In this course students will examine themes in the history of health in the United States, particularly in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Readings will focus on the intersections between health and environment, gender, race, law, and region. We will consider questions such as what's the impact of environmental change in transforming medical, scientific, and lay understanding and experience of health and illness? What's the role of illness in shaping changing perceptions of the environment? How has race been central to the construction and treatment of disease? How has gender shaped conceptions of and approaches to health? What historical role have issues of gender, race, and class played in the inequitable distribution of pollution and in activist involvement in combating environmental hazards? How has changing food production and culture shaped health? This course assumes no previous coursework in the field, and students with a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines are encouraged to participate.
Anthro 326 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 current environmental sustainability and environmental justice efforts. Prior coursework in archaeology is not required to appreciate this class or do well, but would be helpful.
Anthro 357 Biocultural Perspectives on Water Insecurity
The first objective of this course is to introduce students to the many ways that water impacts humans around the world. We will discuss what the international recommendations for safely managed water are and the health and social consequences of water insecurity. The second objective is to explore why there is such variety in water insecurity worldwide. Influences on access to water will be broadly considered; we will draw on literature in global health, ethnography, the life sciences, and public policy. These discussions will be guided by the socio-ecological framework, in which dimensions ranging from the individual to the geopolitical are considered. The third objective is to develop critical thinking and writing abilities to reflect on the multi-dimensional causes and consequences of water insecurity and the appropriateness of potential solutions. This will be accomplished through readings and documentaries that we have lovingly selected, writing weekly reflection pieces, preparing a short in-class presentation on recent media, and writing an OpEd.
Art History 232 Intro to History of Architecture: 1400 to Present
How does the built environment shape social meaning and reflect historical change? In this introductory-level course, we will survey the human designed environment across the globe, from 1400 to the present day. Through in-depth analysis of buildings, cities, landscapes, and interiors, we will observe how spatial environments are created and invested with meaning. From Tenochtitlan, riverine capital of the Aztec empire, to the Forbidden City in Beijing and the Palazzo Medici in Florence, from the Palace of Rudolf Manga Bell in Douala to the Colonial Office of the Bank of London, and from Lina Bo Bardi's Glass House in São Paulo to David Adjaye's National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., this course will introduce students to the changing technologies, materials, uses, and aesthetics that have helped define architecture's modernity across time and geographies. Through detailed visual analysis and the study of primary source documents, students will become familiar with architectural terminology and historical techniques of architectural visualization. Through written exercises and guided slow looking, students will learn how to critically analyze and historically interpret the built environment at various scales.
Art History 368 Transnational Avant-Gardes: Imagining the Future
This course explores the movement of future-oriented art practices across the overlapping geopolitical spaces of modernity, 1900-1968. We focus on five paradigms that sought to place art in the position of the vanguard of social and political change. We engage these movements and their use and claims of art and architecture as "avant-garde" forces against established conventions. We examine Futurism, Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, and Socialist Realism, tracing their formations and transformations across multiple geographies, including the Soviet Union, the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, India, China, Japan, and elsewhere. We will engage these practices first from a historical perspective, examining the broad spectrum of new and critical art that emerged in the twentieth century. Our historical lens will focus on the transnational movement and connectivity of people and ideas, taking into consideration how the global economy of an unequal distribution of resources contributed to these practices. Secondly, and interconnected to these historical and economic shifts, we will adopt a historiographic perspective, questioning how the avant-garde has been depicted and acclaimed—assessed for meaning—for historians, artists, and collectives during various periods of transformation and resistance (and even revolution). Rather than drawing a strict division between the historical and so-called "neo" avant-garde movements, our aim is to recognize the continued exchanges and interplays between the avant-garde projects that preceded World War II and those that emerged after. This trans-temporal line of inquiry allows us to contemplate the continuation of avant-garde practices as artists navigated new contradictions and contexts in the ostensibly bipolar Cold War order.
In this course, students will gain a solid understanding of the science, economics, and more importantly the environmental impact associated with various technologies, including, but not limited to natural gas, nuclear, wind, etc. Climate change and the potential impact and mitigation will be considered throughout the course.
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 like 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 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 studies, women's 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.
This course applies the theoretical and empirical tools of microeconomics to the study of healthcare markets. We will cover topics such as the production and measurement of health, the provision and design of health insurance, the causes and consequences of provider behavior, and competition in healthcare markets. Special attention will be given to recent healthcare policy debates in the United States and the impacts of government regulations on healthcare.
In 1860, the population of the US was 30 million; by 2010 it was over 300 million. US families in 1860 had an average of 5 children; by 1940 that number was 2. In 1900, 1-in-5 people died before age 5; by 1980, that number was less than 1-in-50. How did these changes occur? How do we measure them? How did these changes affect US society? In this course, we will examine the demographic history of the US from after the Civil War to the mid 20th century. Students will learn core demographic concepts and measures, like fertility and mortality rates. They will explore the demographic patterns and changes in the United States. They will examine leading theories for fertility and mortality decline and explore the role of immigration in US history. Students will learn to analyze publicly available census microdata from IPUMS, culminating in an independent research project.
Is the American dream only a white dream, even a fantasy? Jordan Peele's Oscar-winning 2017 horror film Get Out, in which a white liberal family systematically transplants the brains of their aging family members into the bodies of Black people, satirizes the postracial fantasy of colorblindness. White wealth and flourishing (and eternal youth) are based on a horrifying techno-fix: the exploitation and extraction of Black life, the production of a living nightmare. Peele's film raises unsettling questions about the American conception of race—questions with deep histories—which this class aims to explore: How has race been mobilized as a structure of white supremacist social control? What has racialization meant for those being racialized? Centralizing the work of Black and Indigenous thinkers, our goal will be to interrogate what race has meant in American culture over time. We will read a selection of excerpts and short texts from the 18th and 19th centuries to learn about the development of "race science" as a logic underpinning violently imposed social hierarchies. In tandem with this material, we will analyze Peele's film and two contemporary novels with historical roots: Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys (2019), the story of a young Black man in a "reform school" in 1960s Florida, and Tommy Orange's Wandering Stars (2024), which traces the experience of two Indigenous boys at the Carlisle Indian School, an institution designed to destroy Native culture. In doing so, we will aim to investigate the question: What are our contemporary inheritances of these histories?
Nature is one of humanity's most elastic concepts. Sometimes it seems to offer a healing refuge, but sometimes it seems to threaten -- or even contradict -- human survival. Are we part of nature, or do we encounter it? Is human society as natural as the pack or pod, or a defense against "the laws of nature"? Both human and literary history have been defined by the stories we tell about the environment; our common future will be shaped the same way. What new forms of attention might address the destabilized ecologies on which we now know we depend? Tracking environmental writing from the ancient Greeks to the Anthropocene, this course offers a deep dive into the storied concept of "nature" and the rise of ecological thought and environmental literature. Philosophical reflection began by wondering whether something dystopian separates humanity from the rest of the cosmos. Longstanding ideas of a utopian "green world" have offered an escape from the greyness of everyday life and a corrective to the corruptions of the (so-called) "real world." Meanwhile, industrial and technoscientific attempts to "master" the earth have scorched it instead, extinguishing countless species and toxifying land, water, air, and our bodies too - proving once and for all that we are a continuous part of the world. Classic literary concerns like close observation, perception, point-of-view, justice, ethics, belonging, and the wild or unknown frontier invariably draw on environmental content. And the way we represent the natural world, in turn, can be as consequential as scientific advances in the great project of preserving our planet.
This seminar will work across Shakespeare's genres (comedies, tragedies, and tragicomic hybrids), reading representative plays that show Shakespeare's preoccupation with humanity's cosmic place and his assessment of an ambivalent environmental situation for human beings. For critical context, shorter readings - from Genesis to the Anthropocene - will fuel our discussion. The course will explore Shakespeare's troubled sense that humankind, alone among all creaturely kinds, does not quite "belong" to nature. We'll assess how his understanding of "Nature" and our relation to it changes over time and how it varies in the distinct ecologies of tragedy and comedy. The critical concept of Shakespearean "green worlds" first arose to describe the retreats into nature (and away from civilized society) that typically occur in the comedies. In Shakespearean comedy, a removal to the green world (getting ourselves "back to Nature") counteracts one or another social ill, which in turn enables a rebalanced, healthier socio-political life to be restored. But how does this traditional and sometimes pastoral sense of a natural equilibrium hold up in a closer reading of the plays, especially if we consider comedies and tragedies together? Against what, exactly, is the human social order defined and established, and from what threatening "laws of nature" is it supposed to defend us? How does our grasp of more contemporary human impacts on the environment illuminate Shakespeare's premodern vision of human existence as a calamity of exposure - to both hard weather and our own worst instincts? This inquiry into Shakespeare's environmental vision will, finally, tell us something about the longer philosophical history of wondering what it means to be human.
The twentieth century has been called "the lethal century," more violent than any previous era. Contested though that claim may be, industrial capitalism, rival imperialisms, and rapid technological development converged to fuel interlocking civil, international, colonial, racial, and global conflicts, pressed by escalating machine warfare beyond the limiting human. Landmark literary works of the period confront such conflicts in many forms and on many fronts, from the racialized economic and cultural violence of European empires in Ireland, Africa, and India to genocide and the two world wars to decolonization and its vicissitudes to contemporary contests and "clashes" between the values of a declining imperial "west" and those of various rising "non-wests"--all under the globalizing domination of technological modernity. In the spirit of what Edward Said calls "worldly," or multicentric, critical practices, we'll read selected works by Kipling, Conrad, Forster, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Mansfield, Rhys, and postimperial writers against these contexts—and we'll find that "difficult" modernist texts become stunningly legible in light of historical conditions that are still very much with us.
English 374 Studies in Native American and Indigenous Literatures
This course is designed in partnership with the Block Museum's 2025 exhibit of Indigenous art entitled "Woven Being." Building on the exhibit's attention to the "interwovenness of Indigenous art, materials, and time in the Chicago region," the course will place literatures and visual art from/about the Chicago region and Great Lakes in conversation to ask the following questions: what are the relations between Indigenous literatures and visual arts? How do different literary and visual forms weave materials, stories, and beings together? Anchored by four visual artists collaborating with the Block—Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe), Kelly Church (Pottawatomi/Ottawa/Ojibwe), Nora Lloyd (Ojibwe), and Jason Wesaw (Pokagon Band of Potawatomi)—the course places these artists' work in conversation with literatures by Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Susan Power, Simon Pokagon, and more. Students will gain skills in art historical and literary research practices, exhibition design, archival research, the transcription and interpretation of historical materials, and more. Substantial class time will be spent at the Block engaging with the exhibit and with featured artists.
The World Health Organization declared the end of the COVID-19 pandemic on May 11, 2023—three years and change after it began. Most of us continue to experience the aftermath of the pandemic in various ways.* Primary and secondary school students continue to lag behind grade level by as much as nine months; commercial zones in major urban areas remain empty as remote working arrangements persist; millions of families grieve for lives lost to the novel coronavirus; and millions more contend with the effects of long COVID. In short, even as the epidemiological threat of the SARS-COV-2 virus has waned, the sociocultural impact of this worldwide crisis has just begun to come into focus. Having spent three years in involuntary training as amateur epidemiologists, we can now turn to the humanistic disciplines—which analyze the processes and products of human culture—to take stock of what this experience has meant for our values, our outlook, our relationships, and our culture. In that spirit, this course will investigate plague literature over the longue durée—nearly seven centuries, from 1348 C.E.-2023 C.E.—to explore the diversity of human experience in relation to plague and pestilence as represented in the Western/Anglophone canon.** Guiding questions will include: how have different groups of people searched for answers about the mechanisms and the meanings of plague (in medicine, in religion, in moral philosophy)? how have cultures responded to death rates so high that they defy traditional rituals of mourning and memorialization? what underlying prejudices, suspicions, and other social ills tend to be activated by pandemics, and to what effect? what role does literature play in helping us to formulate, and sometimes to answer, these questions and others? Course readings are divided into three units: medieval and early modern Europe, from Boccaccio to Daniel Dafoe; literature of the U.S. AIDS epidemic, including Tony Kushner and Sapphire; and a final unit on contemporary literature, featuring presentiments of and responses to COVID-19 from Ling Ma, Carmen María Machado, and Michael Cunningham. Assignments will include collective annotations on Canvas, podcast episodes (produced in small groups), Canvas Discussions, and a final essay or creative project.
*As well as other crises—political, financial, moral, ethical, educational, racial, economic, and so on—but there are only ten weeks in the quarter. **The primary sources for this course were almost all composed in English; those originally composed in another language have been translated so widely as to occupy space in the Anglophone canon despite their origins in another linguistic tradition.
This course considers the relationships between systems of human injustice and environmental issues—including industrial disasters, ocean acidification, and resource extraction. We examine environmental justice writing and artwork with a transnational, interconnected approach. For example, we ask how the Cameroonian-American writer Imbolo Mbue's depiction of pipeline spills in the fictional town of Kosawa connects to Native American resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. We link a poem documenting silicosis in the lungs of West Virginian coal miners to a novel portraying the aftermath of the Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, India. We compare a nonfiction account of Kenyan women resisting deforestation and an iPhone app reclaiming public access along the Malibu coast. We explore questions of voice, genre, and narrative, cataloguing the strategies writers and artists use to reach a global audience.
Envr Pol and Culture 383 Environmental Anthropology
Environmental anthropology is a more recent outgrowth of ecological anthropology, which emerged in the 1960s and 70s as a quantitative focus on systemic human-environment relationships, especially as they pertain to patterns of social change and adaptation. Environmental anthropology became more prominent in the 1980s, and is typically characterized by qualitative research on communities' engagements with contemporary environmental issues. Environmental anthropology has greater commitments to advocacy, critique, and application than ecological anthropology, but as we'll see in this course, the proliferation of "new ecologies" (as opposed to "new environmentalisms") denotes the continued synergy between ecological and environmental anthropologies. This course is divided into two parts. Part I will provide an historical overview of the development of environmental anthropology. We will cover some of the most influential research trends in the field: environmental determinism, cultural ecology, systems ecology, ethnoecology, historical ecology, political ecology, ecofeminisms, and interspecies studies. Part II will then pivot to the application of environmental anthropology knowledge to some of the most pressing environmental issues facing the contemporary world: population pressure, capitalist consumption, biodiversity conservation, sustainable land use, climate change, and environmental justice.
This senior seminar delves into the cultural, social, and political dimensions of the AIDS crisis in France, with a focus on public health, activism, and artistic responses. Through the works of writers and filmmakers such as Hervé Guibert, Cyril Collard and Guillaume Dustan, students will explore the ways in which AIDS reshaped French culture. The course also examines the role of activist groups like ACT UP-Paris and the contributions of scientists like Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi. As a research-focused seminar, students will be introduced to research methodologies and guided through the process of writing a research paper, developing critical analysis and academic writing skills in the context of AIDS and its cultural legacy in France.
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.
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.
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.
This course explores traditional and alternative data collection methods in public health research. The course focuses on 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 decolonizing processes can be applied in public health data collection to make research inclusive and to validate methods and ways of knowing that have assisted underserved, underheard, and underrepresented communities in advocating for justice to survive. Course readings and videos will provide a critical lens on qualitative data collection methods, including studies on historical and traumatic violence underscoring how people living in Black bodies work to survive, and 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 Joy DeGruy, Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Jean Stefanci.
This course draws on perspectives from anthropology, related social scientific fields, and the humanities to provide a critical introduction to psychological trauma and its increasingly significant place in contemporary global health discourses and agendas. We will explore the history of the concept and its applications in Western literature, science, and medicine; consider the relatively recent construction of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a diagnostic category and the clinical approaches developed to treat it; and examine the politics and effects of applying the concept abroad through humanitarian psychiatry and/or global mental health projects. Key questions of the course will include: how and why has trauma become one of the most important signifiers of our era—and a key criterion of "victimhood?" What politics and debates have shaped the development and application of the PTSD diagnosis in recent decades? And how have notions of trauma and their varied applications transformed politics, suffering, and care in diverse communities around the world?
Gbl Hlth 323 Global Health from Policy to Practice
This seminar explores health and development policy ethnographically, from the politics of policy-making to the impacts of policy on global health practice, and on local realities. Going beyond the intentions underlying policy, this course highlights the histories and material, political, economic, and social realities of policy and its application. Drawing on case studies of policy makers, government officials, insurance agents, health care workers, and beneficiaries, the course asks: what politics inform which issues become prioritized or codified in health and development policy, and which do not? How do philosophies and values about "good governance," "best practices," "preparedness," or "economic progress" influence the kinds of policies that are envisioned and/or implemented? How do politics affect health or medical system governance, and to what effect on the ground? In what ways are policies adapted, adopted, innovatively engaged, or outright rejected by various actors, and what does this mean for the challenges that such policies aim to address? Ultimately, what is the relationship between health politics and health disparities?
Gbl Hlth 326 Native Nations, Healthcare Systems and U.S. Policy
This seminar explores health and development policy ethnographically, from the politics of policy-making to the impacts of policy on global health practice, and on local realities. Going beyond the intentions underlying policy, this course highlights the histories and material, political, economic, and social realities of policy and its application. Drawing on case studies of policy makers, government officials, insurance agents, health care workers, and beneficiaries, the course asks: what politics inform which issues become prioritized or codified in health and development policy, and which do not? How do philosophies and values about "good governance," "best practices," "preparedness," or "economic progress" influence the kinds of policies that are envisioned and/or implemented? How do politics affect health or medical system governance, and to what effect on the ground? In what ways are policies adapted, adopted, innovatively engaged, or outright rejected by various actors, and what does this mean for the challenges that such policies aim to address? Ultimately, what is the relationship between health politics and health disparities?
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.
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.
This seminar approaches global health topics from a political science perspective. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, global health security, global health governance, and global health diplomacy have emerged as key issues in understanding geopolitics. How do power dynamics shape the global health landscape? Who are the various actors (state and non-state; public and private) involved in global health decisions and how do they wield power to shape policy? How do these tactics combat or reinforce health disparities? What factors make collective action and cooperation around global health issues more likely? Throughout the course we investigate how state and local governments are influenced through top-down approaches from international institutions and bottom-up approaches from grass-roots organizations. In addition to a focus on understanding how actors and processes engage in agenda setting and influence policymaking, we will discuss how enacted policies and political events impact health services delivery and population health. Students will explore these dynamics through case studies such as vaccination campaigns, abortion access, noncommunicable disease management, HIV/AIDS, TB, and climate-driven health crises, among others. Ultimately, we examine the ways in which states navigate the tension between sovereignty and cooperation when striving for global health security in an increasingly inter-connected world.
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.
This course is concerned with the history of Europe between 1890 and c. 1990. Its emphasis will be on material and political developments, not cultural-intellectual ones. It assumes some prior knowledge of Europe, including its geography, ethnography, and a good prior knowledge and understanding of the political and social background of twentieth century in Europe. The course will be based on two books, to be read in parallel: John Merriman, A History of Modern Europe, Fourth Edition (earlier editions are not acceptable) and Robert Paxton and Julie Hessler, Europe in the Twentieth Century (fifth ed.), denoted by P&H below. The course will cover the material in both books and class discussions will be based on them. Part of the assignment of this course is to come prepared to each class. The final exam will cover the entire reading as outlined below. In addition, there will be a 10-15 page paper due the first day of reading week in spring (see attached instructions sheets). Grades will be based on class participation, the paper, and the final exam.
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.
On a daily basis we consume—often without notice or concern—a substantial amount of racial knowledge. We routinely ingest, for example, infographics about demographic trends, media coverage on crime and undocumented immigration, and advertisements for ancestry tests. In complex and contextually specific ways, this diet shapes our personal and collective identities, social interactions and relationships, and political aspirations and anxieties. In this course, we endeavor to study the politics of racial knowledge—the ways in which categories, measurements, and other techniques of knowledge production have helped to constitute "race" as a seemingly objective, natural demarcation among human populations and institute forms of racial domination and inequality. Historically, racial knowledge has stipulated and legitimated what we might describe as a kind of racial ontology, a set of assumptions, claims, and prescriptions about race and racial superiority/inferiority—e.g., the notion that "whites" or "the West" represent the apex of human civilization. Drawing on diverse texts, this course explores of the emergence, evolution, and effects of racial knowledge. This exploration will begin by discussing the historical relationship between the modern concept of race and European colonialism and slavery. Subsequently, we will track several major developments in the history of racial knowledge, from Enlightenment naturalists to censuses to contemporary genomics research.
How does our understanding of global history change when we foreground law and empire? To what extent have international legal regimes arisen out of imperial dynamics? Why were slavery and settler colonialism so important to so many constitutional histories? This course takes up these and other questions in order to make sense of the interplay between laws, empires, and corporate entities around the world over the last four centuries (circa 1600 to 2000). We will examine: 1) the origins and effects of mixed jurisdictions (or legal pluralism) in different regions; 2) the ways empires have shaped key concepts of sovereignty and citizenship; 3) the role of transnational corporations in bolstering imperial rule; 4) the roots of empire in the history of human rights and international law; 5) scientific versus legal definitions of racial identities and indigeneity; and 6) entanglements between cultural and intellectual property.
Science is often considered a value-free enterprise. Scientists work in labs following the scientific method and provide society with relevant scientific facts. Policymakers then decide, based on their values, how to act on these facts. However, this picture does not fit the social sciences. Social scientists study social phenomena that seem to be defined according to particular social values. Well-being is something that is good for you, divorce is bad for you. Economists use models that make unrealistic assumptions about human behavior, yet still predict market outcomes. International indicators assess which countries have the most gendered violence, but key types of violence are left out so that more countries will report their data. Climate scientists must decide how to communicate their climate predictions (including their likelihood and the severity of their consequences) to policy makers and the public. In this course, we will evaluate methods such as economic games, sociological indicators, idealized economic models, self-report surveys, causal analysis of big data, and generative AI. In each case, we will assess to what extent these methods help us provide knowledge about our social world.
This course provides a broad overview of philosophical discussions about race and racism. In the course, we will engage theoretical questions such as: What do we mean when we say "race"? Is there a concept of race that undergirds users' many different conceptions of race? Do races exist, and what are races if they do exist? What is implicit bias? and What is racism? We will also engage practical questions such as: What is the relationship between race and health? Do we have good reasons to prescribe medications in accordance with race? Is it moral to believe that humans are divided into races? What ought we to do with race and race-talk given overriding moral concerns? Are implicit racial biases morally condemnable? How does race and racial perceptions impact law? Is racism permanent?
The course will introduce students to metaphysical and epistemological issues raised by modern natural science. We will be guided by nested "what does it take"-questions. For example: What does it take for natural science to be -in societies with a scientific culture—the legitimate authority on matters of fact about nature? What does it take for a system of assertions to count as a good scientific theory? What does it take for a scientific theory to be testable by evidence like observational and experimental data (and: what does it take for certain series of experiences to count as data, observations, experimental results?)? 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 contemporary discussions on the problem of induction, the problem of the underdetermination of theory choice by the available data, the problem of rationality, the problem of realism. This will include reflecting on reasons philosophers of science have established against some common preconceptions about what it takes to be entitled to scientific objectivity, such as that science provides ‘proof', or that there is one simple, context-free ‘scientific method', or that scientific objectivity is free of considerations of values or informed judgment. Many contemporary doubt-manufacturers selectively use parts of such reasons to suggest the skeptical attitude that science produces just one among many optional beliefs about reality, and that others (like religion, or what serves the oil industry) are equally valid. Against this, we will see that the reasons against proof as the standard (and in favor of evidential support and fallibility) in fact don't weaken but instead strengthen the justifications of why we ought to trust scientifically formed belief where it and its institutional and social conditions are available more than any other (purported) sources of information on nature.
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.
Phil 275 Climate Change and Sustainability: Ethical Dimensions
An examination of moral and political challenges related to climate change and sustainability, as well as philosophical approaches to addressing these challenges. Topics to be addressed include: the fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of climate change mitigation and adaptation; the feasibility and desirability of perpetual economic growth; the moral status of nature and non-human animals; the demands of climate justice; and the ethics of geoengineering.
In this course we will be exploring several of the core topics philosophers have addressed in connection with the nature of mind and it place in nature. These include the nature of consciousness, the mind-body problem, the nature of thought and other psychological states, the nature of imagination, and the nature of the self.
In this class we will explore traditional topics in the theory of knowledge - skepticism, the nature of (and prospects for) knowledge and rational belief, the sources of knowledge - from a variety of perspectives, and we will conclude by exploring what, if anything, we can know (and do) about the limits of our knowledge.
When you imagine a city, what comes to mind? Perhaps New York, L.A., or Paris? Today, over half of the world's population lives in urban areas, and the most rapid urbanization is happening in cities in Africa and Asia. While urbanization can have positive effects, such as increased wages and accelerated innovation, population growth can also create strain on institutions and infrastructure. In addition, the forces of colonialism, capitalism, and racism exclude certain people and groups from the benefits of urbanization. This course will be organized around key questions. How are the cities that are urbanizing most rapidly today similar to or different from industrialized or post-industrial cities in the Global North? Who has power in a city? What determines this? And what are the implications? In this course, we will examine how politics relates to the lives of urban residents around the world, including right here in Chicago. We will engage with work from a variety of different regions (with an emphasis on the Global South) and media (including podcasts, videos, and blog posts). We will discuss theoretical debates with an eye toward how they are relevant to public policy and to people's everyday lives. We will also think critically about how to evaluate the evidence presented for different claims about cities.
The world's oceans, encompassing 70% of the world's area and 90% of its volume, are essential to life on Earth. However, they are increasingly imperiled by an array of anthropogenic stressors, including pollution, overexploitation of natural and non-living resources, and climate change. This class will focus on both the threats posed to ocean ecosystems, including impacts on marine living resources. The focus of the course will be on the role of international law, including treaties and customary international law, in addressing threats to the world's oceans. A large portion of the course will focus on the provisions of the so-called "constitution for the oceans," the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
This seminar approaches global health topics from a political science perspective. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, global health security, global health governance, and global health diplomacy have emerged as key issues in understanding geopolitics. How do power dynamics shape the global health landscape? Who are the various actors (state and non-state; public and private) involved in global health decisions and how do they wield power to shape policy? How do these tactics combat or reinforce health disparities? What factors make collective action and cooperation around global health issues more likely? Throughout the course we investigate how state and local governments are influenced through top-down approaches from international institutions and bottom-up approaches from grass-roots organizations. In addition to a focus on understanding how actors and processes engage in agenda setting and influence policymaking, we will discuss how enacted policies and political events impact health services delivery and population health. Students will explore these dynamics through case studies such as vaccination campaigns, abortion access, noncommunicable disease management, HIV/AIDS, TB, and climate-driven health crises, among others. Ultimately, we examine the ways in which states navigate the tension between sovereignty and cooperation when striving for global health security in an increasingly inter-connected world.
The fragility of the human body, its susceptibility to illness and death, provoked a wide array of responses among religious practitioners in pre-modern China. Some pursued supernatural longevity and even immortality through various regimes of self-cultivation. Others, by contrast, renounced the body in part or whole through dramatic acts of self-immolation. Even in death, however, many aspired to rebirth in heavenly realms where bodies do not grow old and die, but rather live forever in bliss. This course examines these various attempts to overcome death in Chinese religion—including Buddhism, Daoism, and traditions that fall between these large categories—seeking to understand how the mortality of the body was used to authorize particular modes of embodied living. In the process, we will explore how these modes of religious life shaped attitudes toward food, medicine, gender, sexuality, and family.
Relig St 349 Medicine, Miracles, Magic: Healthcare of the Mind
Today, religion and science are often regarded as separate spheres of knowledge and practice, but was this always the case? In this class, we will explore the overlapping uses of medicine, miracles, and magic in premodern healthcare. We will ask what kinds of people were able to practice medicine (priests? physicians? nuns? magicians?), why a person's barber was also their surgeon, how the dead supported the health of the living, and why rituals like confession could treat stomach aches and other ailments. We will learn what a vial of urine could tell a medieval physician about a patient's habits, consider how an individual's astrological sign influenced their treatment plan, and discuss what an excess of garlic in a person's diet might tell us about the moral state of their spirit. By the end of this course, students will be able to identify and analyze the complex, nuanced systems that medieval people used to theorize the body and its relationship to the soul, and will be able to articulate how physical, spiritual, and even supernatural medicines were often combined to treat both. As we study the nuances of premodern medicine, we will also work to rethink the relationship between religion and science in our own world, and consider whether and where our modern healthcare practices align with the past as much as they depart from it.
Sch of Comm - Comm St 375 The Sociology of Online News
The goal of this upper-level undergraduate seminar is to survey the state of online news from a sociological perspective. We will divide the class into two main parts. The first part will be devoted to an overview of the state-of-the-art knowledge about the behavior of online news audiences worldwide. The second part will be focused on understanding the internal transformations that news organizations have undertaken over the past couple of decades to address this changing audience landscape and its connections to a series of technological, political, and economic challenges that have marked the evolution of the twenty-first century so far. Cutting across both parts will be the adoption of a global and comparative perspective by examining news audiences and organizations from across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. The are two main learning objectives for this class: a) to understand the behavior of online news audiences worldwide; and, b) to understand the transformations of news organizations to address a changing news audience landscape.
Sch of Comm - Comm St 395-0-29 Communication, Innovation and Organizing
The ability to lead and make change through innovation begins with the development of multiple perspectives on people and organizations. Individuals and groups habitually settle into fixed perspectives, unchallenged mental models of how the world works, unconscious filters determining what we pay attention to and what we ignore. These habits offer powerful economies of thought: without them, the simplest task of picking a face out in a crowd or listening to the radio while driving would be impossible. But they impose costs as well. They lock us into a single view of the world that may not be advantageous, that is surely incomplete, resistant to change, and likely to soon become outdated. Innovation involves trading off economy of thought for creativity of thought. It requires the discipline of interpreting what we see and hear in organizations from multiple standpoints. Accordingly, we will learn to analyze situations and craft implementation plans using three perspectives on organizations—strategic design, political and cultural. While leading change always presents challenges, our goal in this course is to use the three perspectives to develop a more complete understanding of these challenges and how to address them.
Sch of Comm St - Comm St 227 Communications and Technology
Examining factors informing and shaping the design of everyday objects and our virtual world; psychological aspects of computer-mediated communication and virtual collaboration, including impression relations, group dynamics, and social networks; social and institutional structures in which human communication is situated.
Sch of Comm St - Comm St 295 Going Viral: The Powers and Perils
In today's digital culture, going viral on social media is commonly associated with success. However, the phenomenon of virality reveals a complex interplay between visibility and power. This class examines issues related to media virality and power, with an emphasis on understanding the advantages and drawbacks of visibility in contemporary media landscapes. It offers an opportunity to dig into tensions in the areas of media, culture, representation, and online communication. Students will learn to differentiate between key media concepts related to virality, like: memes, visibility, and attention. They will practice analyzing and critiquing the intertwined relationship between media engagement and economic and sociopolitical dynamics. Readings will touch on contemporary topics like: virality and activism, representation and social justice, and the economies of visibility and attention. Through this class, students will develop and refine their critical thinking, verbal, and writing skills in an interactive and collective learning environment.
Sch of Comm St - Comm St 351 Technology and Human Interaction
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.
Sch of Comm St - Comm St 358 Algorithms and Society
Algorithms work to define the information we consume, the jobs that are available to us, our romantic and intimate options, and more. While these technologies bring us many benefits, research suggests that they also have critical negative consequences. In this course, we will render visible the invisible when it comes to algorithmic influence on society. In this project-based course, we will use readings and discussion to understand 1) methods for analyzing algorithms, 2) how algorithms operate in specific contexts, and 3) paths forward that mitigate possible harms.
Sch of Comm St - Comm St 395-0-30 The New Outer Space
This course offers a selective, yet galactic, approach to investigating the contemporary conditions of outer space in 2020s and 2030s. No longer the semi-exclusive domain of a few powerful nations and a handful of rich corporations (although both remain very active), still grudgingly shared with scientists such as astronomers and earth scientists (now shared more grudgingly than ever before) what is increasingly called The New Outer Space involves activities by most of the nations of the planet, a huge range and diverse scale of venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and inventors, and a largely uniformed public that knows little to nothing about The New Outer Space that is arriving for our future. We will look at issues such as the vanishing of dark and quiet skies as satellites increase in number and undermine astronomical research; plans to build telescopes on the Shielded (Dark) side of the Moon; the growing environmental problems of space debris returning to Earth and splashdown at Point Nemo, the rapidly filling oceanic graveyard of satellites; the competition for access to and control of Cislunar Space; whether and why The Moon needs its own time zone; mega-constellations of satellites that will grow to includes thousands of satellites in orbit; LEO, MEO, GEO and other orbits; new direct-to-smartphone satellites such as BlueWalker 3, at certain moments the 9th-brightest object in the skies of the Northern Hemisphere; Space Advertising with coordinated satellites depicting corporate logos and similar images; names and corporations you have likely heard of, such as Elon Musk and SpaceX, as well as activities likely unknown to many, such as the rising importance of New Zealand as a launch site; and why nations we do not often associate with outer space activities (Rwanda, Luxembourg, and many others) are now co-investing with industry start-ups for a huge and growing range of outer space activities. Assignments will include attendance, short papers, short in-class oral reports, and tracking and reporting on selected satellites, projects, and corporations. When weather conditions permit (generally clear skies and ice and snow free) the last hour of class will be held outdoors as we attempt to observe ISS, Tiangong, BlueWalker 3, and the ACS3 Solar Sail if and when these and other objects are visible in the Evanston night sky. If we are very lucky, we might even see a Starlink deployment of 50+ cubesats at once. Dress for winter outdoors and look up.
Disasters are catastrophic events with human and natural causes and may be gradual or sudden and unexpected. What these events share is their potential to disrupt communities, displace residents, and cause economic, emotional, and social suffering. We know that disasters are on the rise globally and in the US, incurring significant economic and social consequences. The aim of this course is to understand how disasters like pandemics, hurricanes, floods, wildfires, plane crashes, oil spills, and terrorism provide a "strategic research site" where we can examine social life and inequality. In this course, students will be introduced to the idea that disasters are fundamentally social events. We will focus on the social, political, and economic conditions that influence disaster experience and recovery, paying special attention to the ways that social characteristics like race, class, gender, and age structure social vulnerability to risk before, during, and after disasters. In learning to think critically about prevailing media representations of disasters, students will master content analysis methodology by engaging in a term-long research project in which they study one recent disaster event and the associated media coverage. This is an introductory level course without any prerequisites.
On a daily basis we consume—often without notice or concern—a substantial amount of racial knowledge. We routinely ingest, for example, infographics about demographic trends, media coverage on crime and undocumented immigration, and advertisements for ancestry tests. In complex and contextually specific ways, this diet shapes our personal and collective identities, social interactions and relationships, and political aspirations and anxieties. In this course, we endeavor to study the politics of racial knowledge—the ways in which categories, measurements, and other techniques of knowledge production have helped to constitute "race" as a seemingly objective, natural demarcation among human populations and institute forms of racial domination and inequality. Historically, racial knowledge has stipulated and legitimated what we might describe as a kind of racial ontology, a set of assumptions, claims, and prescriptions about race and racial superiority/inferiority—e.g. the notion that "whites" or "the West" represent the apex of human civilization. Drawing on diverse texts, this course explores of the emergence, evolution, and effects of racial knowledge. This exploration will begin by discussing the historical relationship between the modern concept of race and European colonialism and slavery. Subsequently, we will track several major developments in the history of racial knowledge, from Enlightenment naturalists to censuses to contemporary genomics research.
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.
What is sex? What is gender? What is sexuality? How are they related? Are they social constructs or biological realities? Can we have one without the others? In this upper division undergraduate seminar, we will explore the interconnected nexus of sex, gender, and sexuality. The course will expose students to a range of theoretical approaches to sex, gender, and sexuality from sociology and other disciplines. The course will also provide students with practice applying these theories to real-life cases. Additionally, students will develop the skills to perform qualitative coding—a key method of analysis of sociological data. By the end of the course, students will have explored a research question of their choice related to sex, gender, and/or sexuality by qualitatively coding data using NVivo.
This course works comparatively with texts from Latin American modernismo and European traditions to elaborate on different conceptualizations of the modern imagination. Modernismo characterizes by its strategies of cultural appropriation on one side, and of cultural exhibition on the other, as it marks the moment of most intense traffic of symbolic and material goods and at the same time it claims its cultural autonomy that portrays in exhibitions, chronicles, journalism, and its poetry. Museums, world exhibitions, geographic expeditions, photography and travel writing, department stores, the fashion industry and the commodification of everyday life -what we can call an "exhibitionary complex-" rendered up and laid out the meaning of the modern world. Through these mechanisms the world began being represented as a framed visual display laid out for a spectator. We will explore the system of cultural appropriation and translation practiced by Latin American writers in a moment of imperial globalization and we will consider the Latin American inflexion on such topics as literature and cosmopolitism, the poetic representation of the street and metropolitan cities, the organization of urban leisure, the woman as objet d'art, the metropolitan fascination with subaltern cultures and debates on the production and consumption of mass urban culture. Prerequisite: SPAN 250-0, 251-0, 260-0, or 261-0.
Spanish 395 Bodies in Crisis: Illness, Transformation and Power
This course examines the relationship between illness, the body, and power relationships in Latin American cultural production from the early 20th century to the present. Through a multidisciplinary lens—including literature, film, theory, and visual art—we will explore how bodies in states of illness, disorder, and transformation reveal cultural anxieties and histories of oppression. Rather than viewing illness solely as a medical condition, we will investigate how it disrupts normative conceptions of race, gender, class, and sexuality. The course will interrogate how vulnerable, excessive, and often stigmatized bodies challenge control and order mechanisms, offering different ways of understanding identity, resistance, and human agency. By engaging with canonical and marginalized voices, we will explore ways in which the body opens spaces for new forms of resistance and meaning-making. Prerequisite: SPAN 250-0, 251-0, 260-0 or 261-0.
