantation increasingly moves from the poor in the Global South to the rich in the Global North. Even the production of human babies through international surrogacy is driven by economic inequities. This course examines the role of advocacy, law, politics and ethics to preserve dignity and health as human beings and human parts increasingly circulate across global boundaries.
History 101-7-24 Scientific Lives - European History
What role has a humanist education played in the lives of scientists and physicians, and how has training in science and medicine fit into a liberal arts curriculum? The chemist/novelist C. P. Snow once claimed that science and literature formed two antagonistic cultures. On one side were scientists who dismissed literature as so much fluff, irrelevant for our technological age. On the other were literary figures like Tolstoy, who condemned science for not answering the all-important question of moral values: "What shall we do and how shall we live?" This course, by contrast, examines at the dialogue between science and literature since World War II. We will read memoirs by scientists, like Primo Levi's "The Periodic Table" and Hope Jahren's "Lab Girl." We will also read fictional portrayals of scientists and physicians, like Bertolt Brecht's "Life of Galileo" and Allegra Goodman's "Intuition." Along the way we will consider how science and the humanities have approached the question of a good education, and how their answers can align—and differ.
History 103-7-26 Food, Pets, Kin and Threats: Animals in History
This course takes a global and historical approach to the human-animal relationship. How has this relationship changed over time and how has it varied across different world cultures? How do people's attitudes towards animals change when they are classified (or re-classified) as pets, pests, predators, invaders, commodities, entertainment, a source of food, a member of the family? The very same animal - a rat, say - can be viewed as vermin, pets, or experimental test subjects depending on the individual, the culture, the time period, and the place. We will explore a range of topics together such as animal rights, animal breeding, hunting and fishing, vegetarianism, zoos, vivisection, "invasive" species, animals on trial, animals and capitalism, animals and colonialism. Ultimately, the ways that humans relate to (non-human) animals reveals just as much about ourselves as it does about them.
History 251-0-20 The Politics of Disaster: A Global Environmental History
The term ‘natural disaster' conjures images of tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes, and other powerful forces of nature that strike without warning, inflicting massive suffering on a powerless and unsuspecting populace. We now have several decades' worth of research from the social sciences and humanities showing that so-called "natural" disasters are not very natural at all. Instead, they are deeply political and profoundly man-made. This course adopts a historical and global approach in order to denaturalize disaster. From famines in British India to earthquakes in post-colonial Peru, from floods in New Orleans to nuclear disaster in Japan, we will see how disasters expose and exacerbate pre-existing inequalities, inflicting suffering disproportionately among those groups already marginalized by race, class, gender, geography, and age. These inequalities shape not only the impact of the disaster but the range of responses to it, including political critique and retrenchment, relief and rebuilding efforts, memorialization, and planning - or failing to plan - for future disasters of a similar kind. The course culminates in a unit on the contemporary challenge of anthropogenic global climate change, the ultimate man-made disaster. We will consider how memories, fears, and fantasies of past disasters are being repurposed to create new visions of what climate change will look like.
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.
We are currently living through a technological revolution that is radically reshaping every aspect of our personal and collective lives. In a sense, however, this is nothing new: Americans have long defined themselves and their nation through changes in the material things they own, make, design, use, and trash. This class examines the debate over what America is and should be by studying its technology. Each lecture is organized around the history of a representative artifact, offering a new perspective on canonical episodes and themes in American history—and theories of technological change—right up to the present day. From the telegraph to social media, from the bicycle to SpaceX, from typing pools to algorithmic AI, Americans have identified technology as central to their personal and national destiny. The course's "flipped classroom" approach is echoed by its core assignment, in which students write an original research paper on the social history of an artifact of their choice. They will do so guided by weekly workshop-sections which walk them through the research and writing process. The course poses the question "Do artifacts have politics?" and if so, of what sort?
History 376-0-20 Global Environments and World History
Environmental problems have become part and parcel of popular consciousness: resources are being depleted at a record pace, human population levels have crossed the eight billion threshold, extreme poverty defines the majority of people's daily lives, toxic contaminants affect all ecosystems, increasing numbers of species face extinction, consumerism and the commodification of nature show no signs of abating, climate change wreaks havoc in different places every year, and weapons and energy systems continue to proliferate that risk the planet's viability. This introductory lecture course is designed to help you understand the relatively recent origins of many of these problems, focusing especially on the last one hundred and fifty years. You will have an opportunity to learn about the environmental effects of urbanization, industrialization, population growth, market economies, empire-building, intercontinental warfare, energy extraction, and new technologies. You will also explore different environmental philosophies and analytic frameworks that help us make sense of historical change, including political ecology, environmental history, science studies, and global history. The course will examine a range of transnational organizations, social movements, and state policies that have attempted to address and resolve environmental problems.
The fourteenth-century Black Death (or bubonic plague) has long been the benchmark against which all other disasters have been measured. Although there were devastating instances of plague in Roman times, and even isolated outbreaks in our own time, the medieval plague was a true pandemic that raged throughout the world. This courses focuses on the bubonic plague in Western Europe. After examining the first visitation of the plague in the Byzantine era (6c), we will then focus on the period between 1346 and 1348, when the Black Death wiped out somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of the population, and the aftermath. At a time when principles of contagion were hazy and medical treatment primitive, the panic-stricken society alternated between regarding the plague as evidence of God's wrath for humanity's sins and desperately seeking scapegoats to blame. This course will approach the plague from multiple perspectives through the lens of primary and secondary sources. Among the topics addressed will be: the immediate causes of the plague; medieval and modern theories of the disease; the plague's impact on both religious personnel and the secular work force; its impact on culture; the relation between plague and persecution, and violence; and the impact of the plague outside of Europe and beyond the Middle Ages.
History 395-0-22 Podcasting the History of Science
This course will provide students with the opportunity to create a podcast on the history of science together. Taking a global approach to the history of science, each student will conduct original research on an object, text, or other source relevant to the theme of the podcast. Students will learn how to record, edit, and produce sound, while we ask: What counts as signal, and what counts as noise? We will take that question to the archive and the editing studio. This course will be highly collaborative at every stage. While students will contribute independent research, writing, and production, we will collectively workshop everything.
Humanities 101-6-20 What Science Can't Teach Us: A Humanities Approach
NOTE: This class is open only to first-year undergraduates selected to be Kaplan Humanities Scholars.
The great political theorist Isaiah Berlin once said that there is an old quarrel between two rival ways of knowing the world: a paradigmatically scientific form of knowledge that is produced by methodical, systematic inquiry, and a more impalpable alternative that has been variously characterized as good judgment, wisdom, or art. In this course we will be examining various oppositions related to this rivalry, like the distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge, between empiricism and aesthetics, between reason and emotion, and between fact and value. One major aim of this course is to use these oppositions to help explore some differences between the sciences and the humanities. It is often taken for granted that the natural sciences aim at knowledge that is theoretical, empirical, rational, and fact-based; but there is much less certainty about whether the humanities should be guided by the same paradigm of knowledge, or whether it would be better served by adopting a fundamentally different conception of its aims and methods. Are there distinctively literary or aesthetic ways of knowing, different from the sciences? What do arts, practices, feelings and values teach us that knowledge cannot? We will pursue these questions by engaging both literary and philosophical texts.
Humanities 210-0-40 Science Fiction and Detective Literature in the Global South
NOTE: This class is open only to first-year undergraduates selected to be Kaplan Humanities Scholars.
Science fiction and detective literature are genres whose formulaic nature has often been derided or ignored by literary critics. Yet the very formal structures of these genres may be part of the key to their popularity and increasing ubiquitousness. Emerging in England in the nineteenth century from, in part, an urban unease brought on by the colonial encounter, the detective novel form was quickly "translated" back into colonized territories, soon becoming one of the most truly transnational literary genres in the world. Similarly, while science fiction's early narratives drew from the scenarios and power dynamics of the colonial encounter, it has more recently become a space from which to contest official histories as well as posit decolonial futures. Focusing on the spaces of the Global South, late colonial and postcolonial South Asia and (post)colonial Latin America in particular, this course will trace how and why these popular genres have emerged as a mode of narration with which to confront political and social transformations and contemporary crises.
Humanities 325-4-20 Refugees, Migration, Exile: Digital Storytelling Workshop
In this course, students will research a case study from among the many refugee and migration crises that have dominated the news cycle in recent years. The final project is a short video about your case study. To develop your research projects, the class foregrounds different methodological approaches: 1) To move beyond journalism, we will conduct primary and secondary historical research to understand the complex historical roots of each case study. 2) We will analyze and practice forms of ethnographic writing to better situate and describe the lived experiences of migration and exile, both past and present. 3) We will pay attention to various forms of media, whether print culture, sound, or visual media, to interrogate but also experiment with contemporary modes of narrating and conveying human experience in the digital age. Our work in class will be collaborative, thus a key prerequisite is that you are mature and self-motivated. You do not need to have prior research experience, but you need to demonstrate a desire to dig into your topic and hone your ability to write deeply informed, rigorous, and nuanced arguments and to think about creative ways to bring rigorous historical and ethnographic detail to visual storytelling.
Students are required to petition for permission to enroll in the class by writing a brief statement, which should be sent to Professor Molina at molina@northwestern.edu. Your brief statement should include: Your name, your major(s), one short paragraph stating the reason why you have an interest in honing your research skills in the direction of the digital humanities, and a second short paragraph on a topic about migration and exile that motivates your desire to do further research on the topic. Attach a recent news item (article or video) about the topic that drives your interests. This will help me organize our first sessions in fall quarter.
Humanities 370-3-20 Race,Gender, Sex and Science: Identities and Difference
How do developments in the life sciences affect our understandings of who we are, how we differ, and how social inequalities are created, perpetuated, and challenged? This seminar explores how scientific claims and technological developments help transform cultural meanings of race, gender, and sexuality. Conversely, we will consider how cultural beliefs about race, gender, and sexuality influence scientific knowledge and medical practice. By studying controversies, we will explore the dynamic interplay among expert findings, social identities, and political arguments.
In this course we will be exploring several traditional topics within philosophy. These include the problem of free will, ethics and social issues (including issues of race and gender), and existential issues (death and the meaning of life). Students will be expected (i) to comprehend the various philosophers' arguments on these topics, (ii) to develop their own views on the topics, and (iii) to present their own views, as well as the views of the philosophers we read, in clear, succinct, and forcefully argued thesis papers.
This course is a study of moral and political problems related to biomedicine and biotechnology. In the first part of the course, we will study the physician-patient relationship. We will consider what values ought to govern that relationship, how those values may conflict, and how such conflicts are best resolved. In the second part of the course, we will turn to some specific ethical challenges related to biotechnology, including abortion, genetic manipulation, and physician-assisted suicide. We will close the course by surveying the field of public health ethics, with particular attention to ethical issues related to global pandemic preparedness and response.
This seminar introduces students to recent research on the cultural problems that have wittingly and unwittingly arisen from the prevalence of digital technologies in multiple spheres of life today (e.g., internet, AI, generative AI, social media, cloud computing, internet of things, big data). We will focus on their political implications. Some researchers are deeply worried while others are optimistic. Some researchers call for the development of ethical standards for data scientists. Some call for policies and regulations of the relevant industries to protect "users." Some call for rethinking the demands of freedom, equality, autonomy and democracy in light of these new technologies. Overall, our learning objective is for students to gain a facility with some conceptual material of value for thinking critically about the political dimension of this moment in the history of technology. No tech background will be assumed or needed. The title of the seminar is a nod to a book we read to start our critical inquiry, You Are Not a Gadget, by visionary computer scientist Jaron Lanier. Other researchers whose work we will consult include technology ethicist Tristan Harris (Center for Humane Technology), economist Shoshanah Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the Frontier of Power), mathematician Cathy O'Neil (Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy), tech writer Nicholas Carr (The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains), journalist Max Fisher (The Outrage Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired our Minds and Our Worlds), "poet of code" and AI researcher Joy Buolamwini (The Algorithmic Justice League). Documentary films also feature in our sampling of recent research. Frequent short student oral presentations.
Psychology 101-7-1 Mental Health Diagnosis and Treatment
While those going into the field of mental health typically think about it as a "helping profession", there is much more than meets the eye when it comes to the psychological, economic, and political forces that have defined the development of the field. The course will focus on the contemporary framework for defining mental illness - the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (now in its 5th edition) - with a particular focus on some of the problems that have emerged from the disease-based framework utilized in the manual, and the assumptions that it makes about disorders and typical development. We will explore the role of state mental hospitals in the U.S. in the early to mid-20th century, and we will examine the political forces that drove the de-institutionalization movement of the 1970s and 1980s, with additional consideration of the contemporary implications of the closing of state hospitals. Finally, the course will focus on the evolution of psychotherapy in the modern marketplace, and some of the challenges posed by the demands of the health insurance industry and academic research. The aggressive way in which the DSM has been marketed internationally and the implications of culture for diagnosis will also be discussed. Along the way, we will explore critiques of the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance industry, and modern psychiatry. Some of these themes will also be explored through analysis of popular films and other media. Students will be evaluated on the basis of class attendance and participation, co-leading a class discussion with peers, and writing assignments including short reaction papers and a longer research paper.
SESP-Learning Sciences 301-0-20 Design of Learning Environments
Issues in designing and studying innovative learning environments. New models of classroom interaction, particularly using technology to enable new cognitive and social roles for students. Topics include simulations, tutors, computer-mediated communication, project-based learning. Theoretical motivations in cognitive and social-interaction learning theories, empirical studies evaluating their effectiveness, and prospects for propagation of such innovations.
In this course, we will explore the relationship between gender and globalization. We will study how gender and sexuality are produced as global social categories. The course will survey liberal approaches to gender and sexuality categories as sites for transnational claims-making. It will then turn to postcolonial and transnational feminist critiques of taken-for-granted social groupings, such as "woman" and, more recently, "gay" and "transgender," that are assumed to be globally relevant. Critical approaches to gender and sexuality challenge conventional "born this way" narratives about gender and sexual identities as innate and therefore universal. This course will raise questions that will make us uncomfortable and, hopefully, give us tools to critically reflect on our own gender and sexuality identities and practices.
Our climate is rapidly changing. Rising sea levels and increasing ocean acidity, higher temperatures, more droughts, melting glaciers, wilder weather patterns, and mounting environmental disasters mean that climate change is increasingly visible in our daily lives. What role does human society play in these changes, and what consequences does society suffer as these changes occur? This course is an introduction to environmental sociology during which we will employ an intersectional, sociological perspective to look beyond the scientific basis for environmental problems to understand the social roots of environmental issues. We will cover a variety of topics in environmental sociology, including new directions in sustainable development and how actors such as corporations, the media, and social movements impact public opinion and environmental issues. Further, we will critically examine the gendered, racial, and socioeconomic production of disparate environmental risks.
Gender structures our daily lives in fundamental ways, yet we are often unaware of its effects. For example, why do we associate blue with boys and pink with girls? Why do most administrative forms only have two categories (i.e. Male and Female)? Why do male doctors, on average, have higher incomes than female doctors? The course introduces students to the sociological analysis of gender as a central component of social organization and social inequality in the US context. We start by reviewing key sociological concepts that are important to the study of gender. Next, we explore the causes and consequences of gender inequalities in important social institutions such as the family, the education system, and the labor market. We conclude by considering gender inequality in an international comparative context to understand crosscutting similarities and differences between the US and both high- and low-income contexts. This allows us to explore the role social norms and policies play in perpetuating and/or mitigating gender inequalities.
Sociology 376-0-20 Race, Gender, Sex and Science: Identities and Difference
How do developments in the life sciences affect our understandings of who we are, how we differ, and how social inequalities are created, perpetuated, and challenged? This seminar explores how scientific claims and technological developments help transform cultural meanings of race, gender, and sexuality. Conversely, we will consider how cultural beliefs about race, gender, and sexuality influence scientific knowledge and medical practice. By studying controversies, we will explore the dynamic interplay among expert findings, social identities, and political arguments. This course is cross-listed with GNDR_ST 332-0-21 and HUM 370-3-20.
Sociology 376-0-21 Neoliberalism, Postcolonial Theory and Human Rights
International human rights frameworks have been promoted as a central mechanisms through which transnational activists and international organizations pursue justice globally. In this course, we will examine whether human rights paradigms live up to this promise. Readings will consider the geopolitical and economic context in which human rights frameworks are forged, both in terms of neoliberal economic relations and postcolonialism. We will examine the history of human rights documents and how discussions of human rights frameworks have changed over the last century. We will also examine contemporary efforts to expand human rights frameworks to "new" rights, including those based on gender and sexuality rights.
This course invites students to explore feminist speculative fiction as a site for social justice advocacy. Students will read classic feminist and afrofuturist science fiction as they prepare their own original short stories for publication. Drawing heavily on the work of feminist afrofuturist Octavia Butler, students will engage imaginative narratives that allow them to think through solutions to the problems of our time. Students will explore the genre elements of short stories and speculative fiction, ultimately integrating these lessons into their own short stories. This is a writing and reading intensive class.
SPCH-Comm St 394-0-1 Technology, Power and Resistance
Digital technology can be used to reinforce existing power structures, but also challenge and resist them. This course will examine the ways technology is used to disempower people with a focus on digital inequalities, the politics of algorithms, surveillance and big data, and the hidden labor and environmental costs of the technology we use. Yet we will also explore the ways digital technology can empower people and advance social justice, with a particular focus on historically marginalized communities.
SPCH-Comm St 395-0-21 The Experience of Illness: Body, Self and Story
This course examines the experience of chronic illness from the perspective of the ill person. It introduces the trajectory model of chronic illness, a model that sees health as the result of a stable alignment of body, self, and life story. It uses this model to understand adherence to medical regimens and to describe how it is possible to heal from chronic illness without being biomedically cured of the underlying disease.
SPCH-Comm St 395-0-22 Interactive Museum Exhibit Design
This course is for undergraduate students interested in the design of interactive museum exhibits. Students will engage with readings about the role museums play in public education/communication, how to design museum exhibits, the role technology can play in making museums interactive, and methods for evaluating learning and engagement at museum exhibits. Readings will primarily focus on interactive exhibits for science communication, with secondary opportunities to explore other types of museum exhibits. Individual assignments will include analyzing and presenting on an existing museum exhibit and creating a design concept/plan for a novel museum exhibit. Students will work in groups towards the end of the quarter to develop an in-depth design and evaluation plan for a novel museum exhibit and, as the final project, create a paper prototype of the exhibit. No previous design or technology experience is needed for students to enroll in this course.
This course focuses on current issues in the field of Critical Internet Studies, with special attention directed to power dynamics related to the use and of internet-related technologies. We will touch on the economic, political, social, and cultural significance of the internet, and work to identify, understand, and analyze, the relations between existing oppressive power dynamics relating to racism, gender-based violence, and other forms of discrimination are entwined in various media issues. Readings focus on the cultural, social, economic, and political aspects of internet use, including creative uses. This class offers an opportunity to discuss the internet in a fundamental way, to engage with complex ideas, and to develop and refine critical thinking, verbal, and writing skills. We will explore timely topics (e.g., memes, misinformation, surveillance, algorithmic bias, tech and social justice, and more) across media and from historical, transnational, and multiple methodological perspectives.
