Amer Studies 310-0-10 US Health: Illness & Inequality
In this course students will examine themes in the history of health in the U.S., particularly in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Readings will focus on the intersections between health and environment, gender, race, law, and religion. 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.
Originating in Slavic words for forced labor, the term "robot" evokes for many an image of blocky metallic humanoids beeping their way through a set of tasks. Yet robots also carry the specter of revolt. We tend to fear the automated tools we design to mechanize labor, even as we continue creating more of them. In this class, we will investigate U.S. popular culture's treatment of robots from early cinema's "mechanical men" to the modern controversy over generative AI. Along the way, we will survey U.S. law's responses to the spread of technology, with particular attention to the problems raised by cutting-edge innovations like self-driving cars and AI-generated artwork. We will read fiction by Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and Naomi Kritzer; analyze films like The Iron Giant and The Stepford Wives; and engage with the work of scholars like Donna Haraway, Dennis Yi Tenen, Scott Selisker, and others. By the end of the course, students will develop a more nuanced understanding of what it means to fear robots and what that fear obscures about them (and us).
This course explores the methods used to investigate disease outbreaks, with particular emphasis on the COVID-19 pandemic. Students examine the principles and practices of outbreak investigation, including the epidemiological and statistical techniques used to detect, investigate, and mitigate outbreaks. Topics include public health surveillance, contact tracing, environmental health assessment, forensic epidemiology, and crisis and emergency risk communication. The course incorporates real-world case simulations for pathogens such as Ebola, Avian-influenza, Foodborne, and bioterrorism.
Visions of "Africa" today often revolve around a set of tropes developed in the 19th century: a continent benighted, undeveloped, helpless, chaotic, famine-ridden, and incapable of self-governance. In this class, we will directly challenge these tropes, viewing contemporary Africa from a cultural anthropological perspective. Using the conceptual tools of anthropology, we will identify the values presupposed by such discourses and worldviews, and consider alternative intellectual traditions, visions and insights emerging from scholarship in, of, about and from the continent. Specifically, we will explore areas critical to understanding contemporary African cultures - music, cinema, literature, health, technology, politics and economy, among others. We will reflect upon ethical engagement with and representations of Africa/ns. Through these perspectives from Africa, we will have the opportunity to reflect on central human questions about the nature of power, hierarchy, exchange, identity and belonging.
In what seems to be an age of unprecedented global distress, what is the role of media in shaping understandings and experiences of mental illness? Western psychiatric frameworks are increasingly defining mental health/illness around the world. These frameworks are also circulated via Western media narratives that shape the meanings people associate with mental health and illness. What other narratives of mental health might be told? What experiences of distress and resilience are obscured by these dominant frameworks? In this class, we will critically examine dominant U.S. models of mental health and illness and ask what underlying cultural assumptions and expectations about personhood, emotion, mind and body, are embedded in these narratives. We will analyze the political and social implications of these representations in film and television and how they reinforce or re-imagine our assumptions about mental health. Through a combination of engagement with scholarship on culture and mental health, media studies, and our own critical analyses of media objects, we will explore these questions and think together about how to rewrite media narratives in ways that better reflect the broad spectrum of experience.
In this course, we will explore an anthropological—which is to say, a cross-cultural, political, economic and social approach--to the study of sports. A starting premise for this course is this: rather than being outside politics (articulated in the plea that athletes ‘just shut up and play ball'), sport has been a means for bolstering nationalism and national belonging; a staging ground for a range of social, political and economic ideologies; and a vehicle for social protest and change. We examine this premise through a close and careful reading of ethnographic and popular texts; together, we will analyze and discuss anthropological theories of value, power, kinship, violence, difference and social hierarchy through the lens of sports.
How do Anthropologists understand and investigate the social and cultural contexts of health and illness? This course will examine the diverse ways in which humans use cultural resources to cope with pain, illness, suffering and healing in diverse cultural contexts. In addition, we will analyze various kinds of medical practices as cultural systems, examining how disease, health, body, and mind are socially constructed, how these constructions articulate with human biology, and vice versa. The course will provide an introduction to the major theoretical frameworks that guide anthropological approaches to studying human health-related behavior. Theory will be combined with case studies from a number of societies, from India, Japan, Brazil, and Haiti to the U.S. and Canada, enabling students to identify similarities across seemingly disparate cultural systems, while at the same time demonstrating the ways in which American health behaviors and practices are socially embedded and culturally specific. The course will emphasize the overall social, political, and economic contexts in which health behavior and health systems are shaped, and within which they must be understood.
Visual anthropology encompasses both the study of visual culture and the modes of producing inter- and cross-cultural visual ethnographic texts (e.g. photographs, film/video, comics/drawings, exhibits)-in other words, the cultural meanings of visual expressions and the visual recording of cultural practices. In this course, we will explore historical approaches to analyzing visual and material culture and ethical and philosophical debates about power, the representation of cultural difference and the ethnographic gaze. In addition to exploring the legacies of visual anthropology, we analyze the techniques, visual rhetoric, and narrative strategies used to produce a range of images of Africa and Africans in historical and contemporary media. We will also experiment with video, photography, and drawing in our own ethnographic projects.
Anthro 357-0-1 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.
This class is an introduction to political ecology, a multidisciplinary body of theory and research that analyzes the environmental articulations of political, economic, and social difference and inequality. The key concepts, debates, and approaches in this field address two main questions: (1) How do humans' interactions with the environment shape power and politics? (2) How do power and politics shape humans' interactions with the environment? These questions are critical to understanding and addressing the current issues of climate change, neoliberal capitalism, and environmental justice. Topics discussed in this class will include environmental scarcity and degradation, sustainability, resilience and conservation. Readings will come from a variety of disciplines within the social sciences and humanities. Case studies will range from the historical to the present-day. No prior background in the environmental sciences is needed to appreciate and engage in this course.
Anthro 390-0-1 Before Eco-Punks and Cottagecore: The Archaeology
"Whether foraging, farming, or clear cutting, this course explores people's relationships with the natural world. With a heavy emphasis on historical and Indigenous perspectives, students can look forward to surveying alternative perceptions of the environment using archaeological and ecological data. All humans require the environment to survive, but their cultural attitudes and survival methods vary widely. Through case studies, students will learn to recognize a spectrum of human-environmental relationships from what people leave behind. Course content will include lectures, in-class activities, assigned articles, and class discussions. No previous experience in archaeology is required."
In 2020, ICOM (International Council of Museums) ratified an updated definition of "museum", which states: A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection, and knowledge sharing. In this course we will consider the responsibility of museums, a question that undergirds the ICOM definition, through a close look at some of the most pressing issues in museums today. Topics will include the restitution and repatriation of artworks; the threatened sale of museum collections to cover debt; the role of museums in the global climate crisis; and collaborative curatorial practices that build and sustain community relationships. Among the questions that will be raised and debated in the course are: what responsibilities do museums have for the care and stewardship of their collections? What do museums owe to individuals and communities with connections to the objects currently in their care? What obligations do museums have to donors, founders, and funders? What makes museums good neighbors in the communities where they are based? How should museums take account of their histories and their sites? We will focus on several case studies through readings, dialogue with practitioners and knowledge sharers, class discussions, and engagement with current Block exhibitions—"Hamdia Traoré's Des marabouts de Djenné and Muslim Portraiture in Mali" and "Teresa Montoya's Tó Łitso (Yellow Water): Ten Years after the Gold King Mine Spill."
Rattan M, W 12:30-1:50pm Notes: SHC Core Course - List B
Anthro 390-0-42 The State of Techno Capitalism
In this course we will rethink two classical ideas—the state and capitalism— in light of contemporary technological change. We move beyond treating technology as a neutral tool and instead analyze it as a social, political, and cultural force that actively reorganizes and is reorganized by power, labor, governance, capital, and everyday life. We explore topics such as the rise of the tech-billionaire class, platform economies and gig work, bureaucracy, algorithmic systems, misinformation, e-governance, environmental regulation, smart cities as intertwined sociotechnical systems rather than isolated innovations. Through comparative works from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the United States, the course sheds light on the global political economy while attending to national differences, local histories and cultures. We will also explore how social actors resist, subvert and contest technological power to imagine alternative futures. The course equips students with classical frameworks and critical conceptual tools for analyzing the intertwining of technology, politics, and economy in modern life.
Art History 232-0-1 Intro to the 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 370-1-1 Architecture and Landscapes 1750-1890
This course provides students with an in-depth understanding of major developments in architectural, urban, and landscape history, from 1750 to 1890. Charting a period of significant change that animated architectural discourse and practice, students will explore the highly innovative and experimental ways in which key architects and planners responded to the challenges of a rapidly changing and globalizing world and to the possibilities introduced by new technologies and materials. While this course focuses on developments that took place within the European and North American frame, they are situated in relation to global processes including trade, imperialism, nationalism, migration, and industrialization. Each lecture is organized around keynote transformations in architectural culture during this period: We will explore how the era of revolutions, from the late 18th to the early 19th century, expanded the role of architecture in the creation of new types of public and political space; how industrial production and prefabrication gave rise to radically new architectural vocabularies and catalyzed debates about national styles and aesthetic and environmental "character"; and how new housing, labor, and urban reform movements, such as utopian socialism, offered visionary spatial strategies in pursuit of an elusive social equality. This course prioritizes discussion and critical reflection and emphasizes the study of primary sources.
This course will explore seven centuries of architecture and urbanism in North America's largest city. First founded in 1325 as Tenochtitlan, the city served as the ceremonial and political center for an expanding Mexica, or Aztec, empire that commanded vast territories across Mesoamerica. Two centuries later, following the Spanish invasion and conquest of the Mexica capital, Tenochtitlan was transformed into a new kind of center and renamed Ciudad de México. As capital of the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Spain—a realm that encompassed modern-day Mexico, parts of the Central America and the USA, as well as islands in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean—Mexico City became the crossroads for global commerce and exchange connecting four continents. Nineteenth-century independence from Spain and early twentieth-century revolution led to Mexico City's further physical as well as cultural transformation into the megalopolis of 22 million inhabitants we can experience today. This course will trace how the ecology and terrain of this remarkable place has evolved over time. We will consider everyday buildings and public spaces as well as monuments, both surviving and lost. From streets, parks, and boulevards to stepped pyramids, basilica-plan churches, and sports complexes designed for the Olympic Games, the course explores architecture and urbanism as a reflection of Mexico City's complex history from a global vantage. Required: Attendance and participation, including contributing to class discussion and writing (and sometimes sketching) weekly responses to readings and/or visual prompts. Participants should plan on one weekend outing (Friday or Saturday TBD) in Chicago.
In 2020, ICOM (International Council of Museums) ratified an updated definition of "museum", which states: A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection, and knowledge sharing. In this course we will consider the responsibility of museums, a question that undergirds the ICOM definition, through a close look at some of the most pressing issues in museums today. Topics will include the restitution and repatriation of artworks; the threatened sale of museum collections to cover debt; the role of museums in the global climate crisis; and collaborative curatorial practices that build and sustain community relationships. Among the questions that will be raised and debated in the course are: what responsibilities do museums have for the care and stewardship of their collections? What do museums owe to individuals and communities with connections to the objects currently in their care? What obligations do museums have to donors, founders, and funders? What makes museums good neighbors in the communities where they are based? How should museums take account of their histories and their sites? We will focus on several case studies through readings, dialogue with practitioners and knowledge sharers, class discussions, and engagement with current Block exhibitions—Hamdia Traoré's Des marabouts de Djenné and Muslim Portraiture in Mali and Teresa Montoya's Tó Łitso (Yellow Water): Ten Years after the Gold King Mine Spill.
Asian Amer. Lang and Culture 322-0-20 Video Games in or as Japanese Culture
What kind of stories do video games tell, and what do these stories tell us about the cultures that produced them? How does the uniquely interactive nature of games give shape to the stories that they tell and the meanings that they convey? Where does the experience of play fit into the stories through which a culture produces meaning? This course explores these questions in the context of Japanese cultural history from the 1990s to the present. In particular, we explore how Japanese video games reflect on the condition of post-history: the sense that Japan's history was reaching an apocalyptic and entering a moment of stasis.
Far from apolitical, histories of science in the United States have been deeply shaped by structures of racism—such as slavery, settler colonialism, immigration, militarism, policing, and more. This course examines how racism has persisted across scientific fields and how technology has been used to advance systems of discrimination, from medical and biological sciences to chemistry, physics, and computing. Along the way, the course will explore justice-oriented technological approaches developed by activists that offer new ways of envisioning the relationship between science, technology, and the social world.
Asian Amer. St. 303-0-1 The Military-Industrial Complex
Since 1942, the United States has been engaged in a permanent state of war – from World War II and the Cold War to the ongoing War on Terror. In this course, we will explore how this society emerged from complex entanglements between racism, militarism, capitalism, and empire: the military-industrial complex. War is not waged just on the battlefield but permeates our everyday lives; it lurks in our workplaces, classrooms, laboratories, homes, neighborhoods, and local communities. Through historical, cultural, and social analysis, we will examine how this society came to be and its ramifications for those living in the “belly of the beast” of US empire. In doing so, we will pay specific attention to anti-war movements, past and present, driven by visions for more just and decolonial worlds.
Asian Amer. St. 303-0-3 Asian Amer. Digital Cultures
How are digital spaces shaping - and shaped by - Asian American identities, communities, movements, and experiences? In this class, we explore the intersection of race and technology, labor and (im)migration, and our relationship to screens, code, and algorithms. We ask how surveillance, weaponization of data, the politics and circulation of (mis/dis)information, and resistance informs Asian American digital cultures. From hashtag activism to digital intimacy, we examine cultural production on social media platforms, dating apps, and viral videos and memes. Students will engage in a quarter-long digital ethnography project.
Asian Amer St 376-0-1 Memory and Identity in Asian American Literature
How can writers represent inaccessible stories, ones lost to the passage of history? This class explores how literature functions as repositories of minority histories and memories, as meditations on the process of assembling and collecting stories, and as imaginings of alternative histories and futures. Given the difficulty of assembling a coherent Asian American identity, our examinations will be defined as much by the absences, gaps, and contradictions of Asian America's collective memory as by what is found within it
Classics 310-0-1 The Archaeology of Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabi
The cities buried by Mt Vesuvius hold an undying place in the modern imagination. Tourists marvel at the size of the sites and empathize with the plight of the towns' inhabitants. However, Campania's destroyed cities have more to offer than the story of the 79 AD volcanic eruption. Rather than present a static picture of Campania's towns as "frozen in time," this course takes a diachronic approach to the rich archaeological material. Campania was not originally Roman territory and was conquered by force of arms. Pompeii, often seen as an archetypal Roman town, was not Roman at all for most of its existence. Still, at the time of the eruption Campania's cities had been thoroughly Romanized; they are now famous for the evidence they provide for Roman daily life. This course will survey key aspects of the evidence, as well as current archaeological techniques and fieldwork. The course will also discuss the 18th and 19th century uncovering of Campania's cities, which is a story in its own right.
This course will explore the history of European and Near Eastern astronomy from the 7th century BCE to the 6th century CE. Students will learn the fundamentals of the geocentric model, ancient methods of observation, and traditions of cosmology. We will study the history of time-reckoning and calendar-making, as well as portrayals of astronomy and celestial phenomena in myth and literature. In addition to reading ancient texts, students will also make their own observations using models of ancient instruments and the methods of ancient astronomers.
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.
Comp Lit 201-0-20 Is Surgery the New Sex? And Other Body Horror Questions
Visceral, disgusting, and perverted - there are many ways to describe body horror as a loose genre. This course looks at different body horror texts across the world as world literature. Students will explore how body horror asks questions about body politics when the capacity to alter one's body and the political limits on one's body collide. We will discuss fictions, graphic novels, and films in the genre as well as scholarship on gender, sexuality, race, violence, ethics, colonialism, and capitalism. This course comes with a major content warning, as many of the materials will have graphic depictions of violence and may be triggering.
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.
The course provides an overall analysis of the Israeli Economy, its development in the 70 years since the establishment of the state of Israel, and how it coped with various crises during those years. The course will focus on economic growth, the effects of the Israeli-Arab conflict, the inflation crisis and stabilization policy, and on inequality in Israel. We will study those issues by applying fundamental concepts in economic analysis.
Econ 323-1-20 Economic History of the US Before 1865
The course examines the economic and institutional development of the United States from colonial times to the Civil War. It focuses on questions related to differential patterns of development across the Americas and the US, devoting specific attention to labor market institutions, its divergence across North and South, and the role of Slavery in the development of the American Economy.
Econ 323-2 Economic History of the U.S. 1865-Present
The course examines the economic development of the United States since the Civil War to the present. It focuses on both long-term economic trends (like technological advance and industrialization) and the economic causes and consequences of particular events (like the Great Depression).
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.
This course is a survey of some of the main issues of the Industrialized World in the period 1890-1989. Each week, a different topic will be discussed. While the main emphasis will be on Europe, the North-American experience will also be discussed and comparisons with other countries will be made frequently. Because the discussion will be according to topic, the course will not be strictly chronological (though many of the readings are).
Econ 355-0-20 Transportation Economics and Public Policy
The objective of this course is to provide the student with an understanding of the transportation industries in the United States and the major policy issues confronting government and the public. All modes of transportation are considered: highways, trucking, mass transit, airlines, maritime, railroads, and pipelines. The course acquaints the student with the underlying economics of transportation provision including demand, costs, the economics of regulation and regulatory reform, the pricing and quality of service, managing congestion, subsidies, competition between the various modes, and the social appraisal of projects.
The environment and our natural resources are scarce yet their values are quite hard to determine. Furthermore, there are a variety of problems with the incentives to use them well. Using the tools of microeconomic analysis and some econometrics, this course will define and examine "environmental problems" in terms of economic efficiency. We will also discuss the methods (and shortcomings of these methods) used by economists and policymakers to place dollar values on environmental amenities (since such valuations will determine what policy options are deemed "efficient"), such as benefit-cost analysis. Then we will apply these tools to look at a particular set of environmental problems caused by negative externalities transmitted through naturally occurring amenities, and the effects of the policies we construct in response to these problems. NOTE: This class is not open to students who have taken Economics 370: Environmental & Natural Resource Economics.
The environment and our natural resources are scarce yet their values are quite hard to determine. Furthermore, there are a variety of problems with the incentives to use them well. Using the tools of microeconomic analysis and some econometrics, this course will define and examine "environmental problems" in terms of economic efficiency. We will also discuss the methods (and shortcomings of these methods) used by economists and policymakers to place dollar values on environmental amenities (since such valuations will determine what policy options are deemed "efficient"), such as benefit-cost analysis. Then we will apply these tools to look at a particular set of environmental problems caused by negative externalities transmitted through naturally occurring amenities, and the effects of the policies we construct in response to these problems. NOTE: This class is not open to students who have taken Economics 370: Environmental & Natural Resource Economics.
English 283-0-01 Intro to Literature and the Environment
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.
English 339-0-20 Studies in Shakespeare: Green Thought, Green Worlds
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.
English 369-0-20 Studies in African Literature: Ubuntu and Ecology
This course engages the philosophy of ubuntu—often seen as focused on human relationships—in conversation with the more than human world. Together, we'll read inspiring works by Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Wangarĩ Maathai, and Micere Githae Mugo, alongside African fiction, poetry, and drama, to see how ubuntu can shape the way we read literature. We will revisit major debates in African literary studies—most notably the "language question"—through the twin lenses of ubuntu and ecology. Consider, for instance, how the call to preserve indigenous languages resonates with the call to protect the environment. Yet here lies a productive tension: why do we resist the notion of art for art's sake, while simultaneously affirming the environment for its own sake? This paradox invites us to rethink the grounds on which value is claimed and defended. Alongside ubuntu, we will also explore non-Bantu equivalents, situating it in dialogue with other African philosophies such as ijough ave, Hunhu/Unhu, and ujamaa. This course honors the memory of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (1938-2025), Micere Githae Mugo (1942-2023), and Wangarĩ Maathai (1940-2011). Their voices will guide us as we read, reflect, and write about ubuntu and ecology throughout the term. At the end of the course, the student should be able to appreciate ubuntu's investments in deep ecology and its recognition of the environment's intrinsic value—valued for its own sake—rather than merely its instrumental value as a resource for human use.
English 374-0-20 Studies in Native Studies in Native American and Indigenous Literatures: Writing from Memory
Memory is an enduring and powerful source of inspiration for Indigenous storytelling. However, it can also be deeply controversial and contentious. In his creative non-fiction essay titled "Beauty & Memory & Abuse & Love", Navajo author Bojan Louis offers a cutting take on memory by an anonymous Blackfeet writer: "You never ask a Native to talk about their childhood. That's Indigenous 101. You think life on the reservation is pretty? Fuck that. Natives never talk about their childhood". From a similar place of tension and discomfort, Kanaka 'Ōiwi writer Nālani Mattox prefaces her poem "1 page per life" with this memory: "For the mainland English teacher who flunked me in English Literature in the summer of 1978 at UH. She cost me my graduation with the rest of my class in June 1980. Thank God she was only visiting". Seared in her mind and body, this memory, she writes in the last line of her poem, "haunted" her forever. In both examples, memory is unsettling; yet both Louis and Mattox have transformed these memories to create Indigenous texts and stories. This course asks: Beyond the mind and body, what are other sites of intergenerational memory accessible to Native American and Indigenous writers? How do they navigate a complex phenomenon like memory across these various sites? What types of texts do they produce within their chosen location(s) of memory?
English 375-0-20 Memory and Identity in Asian American Literature
How can writers represent inaccessible stories, ones lost to the passage of history? This class explores how literature functions as repositories of minority histories and memories, as meditations on the process of assembling and collecting stories, and as imaginings of alternative histories and futures. Given the difficulty of assembling a coherent Asian American identity, our examinations will be defined as much by the absences, gaps, and contradictions of Asian America's collective memory as by what is found within it.
English 381-0-20 Intro to Disability Studies in Literature
The field of disability studies grew out of the rights-based activism that led, in the United States, to the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Yet, as disability theorists have observed, "western" literature has long been obsessed with disability as metaphor, character trait, and plot device. This course will serve as an introduction to the application of disability studies in literature. We will explore a range of questions: how do we approach the representation of disability in texts by non-disabled authors? How do we differentiate (or should we?) between disability and chronic illness, or between physical and mental disabilities? Can literary representation operate as activism? How do we parse the gap between disability as metaphor and lived experience? What does literature offer disability studies, and why should disability studies be a core method for studying literature? This is a methods class, and readings will be divided between theoretical texts and primary sources. Students will learn to grapple with complex sociocultural and literary analysis, as well as to make space for their own primary source readings.
How does literature work through the structural and social struggle of disability to create discrete, sustainable worlds? How night the language of disability mobilize not just an identity category but a robust aesthetic apparatus of thought and feeling? This course works through Anglophone writing from India, South Africa, Britain, and the US to ask how disability remaps collectivity care, and personhood by querying vocabularies of cripness, capacity, debility, and illness. We will examine how disability challenge assumed categories of exceptionality and capitalist productivity, while also asking significant questions about civil rights and human rights. In addition, the course also tracks how disability studies has evolved beyond a narrow Anglo-American focus to understand complex Global South realities. Reading disability theorists like Rosemarie Garland Thompson, Eve Sedgwick, Jasbir Puar, and Eli Clare, we will think about the frictional registers of belonging and alienation represented in novels, autobiographies, short stories, and art.
Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring, and Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farmworkers Union, both campaigned against toxic exposures in the mid-20th-century United States and yet are rarely considered in tandem. This course puts the writings and activism of these two women in conversation, ranging through feminist, queer, and Latinx environmental writing to build connections between environmentalism and labor rights. Our study focuses on the craft of environmental nonfiction writing, examining contemporary practitioners working in the vein of Carson and Huerta. Students will also compose environmental nonfiction, employing the literary techniques analyzed in this course to craft a narrative addressing exposure, toxins, or the state of public health.
This course focuses on climate change literature, the most active and popular arena of contemporary environmental writing. Examining a variety of 20th and 21st century works—including science fiction, spoken word poetry, narrative fiction, and film—we will analyze how literature shapes and responds to planetary crisis. Which imaginative currents—apocalyptic, technocratic, communalist, militaristic—are molding readers' visions of the climatic future? Is it possible to narrate climate change as a multi-century catastrophe rooted in colonialism and the acquisition of capital? What can we learn about climate change from literature that we can't grasp through other fields of study? Since the works in this class cover a broad geographic range and include award-winning texts as well as relatively unknown books, we will also theorize how—and why—particular writers' voices become central or peripheral within climate discourse.
Envr Pol and Culture 283-0-01 Intro to Literature and the Environment
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.
Envr Pol and Culture 337-0-1 Hazard, Disaster and Society
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.
Envr Pol and Culture 339-0-1 Silent but Loud: Negotiating Health in a Cultural, Food, Poverty, Environ
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.
Envr Pol and Culture 390-0-21 Environmental Political Theory
Environmental Political Theory challenges the long-standing humanistic emphasis of political thought, insisting that nature is not simply a passive backdrop to human affairs but an active participant in political life. This course explores how social, discursive, and material forces interact to shape political systems, economies, and identities. We will examine how environmental political theorists reconceptualize the state, justice, and economic systems, while also rethinking political action and the meaning of human freedom. Special attention will be given to critiques of mainstream green politics and sustainable development, which, despite good intentions, can reinforce ideologies and institutions that drive ecological degradation. Alongside critique, we will study creative contemporary approaches that imagine new forms of political community and human freedom that do not depend on the domination and devaluation of nonhuman life. Finally, the course will turn to grassroots activism and community engagement as sites of possibility for building more just, democratic, and ecologically attuned forms of social, political, and economic order.
How do we understand the world around us? Do we collect, draw, describe, measure, or dissect? How have methods of understanding environments near and far changed over time? This class will explore the history of the environmental sciences (and its relatives and predecessors) to understand the ways humans have created knowledge of the natural world. By reviewing methods of scientific documentation and assessment from the early modern period to the present day, students will gain familiarity with methods of observation and evidence used across the natural sciences and learn to think critically about the conditions under which ‘scientific investigation' is employed. Topics will vary across travel narratives, cartography, nomenclature and taxonomy, and craniometry. Many of these evidentiary practices are still in use today, and serve as central evidence for scientific studies, climate policy, and nonprofit initiatives. As a result of its historical focus, this course will also interrogate how practices of scientific measurement and documentation are intimately tied to the establishment of imperial control, leading to lasting legacies in modern political and climate landscapes. Class trips to the Field Museum and McCormick Library of Special Collections will be incorporated into learning.
Envr Pol and Culture 390-0-23 Maple Syrup and Climate Change
As the earth's climate changes, maple trees and the maple syrup industry in the U.S. and Canada are being affected, in both good and bad ways. The class will cover these effects, their impact on Native American and non-Native communities, the maple syrup industry, and maple species themselves through articles and readings. Along with a focus on maple syrup production, we will cover aspects of food sovereignty happening across the United States, Canada, and other parts of the world. Examining how communities and countries are looking inward towards traditional economies and practices to adapt to a changing climate. Through field observations of climatic and natural phenomena, students will work in groups to collect data from three maple species on campus. The groups will examine and record sugar ratios, sap flow rates, and ambient temperature and precipitation: along with a focus on species differentiation, soil nutrients, and campus micro-climates. The final product for the class would be a group data report. A copy of the report will go to facilities management to be added to their campus tree inventory.
Envr Pol and Culture 390-0-25 US Health: Illiness and Inequality
In this course students will examine themes in the history of health in the U.S., particularly in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Readings will focus on the intersections between health and environment, gender, race, law, and religion. 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.
Envr Pol and Culture 390-0-26 Climate Change in Literature
This course focuses on climate change literature, the most active and popular arena of contemporary environmental writing. Examining a variety of 20th and 21st century works—including science fiction, spoken word poetry, narrative fiction, and film—we will analyze how literature shapes and responds to planetary crisis. Which imaginative currents—apocalyptic, technocratic, communalist, militaristic—are molding readers' visions of the climatic future? Is it possible to narrate climate change as a multi-century catastrophe rooted in colonialism and the acquisition of capital? What can we learn about climate change from literature that we can't grasp through other fields of study? Since the works in this class cover a broad geographic range and include award-winning texts as well as relatively unknown books, we will also theorize how—and why—particular writers' voices become central or peripheral within climate discourse.
Energy transitions are often described as technical and scientific achievements that occur when the inevitable growth and expansion of human civilization necessitates new technologies to provide energy. For instance, the transition to coal that took place during the Industrial Revolution is often portrayed as the result of technological invention and geological circumstance, rather than intentional political choices. Similarly, the ongoing effort to transition human societies to renewable energy in the present day is often understood as a challenge of scientific literacy and technological strategies, rather than one of political negotiation. This course examines how the technologies and social arrangements surrounding energy transitions become laden with political and cultural narratives that shape what is possible. We will discuss what truly just and liberatory energy futures might look like, in conversation with enduring debates between eco-modernism and eco-localism, techno-optimism and Luddhism, and other philosophical tensions. This course will include opportunities to pursue research, interact with guest speakers, and participate in immersive learning activities.
Envr Policy and Culture 212-0-1 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 how actors such as corporations, the media, and social movements impact public opinion around environmental issues. Further, we will critically examine the gendered, racial, and socioeconomic production of disparate environmental risks. A primary, central focus of this sociology course is environmental inequality, and students engage with a wide range of theories to examine environmental issues of their own choosing. This is not a public policy course.
Envr Policy and Culture 337-0-1 Hazard, Disaster 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 how actors such as corporations, the media, and social movements impact public opinion around environmental issues. Further, we will critically examine the gendered, racial, and socioeconomic production of disparate environmental risks. A primary, central focus of this sociology course is environmental inequality, and students engage with a wide range of theories to examine environmental issues of their own choosing. This is not a public policy course.
White Tu, Th 11:00-12:20pm Notes: SHC Core Course - List A
Envr Policy and Culture 390-0-20 Inventing the Earth
From the invention of plows that enabled early agriculturists to till the earth efficiently to the use of SeaKites to create eco-friendly energy in hostile ocean environments, technology has mediated and channeled human interactions the environment. This class will explore the evolving relationship of humans to the natural world and the role of technology in facilitating these interactions. We will review attempts to tame, order, combat, and preserve nature as well as the consequences of these interactions. The environment and technology also share a long scholarly tradition, and this course will draw on seminal texts alongside growing literature in history, anthropology, and digital humanities. In addition to technologies that enabled changes in human-environmental relations, topics such as pollution and depletion will form a core theme, as well as the role of technology in combatting climate change.
Envr Policy and Culture 390-0-24 Frontier Technology and Environmental Governance
Recent developments in the research and deployment of frontier technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Geoengineering, Geothermal Energy, Deep Sea Mining, and Nuclear Fusion have divided proponents of environmental sustainability. Many self-described realists and pragmatists argue that these technologies are necessary to save humanity from runaway climate change, while other more critical voices contend that these technologies may cause more harm than good, disempower humanity, or have unintended consequences. This course will prepare students to understand various perspectives within this discourse, and to analyze how political and social forces have shaped the conversation and governance strategies surrounding these technologies. The course will include research opportunities, guest speakers, and immersive learning activities.
Envr Policy and Culture 390-0-26 U.S. Environmental Politics
This course explores the political institutions that govern the interactions between humans and the natural environment in the United States. The goal of the course is to provide an overview of the major concepts and theoretical frameworks in political science that help us make sense of how environmental problems emerge and how we might address them. We will cover theories of collective action, distributive politics, interest group politics, and social movements, along with the role of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches in formulating and implementing environmental policy. We will apply these theories to key issue areas such as energy production, pollution, natural resources, and land use, as well as to emerging technologies with environmental implications, such as AI data centers.
Envr Policy and Culture 395-0-1 Politics of the U.S. Energy Transition
Climate change threatens to permanently alter and disrupt weather patterns, ecosystems, food sources, economic production, commerce, and migration. One way to mitigate these harmful effects is to reduce our reliance on the energy sources that contribute most to global warming. In this research seminar, students will examine the challenges and opportunities of transitioning energy production and consumption away from fossil fuels and toward lower-carbon alternatives in the United States. What are the concrete goals of the clean energy transition? What policy tools can be used to achieve them? What political obstacles does the transition face? How can we address the economic, social, and political consequences of its success or failure? Students will explore these questions by reading and applying key theories from political science and economics, as well as consulting policy reports, case studies, and news articles. The course will also teach students how to design, develop, and write a political science research paper. Our class time will be divided into substantive and research design sessions to guide students toward producing original research, presenting findings, and drafting a final paper on a topic related to the energy transition.
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 2000s and 2010s saw a rush of narratives that centered around one key subject: the cancer-afflicted girl. From the "dying angel" in A Walk to Remember, to John Green's infamous novel, The Fault in Our Stars, an obsession with the spunky sick girl dominated American culture. Yet while there seem to be sick girls everywhere, we also recognize that there is a gender gap in medical care quality. Not only do doctors screen for different disorders based on perceived gender, but also affected is the degree to which a patient's concerns and pain are taken seriously. This class will look at stories about ill and disabled characters to ask a wide range of questions about their relationship with gender. We will start in the nineteenth century, when questions of gender and illness rose to the cultural zeitgeist, and then investigate how these same questions echo in contemporary films and texts. Throughout the course, we will return to the question, what is it about the gendered ailing body that keeps us intrigued? To develop a chronology of illness, disability, and gender in literature, we will use movies like Moulin Rouge! and The Fault in Our Stars, and texts like "The Yellow Wall-paper," Sontag's Illness as Metaphor, and writing by Barbara Ehrenreich. Some topics of particular focus include tuberculosis, hypochondria, STIs, environmental illness, and cardiac failure.
Gbl Health 221-0-1 Beyond Porn: Sexuality, Health and Pleasure
Threesomes. Squirting. Vibrators. Butt plugs. Multiple orgasms. You may have seen them in pornography, but have you ever wanted to study and talk about sex, and specifically, how to have a satisfying sex life? Many people look to pornography not just for entertainment, but also for education about what satisfying sexual encounters look like. Unfortunately, much of what people learn from pornography doesn't lead them to healthy and satisfying sexual encounters and relationships. This lecture class isn't actually about pornography. It goes beyond many presumptions about sex and pleasure depicted in pornography, the media, and popular culture, in order to equip students with information that can lead to more satisfying and healthy sexual experiences across their lifespan, regardless of how they identify, or who or what they like. The course also familiarizes students with a wide spectrum of human identities, practices, and attitudes towards sex and sexuality. The course includes lectures from guest speakers with particular expertise or experience in topics covered. Possible topics covered include: physiological and biological sex; gender; sexual orientation; homophobia and heterosexism; navigating sexual risks in a sex-positive way; sexual health disparities; sexual desire, arousal, and response; solitary sex & sex with others; sex toys; unconventional sexual practices; intimacy and effective communication; sexuality & aging; sexuality, disability & intimacy; sexual problems and solutions; sexual harassment and violence; selling sex; and hallmarks of great relationships; race, gender & sexuality, and yes, dotted through the quarter are some references to pornography.
Gbl Health 222-0-2 The Social Determinants of Health
The human body is embedded into a health framework that can produce hypervisibility, invisibility, or both. This upper-level course 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, self-care, and care of loved ones This course focuses on the linkages between society and health inequalities in the U.S., U.S. territories, Brazil, and Africa. It offers a forum to explore how social standings (mis)inform policies. This course utilizes historical accounts, contemporary ethnographies, Twitter threads of health experiences, public health literature, media reports, TedTalks, and films to bring to life the "why's" of health differences.
Gbl Health 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 upper-level course 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, self-care, and care of loved ones This course focuses on the linkages between society and health inequalities in the U.S., U.S. territories, Brazil, and Africa. It offers a forum to explore how social standings (mis)inform policies. 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. With an emphasis on the ethical responsibility to reduce inequities, we consider some of the most pressing global bioethical issues of our time: equity, fairness, and planetary health. Particular attention is given to the ethics of research during a pandemic and equitable access to vaccines and therapies for Covid-19.
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. With an emphasis on the ethical responsibility to reduce inequities, we consider some of the most pressing global bioethical issues of our time: equity, fairness, and planetary health. Particular attention is given to the ethics of research during a pandemic and equitable access to vaccines and therapies for Covid-19.
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. With an emphasis on the ethical responsibility to reduce inequities, we consider some of the most pressing global bioethical issues of our time: equity, fairness, and planetary health. Particular attention is given to the ethics of research during a pandemic and equitable access to vaccines and therapies for Covid-19
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 lecture course uses the Covid-19 pandemic as a point of departure to study the history of global health and biomedicine. We will break the quarter into four segments during which we will consider: 1) the "unification of the globe" by infectious diseases; 2) the role of empires, industries, war, and revolutions in spreading biomedical cultures around the world; 3) the functions played by transnational and global health institutions in different continents; and 4) the growth of the pharmaceutical industry and the narcotics trade. Students will have a chance to apply insights from the readings - about histories of racial segregation, reproductive politics, militarization, and police powers - to the more recent past. Lectures and readings cover all world regions: Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, Asia, Europe, and the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
Gbl Health 310-1-1 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.
Gbl Health 318-0-1 Community-based Participatory Research
Oftentimes we hear of research done on communities. What we hear less about is the power inequities, silences, and sometimes, violence, that many research paradigms (un)intentionally produce within their research. This course exposes prevalent assumptions underlying common research methodologies and demonstrates why they are problematic for many of the communities that researchers purport to want to assist. We then delve into community-based participatory research (CBPR), a research paradigm that challenges researchers to conduct research with communities. In this reading-intense discussion-based course, we will learn the historical and theoretical foundations, and the key principles of CBPR. Students will be introduced to methodological approaches to building community partnerships, research planning, and data sharing. Real-world applications of CBPR in health will be studied to illustrate benefits and challenges of this methodological approach to research. Further, this course will address culturally appropriate interventions, working with diverse communities, and ethical considerations in CBPR.
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?
This course draws on perspectives from anthropology and related social scientific fields to provide a comparative overview of the impact of armed conflict on public health and health care systems worldwide. Drawing primarily on examples from recent history, including conflicts in the Balkans, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East, we will explore warfare as a crucial sociopolitical determinant of global health disparities and consider organized efforts to respond to the health impacts of mass violence. Key topics that we will consider include variations in the relationship between warfare and public health across eras and cultures; the health and mental health impacts of forced displacement, military violence, and gender-based violence; and the roles of medical humanitarianism and humanitarian psychiatry in postwar recovery processes. Through close readings of classic and contemporary social theory, ethnographic accounts, and diverse research on war, health, and postwar humanitarian interventions, this course will encourage you to build your own critical perspective on war and public health anchored in history and the complexities of real-world situations.
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.
Gbl Health 323-0-1 Global Health from Policy to Practice
This seminar explores global 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 aid recipients, the course asks: what politics inform which issues become prioritized or codified in global 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 global 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 global health actors, and what does this mean for the challenges that such policies aim to address? Ultimately, what is the relationship between global health politics and global health disparities?
Gbl Health 324-0-1 Volunteerism and the Ethics of Help
Since the early 2000s, there has been an explosion of interest in volunteering in low-income communities: within orphanages, clinics, schools, conservation projects, refugee camps, and housing projects. At the same time, volunteering has become a significant issue of public debate, as unintended consequences of people's best intentions are brought to light in the popular press and in academic literature. This class explores the ethics of altruism through the discourses and practices that make up volunteering and voluntourism, from the perspectives of volunteers, hosts, and a range of others both promoting and critiquing volunteerism. What motivates people to volunteer among strangers or in unfamiliar contexts, and what are the implications of these voluntary exchanges for the volunteers, and for the communities and institutions where volunteering takes place? What are the ethics and values that make up "making a difference" among differently-situated players involved in volunteering? Given that volunteers often act upon best intentions, what are the logics and values that justify altruistic action, and the differential standards by which volunteers are judged based on where they go and how they engage in volunteering? What kinds of unintended consequences come about through voluntary action? This class highlights the need go beyond the adage "any help is better than no help at all," and instead bring critical thinking to altruistic intentions.
The history of reproduction is a large subject, and during this course we will touch on many, but by no means all, of what can be considered as part of this history. Our focus will be on human reproduction, considering the vantage points of both healthcare practitioners and lay women and men. We will look at ideas concerning fertility, conception, pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, birth control, abortion, and assisted reproduction. Because, at a fundamental level, reproduction is about power - as historian Amy Kaler (but by no means only Kaler), pointed out, "[c]control over human reproduction is eternally contested, in zones ranging from the comparative privacy of the conjugal bedroom to the political platform and programs of national polities" - we will pay attention to power in reproductive health. And, since the distribution of power in matters of reproduction has often been uneven and unequal - between men and women, between colonizing and Indigenous populations, between clinicians and lay people, between those in upper socioeconomic classes and those in lower socioeconomic classes - we will pay particular attention during this class to struggles over matters of reproduction as we explore historical changes and continuities in reproduction globally since 1900.
Gbl Health 326-0-1 Native Nations, Healthcare Systems and US Policy
In the territory currently called the United States of America, healthcare for Native populations is often experienced as a tension between settler colonial domination and activism among Native nations to uphold their Indigenous sovereignty. This reading-intensive, discussion-based seminar will provide students with a complex and in-depth understanding of the historical and contemporary policies and systems created for, by, and in collaboration with Native nations. In order to understand the U.S. government's role and responsibility towards Native nations, we will delve into legal foundations of the trust responsibility and fiduciary obligation of the federal government as outlined in the U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court decisions. To understand how Native nations continuously work within and resist colonial settler systems to exercise their sovereignty, students will examine notable federal and state policies that affect Native health, wellbeing, and (lack of) access to meaningful care.
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 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.
Gbl Health 339-0-1 Silent but Loud: Negotiating Health in a Cultural, Food, Poverty Environ
To be "healthy" is a complex obstacle course that many individuals living in certain bodies have to navigate. Black bodies, for example, are often the tied to (un)health because they are stereotyped as in need to be controlled, managed, and "guided" into healthfulness. In the U.S., these narrow stereotypes are just a few of the ways Black bodies get defined. In this course, we will move beyond those restrictive stereotypes, guided by questions such as, "How does culture define health?", "How does the food pipeline affect the health of certain bodies?" and "What does it mean to live in an obesogenic environment?" In this course, we examine the connection between health, culture, food, and environment with a focus on what is silenced and what is loud when generating "fixes" for "diseased" bodies. Silence refers to the disregard and dismissiveness of the narratives and experiences around the oppressions attached to the health of certain bodies. Yet, this silence echoes as Loud when connected to their culture, food, and environment when discussing diseases highlighted in Black bodies such as obesity, hypertension, and diabetes.
This course 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?
This course introduces students to pressing disease and health care problems worldwide and examines efforts currently underway to address them. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the course identifies the main actors, institutions, practices and forms of knowledge production characteristic of what we call "global health" today, and explores the environmental, social, political and economic factors that shape patterns and experiences of illness and healthcare across societies. We will scrutinize the value systems that underpin specific paradigms in the policy and science of global health and place present-day developments in historical perspective. Key topics will include: policies and approaches to global health governance and interventions, global economies and their impacts on public health, medical humanitarianism, global mental health, maternal and child health, pandemics (HIV/AIDS, Ebola, H1N1, Swine Flu), malaria, food insecurity, health and human rights, and global health ethics.
Gbl Health 390-0-29 Literary Genres and Health: A TBR Readalong
When I was an undergraduate student my "To Be Read" list was always really long and often forgotten. As I have re-established my love of reading for fun I see how literary genres influence and challenge our understanding of well-being/health. Fiction, non-fiction, poems, memoirs, novels, young adult fiction, science fiction, mysteries, fantasy, fairy tales, horror, magical realism, and so many other genres influence our definitions of health or wellbeing. They provide insight into how other folks imagine and understanding situations we may or may not find ourselves in. Our course will consider some of these and other genres noted above. The best text allow us to empathize with the characters or challenge what we thought we knew. We will read one book as a class. In addition, you'll be asked to individually select a book to read/listen to, a list of various text will also be provided if you need guidance in choosing a text. You will learn how these materials influence or challenge norms about health and well-being. Professor Reyes will help you access books that aren't easily available or affordable.
Gbl Health 390-0-32 Achieving Global Impact through Local Engagement
Reducing chronic diseases and controlling infectious diseases are no longer just the responsibility of national governments, private health care institutions, city departments of public health, or community physicians. Cardio-vascular disease, stroke, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases, obesity and diabetes, substance abuse such as opioids, tobacco and alcohol, and a range of health safety issues are now the major causes of death throughout the world. In addition, especially in low resource countries and communities, people are especially vulnerable to infectious diseases such as HIV and AIDS, Zika, Ebola, Malaria, Tuberculosis, Diarrheal diseases, as well as other viruses, parasites and antibiotic resistant bacteria. With the understanding that a healthy society is also a more economically productive society, there is an increased emphasis on reducing the burden of disease in local communities throughout the world. As a result, there is an enormous increase in the number of organizations and programs that are being implemented by the three sectors of society, public, private and civil society. This course is designed for those global health students who are seeking ways to have an impact on these global health issues by engaging in local programs and organizations which are addressing these global health challenges.
Gbl Health 390-0-34 Pregnancy and Childbirth Since 1800
People's ideas about pregnancy - how to prevent or enable, when it starts and how it progresses, how to ensure it is healthy, how to intentionally end it early, and what it means when it ends early unintentionally - have changed, in some cases dramatically, over the past 275 years. In addition, ideas about childbirth have also changed since 1750, going from what was largely a female event, one assisted (if assisted at all) by women who had gained their knowledge through experiential learning to one where the most ‘appropriate' attendant obtained their skills formally, in alignment with biomedical ideas, and overseen by the state. How have laboring women, midwives (both formally and experientially trained), physicians, fathers, family members, and the state participated in changes regarding conceptualizations of pregnancy and childbirth? We will consider this question within both local and global frames, seeking to juxtapose microhistory "and broadly comparative narratives" to, per Northwestern history professor Amy Stanley, zoom in "on the particularities of a local situation" and pan out "to ponder the commonalities."
Gbl Health 390-0-35 Disease Outbreak and Investigation
This course explores the methods used to investigate disease outbreaks, with particular emphasis on the COVID-19 pandemic. Students examine the principles and practices of outbreak investigation, including the epidemiological and statistical techniques used to detect, investigate, and mitigate outbreaks. Topics include public health surveillance, contact tracing, environmental health assessment, forensic epidemiology, and crisis and emergency risk communication. The course incorporates real-world case simulations for pathogens such as Ebola, Avian-influenza, Foodborne, and bioterrorism.
Gender St 221-0-20 Beyond Porn: Sexuality, Health and Pleasure
Threesomes. Squirting. Vibrators. Butt plugs. Multiple orgasms. You may have seen them in pornography, but have you ever wanted to study and talk about sex, and specifically, how to have a satisfying sex life? Many people look to pornography not just for entertainment, but also for education about what satisfying sexual encounters look like. Unfortunately, much of what people learn from pornography doesn't lead them to healthy and satisfying sexual encounters and relationships. This lecture class isn't actually about pornography. It goes beyond many presumptions about sex and pleasure depicted in pornography, the media, and popular culture, in order to equip students with information that can lead to more satisfying and healthy sexual experiences across their lifespan, regardless of how they identify, or who or what they like. The course also familiarizes students with a wide spectrum of human identities, practices, and attitudes towards sex and sexuality. The course includes lectures from guest speakers with expertise or experience in topics covered. Possible topics covered include: physiological and biological sex; gender & gender norms; sexual orientation; navigating sexual risks in a sex-positive way; sexual health disparities; sexual desire, arousal, and response; solitary sex & sex with others; sex toys; unconventional sexual practices; intimacy and effective communication; sexuality & aging; sexuality, disability & intimacy; sexual problems and solutions; sexual harassment and violence; hallmarks of great relationships; and yes, dotted through the quarter are some references to pornography.
From abstinence-only sex education programs to the public response to songs like WAP by Cardi B & Megan thee Stallion, we are bombarded with messaging that sexuality is stigmatized. But why is sexuality so taboo? How do social forces shape the way we view, experience, and regulate sexuality? Using a sociological lens, this course explores the intersection of sexuality and stigma. We will begin by exploring foundational theories of both stigma and sexuality in the social sciences. Armed with these frameworks, we will then engage with in-depth case studies of different stigmatized sexualities, including homosexuality, bisexuality, asexuality, HIV/AIDS, infidelity, sex work, kink, ethical non-monogamy, and disabled sexualities. The course will empower students to interrogate their own assumptions and to critically examine the forces that perpetuate sexual inequality in society. By the end of the course, students will have gained a deeper understanding of how stigma operates at both the individual and structural level. The final assignment requires students to write a proposal for a research project that would answer a sociological question of their choice about stigma and sexuality.
This course is an opportunity for students to critically examine what is often a taken-for-granted aspect of social life: gender. This course will involve learning about gender as well as applying gender theory. We will study a variety of theoretical approaches to the study of gender, with particular focus on how problems are identified and theories are developed. We will examine emergent cases of gender theorization - childhood gender and sexuality panics, bathroom surveillance, and the intersex experience, among others. By the end of the term, students will be able to 1) describe and compare theoretical anchors for the sociological study of gender and 2) in writing, apply gender theory to original ethnographic data. This is a reading-heavy upper division course and prior course experience in gender/sexuality studies (by way of taking Gender & Society or other course work) is strongly advised.
Gender St 332-0-20 Gender, Sexuality and Health Activism
How do conceptions of "health" relate to ideological assumptions about gender, race, class, and sexuality? In this course, we will explore this question through a close examination of a range of activist movements that have attempted to challenge contemporaneous conceptions of health and models of disease. Case studies will focus on the U.S. and will include: 1) Groups/movements organized around a common (but often unstable or otherwise vexed) identity (e.g. we consider the changing assumptions, demands, and goals of movements committed to "women's health" from the19th century "birth control movement" and the 1970s-1990s-era reproductive rights, mental health, and environmental rights activism that made up the "women's heath movement" through the current "reproductive justice movement" and its opponents); 2) Groups/movements that use (non-violent) direct action to respond to a ‘health crisis' (e.g. ACT UP and AIDS activism; WHAM! and more recent activism around abortion access/care; Breast Cancer Action and ongoing breast cancer/environmental activism); 3) Groups/movements that challenge mainstream "biomedical" models of health and disease and (the often) tacit assumptions that inform them (e.g. the Black Panther Party "survival (pending revolution) programs"; the "healing justice" framework used by groups as diverse as the Icarus Project/Fireweed Collective and BYP100; Local Covid-era "mutual aid" projects, many of which are ongoing). In each case, we will consider how activists frame the problem, the tactics they use to mobilize a diverse group of social actors around the problem, and their success in creating a social movement that challenges contemporary medical models and the ideological assumptions that inform them. The course also introduces students to recent interdisciplinary scholarship on social movements.
Gender St 332-0-20 Reproductive Health, Justice, Politics
As feminist scholar Michelle Murphy points out, "reproduction is not self-evidently a capacity located in sexed bodies"; it is instead a site (or formation) that joins, "cells, protocols, bodies, nations, capital, economics, freedom, and affect as much as sex and women into its sprawl." Thus, she reminds us, "how we constitute reproduction shapes how it can be imagined, altered and politicized." In this seminar we will explore the changing contours of "reproductive politics" from the 1960s to the present (or from the period immediately pre-Roe v Wade through the recent 2022 decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization) through an in-depth investigation of a range of projects and organizations that conceptually reimagine what we mean by "reproduction," the scope and content of "reproductive politics," and the kinds of demands that can be made in the name of reproductive health, rights, freedom and justice.
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 a range of cases, we will explore the dynamic interplay among expert findings, social identities, and political arguments
In this course, we examine how the Western medical system and accompanying health practices impact people of different genders, as well as how healthcare as an institution and practice produces gender categories. Using interdisciplinary research with a focus on sociological studies, we will interrogate the social, institutional, and biological links between gender and health. We will discuss health inequalities between women, men, and trans* people from different race, ethnic, and class backgrounds, using sociological research to understand why these inequalities and forms of difference emerge and are sustained. We will explore how modern Western medicine views male and female bodies and defines their health and illnesses accordingly. Students will complete two short research projects over the term in which they use different data sources (interviews and media content) to examine gendered perceptions of health, health behaviors, help-seeking behaviors, and experiences with medical institutions.
The 2000s and 2010s saw a rush of narratives that centered around one key subject: the cancer-afflicted girl. From the "dying angel" in A Walk to Remember, to John Green's infamous novel, The Fault in Our Stars, an obsession with the spunky sick girl dominated American culture. Yet while there seem to be sick girls everywhere, we also recognize that there is a gender gap in medical care quality. Not only do doctors screen for different disorders based on perceived gender, but also affected is the degree to which a patient's concerns and pain are taken seriously. This class will look at stories about ill and disabled characters to ask a wide range of questions about their relationship with gender. We will start in the nineteenth century, when questions of gender and illness rose to the cultural zeitgeist, and then investigate how these same questions echo in contemporary films and texts. Throughout the course, we will return to the question, what is it about the gendered ailing body that keeps us intrigued? To develop a chronology of illness, disability, and gender in literature, we will use movies like Moulin Rouge! and The Fault in Our Stars, and texts like "The Yellow Wall-paper," Sontag's Illness as Metaphor, and writing by Barbara Ehrenreich. Some topics of particular focus include tuberculosis, hypochondria, STIs, environmental illness, and cardiac failure.
Much recent fiction, film, and theory are concerned with representing the internet and the world wide web. Sometimes cyberspace is depicted as a continuation of previous media such as television, cinema or telephone, but often it is envisioned as a new frontier. This course will examine the ways in which virtual media appears in cultural discourses. We consider how technological objects and tools participate in shaping elements of our culture that may appear natural, logical, or timeless. We will look examine films predicting the internet, cyberpunk fiction predating the www, and early websites from many sources. In addition, this quarter we will consider various generative AI programs, assessing their strengths and weaknesses. Our guiding questions will include the following: In what ways are these narratives shaping collective perceptions of the internet? How have virtual technologies challenged experiences of language, gender, community, and identity? Following a Cultural Studies model for inquiry, this course will be project-based and experiential. Your attendance and participation are mandatory. No experience needed, only a willingness to take risks and share work.
History 200-0-22 Sex and The Body in Early America
This course examines the history of sex and the body in early America, a particularly fruitful time and place for this study, as multiple different groups including Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans came together with different ideas and practices. These groups used the evidence of the body and embodied experience to articulate notions of sameness and difference at various moments, leading to new ideas about key concepts like race, gender, and sexuality. Topics include disability, disease and medicine, reproduction, sexuality, and sexual violence.
Politicians, business elites, architects, and common people have hailed cities as engines of modernist progress since the mid-19th century. This course focuses on cities of the Global South to demonstrate how key modernist ideas, many of which had foreign origins, were appropriated under colonial, newly independent states, and contemporary national regimes. At the same time, the class will show that modern urbanist practices and ideas from the Global South have, in turn, influenced city planning in the Global North. This N-S exchange prompts us to consider what constitutes a "Global City", whether conceptually, historically, or in the present and future.
Aguilar M, W 12:30-1:50pm Notes: SHC Core Course - List A
History 200-0-30 Global Tech
Technology is everywhere in the news nowadays. Some describe the changes it will bring with fear, some others with enthusiasm, but rarely with a cool head. Fears about AI destroying humanity or hopes for its future are just two faces of the same problem: we fear or we love technology, but do we understand it? Technology is often presented as a quick fix to solving complex human problems without the need to radically alter our behaviour or economy. Some say that climate change can be addressed with geoengineering or Direct Carbon Capture. And just this year, AirPods began to offer to translate foreign languages in real time, possibly eliminating the nuisance of having to learn other languages. But is technology a neutral tool to be used as we please? Confusion arises from the way we understand technology, as we tend to focus only on high-tech, large-scale systems, ignoring the less visible but more impactful technologies. But are the same technologies significant to different people around the world? What are the social, economic, and political limits of technological solutions?
In this course, we will explore the global history of technology in at least four ways: First, we will study the historical changes in the Western conception of technology in comparison with notions of technology and the material beyond Europe and North America. Second, we will explore how people in the past have also attached meanings, hopes and fears to technology, showing that our ambiguous relationship to technology is not as new or definitive as we might think. Third, we will consider the ways that seemingly "ordinary" technologies have shaped the lives of people in different periods and geographies. And fourth, we will trace the relationship between ‘old' and ‘new' technologies, alongside notions of obsolescence, technical change and the repurposing of existing technology. Our goal will be to understand the global process by which societies in different places have adopted technologies and understood their social role.
This interdisciplinary seminar explores several kinds of scientific ingenuity and technical know-how that have developed in the African continent across the centuries. You'll learn a little about metallurgy and sculpture, music and therapeutics, landscapes and foodways, architecture and urban aesthetics, mapping and cosmologies, human origins and genesis stories, algorithms and games, and economic systems and trans-Saharan trade. We'll do a range of exercises that help you place case studies in their widest context, geographical, linguistic, sociocultural, and temporal. We'll discuss what it means to make and create useful arts, to know and manage environments, and to cultivate well-being. We'll also examine different yardsticks that have been used to measure - and often denigrate - African accomplishments. Finally, we'll look at classic texts in the history of science to see how, if at all, African places and peoples were included and what was omitted.
The Inquisition is one of the most infamous and misunderstood institutions in the early modern world. This seminar examines some of the myths and debates surrounding the working of its tribunals and their impact on society, with special emphasis on the practices, experiences, and worldviews of ordinary subjects. How have the records of the Inquisition been used to reconstruct the histories of the Jewish diaspora, African healers, bigamists, homosexuals, and "witches," among others? Participants will pursue their own answers and construct an alternate archive by which to tell the stories of prosecuted figures. Topics include religious tolerance and intolerance; healing and love magic in the Americas; the policing and politics of gender and sexuality; and the lives of Jewish conversos.
History 292-0-26 Fossil Fuels and Climate Change in Palestine and Israel
With a warming rate double the global average and half of the world's oil reserves, the Middle East is a pivotal site for understanding the history, present, and future of climate change. Although Israel/Palestine is not today an oil-producing country, historically it was imagined differently: in the 19th and 20th centuries it was considered a promising frontier for oil exploration and became a regional hub of fossil fuel infrastructures, channeling Middle Eastern oil and North African gas to Europe. This seminar examines how the rise of fossil fuels and the dynamics of climate change played out in Palestine/Israel and shaped both the Zionist-Palestinian struggle and Palestine's place within the Middle East. We will consider how the Middle East became "Middle" through the interplay between energy sources, infrastructures, and colonial powers. We will explore how carbonization in the region gave rise to new forms of political rule, reshaping identities and altering environments, and how seemingly mundane infrastructures - from coaling depots to automobility - enabled and managed colonial power as well as resistance to it. Drawing on archival materials alongside fiction, poetry, and film in Arabic and Hebrew (all provided in English translation), we will analyze the intimate, everyday, and affective dimensions of carbonization and warming, exploring how these forces shaped subjectivities and societies. Finally, we will consider how different notions of heat and cooling technologies were tied to specific constructions of gender, race, and class.
From biblical times until the present day, Jewish and non-Jewish theologians, worshipers, politicians, dissidents, scientists, and ethicists have vigorously debated the relationship between the Jewish tradition and the natural world. Indeed, they have frequently used Jewish texts as means of interrogating just what "nature" consists of in the first place. This course will undertake a thematic exploration of how Jews have thought about and interacted with the environment, the animal kingdom, shifts in climate, and the miraculous or "unnatural" elements of the Jewish tradition that might seem incompatible with the regular "laws of nature." We will pay particular attention to the interreligious settings in which Jewish texts and ideas were produced, and to the concrete political ends for which religious beliefs and scientific knowledge were often deployed. The course will begin by exploring the Hebrew Bible and its reception, and will proceed roughly chronologically, concluding in the modern era. As we shall see, an understanding of this long term history is vital for making sense of contemporary debates and innovations in Jewish religiosty, environmental activism, and various political movements in the United States and the State of Israel.
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.
Alder M, W 2:30-3:20pm Notes: SHC Core Course - List A
History 325 History of American Technology
We are currently living through a technological revolution that is radically transforming every aspect of our social, economic, and personal lives. But maybe this is nothing new. From the telegraph to social media, from the bicycle to electric vehicles, from typewriters to AI, Americans have long identified technological change as central to their personal and national destiny. This class deploys historical methods to answer core questions about the past, present, and future of technology. Do artifacts have politics? Is time accelerating? What counts as technological progress—and is it different this time around? To answer these questions, this course operates on a flipped-classroom model. In lectures, students learn how an entire social world can be illuminated by the study of an individual artifact. And in weekly workshop-sections, students are guided as they write an original research paper on the social history of an artifact of their choice. (Note, enrolled students get credit for a history distro/FD, Advanced Expression, and U.S. Perspectives).
Tilley M, W 2:00-3:20pm Notes: SHC Core Course - List A
History 379 Biomedicine and World History
This lecture course uses the Covid-19 pandemic as a point of departure to study the history of global health and biomedicine. We will break the quarter into four segments during which we will consider: 1) the "unification of the globe" by infectious diseases; 2) the role of empires, industries, war, and revolutions in spreading biomedical cultures around the world; 3) the functions played by transnational and global health institutions in different continents; and 4) the growth of the pharmaceutical industry and the narcotics trade. Students will have a chance to apply insights from the readings - about histories of racial segregation, reproductive politics, militarization, and police powers - to the more recent past. Lectures and readings cover all world regions: Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, Asia, Europe, and the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
Water has been the most ubiquitous and essential material in human history. What is less well known, however, is that the quantities of water controlled by humans, and the very nature of water itself, have changed very radically in the last two hundred years. Today, most controlled water is used, and in large quantities, for irrigation and industry. Water control has been the subject of many forms of expertise, from medicine to engineering to hydrodynamics. This transformation represents one of the largest human interventions in nature. How has water shaped the modern world, and what forms of knowledge and technology have driven this transformation? This course explores the central role of water in constructing modernity during the 19th and 20th centuries. Among the historical cases examined are the transformation of the Rhine River into a navigable waterway in the 19th century, the Panama Canal and its impact on global trade, and large-scale infrastructure like the Hoover Dam, the Aswan Dam, and the Three Gorges Dam, which provided electricity for rapidly growing 20th-century cities, industry and irrigation. Everyday transformations, such as improved urban water and sanitation in the 19th and 20th centuries, are also explored, highlighting how access to clean drinking water improved public health and extended life expectancy. The course analyses the political economy of water, alongside social movements and adaptations to water crises, such as communal irrigation in Bolivia and Colombia's community-managed water supply systems.
History 395-0-20 Commodities and Culture in Atlantic Africa
This research seminar offers students the opportunity to conduct primary historical research on the relationships between transoceanic commerce and cultural formations in Western Africa between 1500 and 1850. With emphasis on the commodity chains that linked Western Africa to the other parts of the Atlantic Basin, especially Western Europe and the Americas (US, Caribbean, Brazil, etc.), the seminar will examine the impacts of transatlantic trade networks on taste, aesthetics, social valuation, epistemology, religion, political culture, science and technology, ethnic and gender identities, and everyday lives. Among the commodities that will be discussed are tobacco, tobacco pipes, cowries, beads, metal objects, cloth, alcohol, and enslaved people. Students will have the option to use quantitative, qualitative, or object-focused primary sources, including the artifacts in the Material History Lab at Northwestern University.
The arrival of European colonizing powers in the Americas in the wake of Columbus's voyages marked a new and often disastrous chapter in global environmental history. American nations and environments shaped the course of European colonial settlement at the same time as colonial expansion profoundly changed the flora, fauna, disease ecology, and patterns of labor and land use prevailing across the Americas. This seminar explores the entangled histories of imperial and environmental history in the colonial Atlantic world. Topics will include the so-called Columbian Exchange and the dispossession of indigenous lands; the transatlantic slave trade and the rise of the plantation system; the intersections of African, European, and Indigenous American agricultural practices; European theories of race and climate; colonial bioprospecting; and the role of disease in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. We will also consider the imperial origins of modern conservationism and of key environmental concepts such as ‘wilderness' and 'native' and 'invasive' species.
This research seminar examines climate history from the Middle Ages to the Modern Period. Through historical and environmental approaches, it considers Earth's climate as both a cultural construction and a physical phenomenon. As a concept crafted by humans to make sense of and stabilize their relationship with the weather, climate has profoundly shaped societal imaginations and practices. Students will explore how past societies envisioned the sky and developed diverse ways of interacting with it, investigating why some climate ideas gained global traction while others remained geographically and culturally confined. Topics will include Western theories of climate and health; Indigenous approaches to sustaining and restoring atmospheric balance; the ecological impact of empires and extractive economies; the role of religion, technology, and scientific inquiry in shaping climatic understandings; and the polarized discourses of human-driven climate change. By situating climate within specific cultures and ecologies, such as the Indian Ocean, the Eurasian steppe, the African Sahel, the Andes, wetlands, and glaciers, this course offers a nuanced and global perspective on humanity's enduring interaction with the natural world and its long-standing efforts to control it.
Humanities 310-4-20 Pregnancy and Childbirth c. 1750 to Present
eople's ideas about pregnancy - how to prevent or enable, when it starts and how it progresses, how to ensure it is healthy, how to intentionally end it early, and what it means when it ends early unintentionally - have changed, in some cases dramatically, over the past 275 years. In addition, ideas about childbirth have also changed since 1750, going from what was largely a female event, one assisted (if assisted at all) by women who had gained their knowledge through experiential learning to one where the most ‘appropriate' attendant obtained their skills formally, in alignment with biomedical ideas, and overseen by the state. How have laboring women, midwives (both formally and experientially trained), physicians, fathers, family members, and the state participated in changes regarding conceptualizations of pregnancy and childbirth? We will consider this question within both local and global frames, seeking to juxtapose microhistory "and broadly comparative narratives" to, per Northwestern history professor Amy Stanley, zoom in "on the particularities of a local situation" and pan out "to ponder the commonalities." This course takes a comparative approach regarding the history of pregnancy and childbirth. We will begin in the 1700s, as during this century multiple states across Europe began more formal training for midwives, requiring midwives pass oral examinations to practice, and requiring midwives be registered with the government. In addition, it is this century when men began to engage more frequently in normal deliveries, first as male midwives and then by the 1800s as obstetricians. Drawing from histories focusing on individuals and institutions from across the globe, we will explore changes and continuities in both popular and medical ideas about when a pregnancy starts; how to become pregnant; how to prevent or end pregnancy; fetal development; perceived risks in pregnancy and childbirth; and what counts as ‘normal' and ‘safe' labor and delivery. Further, we will consider who has been regarded as an expert in pregnancy and childbirth and shifts in authority, who has been seen as the appropriate attendant during labor, when and why actors beyond the laboring woman and the attendant have become interested in pregnancy and childbirth, and the role of the state regarding pregnancy and childbirth. In this class we will be attentive to historical changes and continuities regarding pregnancy and childbirth globally since 1750, enabling us to consider historical themes and patterns, with the intention of better understanding how ideas and concerns regarding pregnancy and childbirth do not exist in isolation from larger sociopolitical and economic concerns.
Humanities 325-6-20 Reclaiming Lost Ancestries in the Digital Age
The seminar examines migration and cultural memory across transatlantic and transpacific networks, situating contemporary Spanish cultural production within broader global circuits of movement, diaspora, and archival occlusions. Taught in Spanish, while reading and listening Spanish skills are required, participation can be in English. The course foregrounds critical fabulation as a method for addressing archival gaps, interrogating official histories, and reimagining ancestry beyond documentary evidence. Students will examine the ethical implications of AI in shaping historical and genealogical narratives, from archival access and preservation decisions to digital reconstruction. Class sessions will include visits to local community archives such as the Shorefront Legacy Center and Evanston ASPA. The seminar culminates in a digital family history project, completed in Spanish or English. The students will participate in structured in-class workshops to scaffold their progress, ensuring both conceptual depth and technical proficiency. At once experimenting with digital tools and interrogating the limits of historical knowledge, students will create projects with impact beyond the classroom. This course advances the role of digital humanities in transmedia storytelling, memory studies, and contemporary genealogical inquiry.
Individually and collectively, we think about what might happen in the time to come. We consider the future over a range of time-horizons, from the immediate (what will happen in the next hour) to the distant (how will things look in a century). We worry about our own individual futures (will I have a job when I graduate from Northwestern?), we worry about other peoples' futures (will my child get a job after they graduate from college?), and we worry about our collective futures (what will climate change do to our society over the next 50 years?). Frequently, we make plans for the future, either to create a future that we seek, or to avoid a future that is problematic. Public policy is often concerned with how to create better collective futures, and the tricky part is figuring out which alternatives are better than others, and for whom. Sometimes people make contingency plans, deciding what to do if something happens (for example, disaster planning). Such activity generally involves making two types of guesses: what will or could happen in the future, and what will our future preferences be about those various possibilities. In certain cases, the predictions we make are "self-fulfilling" in that the prediction helps to make itself come true (bank runs are a classic example). In this course, we will work through a series of examples where people have thought about the future, sometimes focused on very specific features. Students are expected to participate in class discussions in addition to completing a series of short take-home writing assignments. Readings are a mixture of social science articles (non-fiction) and two novels (fiction) offering visions of the future.Students will develop a more sophisticated way to think about their own individual futures as well as the future of our society.
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 a range of cases, we will explore the dynamic interplay among expert findings, social identities, and political arguments.
Humanities in the Digita Age 325-6-20 Telling Chicago Climate Stories
Chicago, as well as the broader Midwest region, has often been cast as geographically shielded from climate change-induced environmental destabilization. And yet the city and its environs are still affected by the impacts of climate change in increasingly extreme weather patterns, subsidence, and other environmental upheavals, leading the city to declare a state of climate emergency in 2020. How do the stories we tell about place shape how we understand and respond to climate change? In this project-based course, students will be immersed in diverse approaches to telling stories of climate change in a primarily U.S. context. Throughout the quarter, we will examine a wide range of research-driven, place-based stories of climate change across media, from a documentary film about the hottest August in New York City to a StoryMap about climate resilience in the Ohio River Valley and nonfiction writing and journalism about how landscape changes exacerbated by climate change are transforming life for different urban and coastal communities. Alongside our discussion of such storytelling projects, students will work in teams on a quarter-long collaborative project about how a place or community in the Chicagoland area has experienced, addressed, or imagined climate change. Teams will be formed based on student interests in a location/topic and in a particular storytelling medium. Project-based work will require independent travel to off-campus locations.
Humanities in the Digital Age 325-4-20 Refugees, Migration, Exile - Digital Storytelling
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.
Latino and Latina Studies 392-0-2 Race and Ethnicity in the Digital Age
The internet was once envisioned as a space free of social hierarchies, promising a democratic and post-racial world. However, the digital world has consistently mirrored and, at times, amplified the inequalities and biases present in society. This course explores the intersections of race, ethnicity, and digital media, focusing on how Latinas/os/xs and other communities of color navigate, challenge, and shape digital spaces. Students will critically examine both the constraints and possibilities that digital platforms -including social media, dating apps, algorithms, and video games- present. Topics include access inequalities, commodification of racial and ethnic identities, algorithmic bias, online racism, and the politics of visibility and representation. At the same time, students will engage with acts of innovation, resistance, cultural expression, and community-building by marginalized groups, exploring how digital spaces are reclaimed for empowerment, solidarity, and joy. By analyzing the dynamic relationship between digital technologies and ethno-racial identities, this course equips students with the tools to critically engage with how race and ethnicity are constructed, represented, and contested in the digital age.
This course examines the relationship between law and thedistribution of power in society, with a particular emphasis on law andsocial change in the United States. Readings will be drawn from thesocial sciences and history, as well as selected court cases that raisecritical questions about the role of race, gender, and sexualorientation in American society. Among the material we will examineare the documents made public in the shooting death of MichaelBrown in Ferguson, Missouri. Students should be aware that some ofthis material is graphic and disturbing.
This course will examine the complex issues involved in applying the science of psychology to the field of law. Among the topics we will cover: • How psychological research can apply to policies and practices in the legal system • Expert testimony • Methods, uses, and limitations of forensic assessment • Determination of legal competence • The insanity defense • Syndromes (Battered Women's Syndrome/Rape Trauma Syndrome) in the legal arena • Criminal profiling types, methods, and limitations • Eyewitness testimony and other memory issues • Interrogation and confessions • Jury selection and decision making • Prisons and death penalty
Originating in Slavic words for forced labor, the term "robot" evokes for many an image of blocky metallic humanoids beeping their way through a set of tasks. Yet robots also carry the specter of revolt. We tend to fear the automated tools we design to mechanize labor, even as we continue creating more of them. In this class, we will investigate U.S. popular culture's treatment of robots from early cinema's "mechanical men" to the modern controversy over generative AI. Along the way, we will survey U.S. law's responses to the spread of technology, with particular attention to the problems raised by cutting-edge innovations like self-driving cars and AI-generated artwork. We will read plays, short stories, and novels; analyze a range of films; and engage with the work of scholars like Donna Haraway, Dennis Yi Tenen, Scott Selisker, and others. By the end of the course, students will develop a more nuanced understanding of what it means to fear robots and what that fear obscures about them (and us).
McCormick - Civil Eng 309 Climate and Energy - Law and Policy
This course is a survey of the major laws that regulate the acquisition of energy resources, the conversion of energy resources into usable energy, the energy transmission and transportation infrastructure and the climate change implications of these activities. The course explores the regulatory requirements that apply to several major energy-producing industries including oil and gas, coal, nuclear, wind and solar. The course also covers the regulatory systems for the electric grid, pipeline infrastructure and the transportation of energy commodities using rail and truck. The course concludes by reviewing regulatory incentives for the efficient use of energy by mobile sources and in the built environment. The course will enable non-legal professionals to understand the regulatory context in which business and management decisions about energy are made. The course will also give each student the opportunity to explore a self-selected, current energy topic through independent research.
McCormick - Civil Eng 361 Public and Environmental Health
This course explores current problems in public and environmental health, such as the worldwide burden of major infections diseases; the emergence and re-emergence of new pathogens, epidemiology, prevention, diagnostics and treatment of major diseases, environmental reservoirs of infectious organisms, transport of microorganisms in the environment, and evaluation of the combined effects of land use modification, water abstraction, and global climate change on ecosystems.
How can we make our lives and our communities better? Why should we act justly, when being unjust can be profitable? What makes someone a true friend, how many kinds of friendships are there, and how many friends should we aim to have? These kinds of questions preoccupied ancient Greek philosophers, and their contributions to these topics continue to influence contemporary thought. We will investigate different proposed answers to these and other questions with a view to better understanding ancient Greek ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. This course strongly emphasizes the development of close reading and writing skills. No prior exposure to ancient philosophy is required.
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 racism?; and What is implicit bias? We will also engage practical questions such as: 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?; What makes being racist immoral; Is racism permanent?; and Are implicit racial biases morally condemnable?
This course will take up a number of philosophical questions about generative artificial intelligence. Are generative AI models agents? Do they pose unique existential risks to humans? What does the surge in AI-generated content mean for art, social media, and politics? We will explore these questions through readings from philosophers, computer scientists, and others in the cognitive and social sciences.
In this class we will investigate several philosophical questions that arise as we think about knowledge. We will consider questions concerning the values that arise in connection with knowledge and other products of inquiry, we will help students recognize and reflect on evaluative questions that arise when we assess claims to knowledge, we will become aware of the standards we bring to bear in such assessments, and we will appreciate how these standards may be misused, abused, or exploited under certain social conditions.
Horne Tu, Th 2:00-3:20pm Notes: SHC Core Course - List B
Phil 269 Bioethics
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 ethics of 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.
Horne Tu, Th 9:30-10:50am Notes: SHC Core Course - List B
Phil 269-0-20 Bioethics
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. We will pay special attention to ethical problems related to cultural differences and to the application of Western bioethical principles in global clinical and research settings. 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 burgeoning field of public health ethics, with particular attention to ethical issues related to global pandemic preparedness and response.
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, and the nature of the self.
Phil 355-0-20 Scientific Method in the Social Sciences
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. Rarely is the story so clean. Social scientists often study social phenomena that must be defined according to some set of 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. Climate scientists must decide how to communicate the predictions of their models to policy makers and the public. In this course, we will evaluate methods such as economic models of decision-making, indicators and indexes, integrated assessment models of the Earth's climate, causal analysis of social data, and machine learning models. In each case, we will assess to what extent these methods help us provide knowledge about our social world.
This course will explore how we should understand the relationship between human beings and their natural environment. Our focus will be on conceptions of nature originating in Europe, but along the way we will challenge those conceptions in light of others, especially from Indigenous thought. Our survey will be rooted in philosophical understandings of nature but draw on resources in biology, sociology, political science, and history. We will start by considering two opposed models of nature as it has been understood in Western philosophy: rationalism and romanticism. We will contrast this with a look at the stress on care for nature in Indigenous kinship ethics. Then, we will explore various themes that latch on to these three models: the impact of humanity on nature and the idea of the Anthropocene; visions of nature beyond human control, such as deep ecology; and a variety of ideas for how to remedy our relationship with nature. Thinkers read include Isaac Newton, Karoline von Günderrode, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Henri Bergson, Henry David Thoreau, Arne Næss, Jane Bennett, and Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Poli Sci 390-0-20 Health, Chronic Illness & Disability Politics
Health is simultaneously one of our most basic needs and one of our most commodified goods. We race for cures, rally for affordable and accessible healthcare, debate the ethics of various treatments, and pass laws meant to keep our public healthy. But what do we mean when we talk about "health" or what constitutes a "disease"? How do we define disability, and for what purpose? Who is served by "health politics"? This course examines chronic illnesses and disability (CID) among adults, focusing on the medical and psychosocial aspects of various mental and physical health conditions with implications for political domains of functioning. The primary aim of this course is to offer students an opportunity to explore the continuum of chronic illness and disability (CID) within adulthood through a political science lens. CID will be addressed by studying theoretical underpinnings drawing from medical, psychosocial, and political schemas and examining how these dimensions of understanding interact at the level of the individual, the family, the community, and the society-at-large.
Poli Sci 390-0-21 Research in Global Climate Change: Science, Rights
How do international climate negotiations work? Who participates, and what motivates the parties involved? What are their points of agreement and disagreement? Under what conditions can global climate governance be effective? This course provides students with foundational knowledge of global climate governance and offers an immersive experience at COP30—the 30th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), taking place this year in Belém, Brazil (November 10-21). Students will gain firsthand insights into the negotiation processes and dynamics shaping global climate policy. Students will also complete an original research project, either individually or collaboratively.
Poli Sci 390-0-26 Digital Propoganda and Repression
Digital media and technologies, often considered liberation technology, have increasingly been employed by governments and non-political entities for political propaganda and repression. This course will examine the practices and implications of propaganda and repression within the digital media landscape. We will explore the role of digital media and technologies in authoritarian regimes, the common strategies and applications of digital propaganda and repression, and consider how various actors implement these tactics, along with their consequences and global impacts. Through course readings, in-class discussions, and student-led projects, students will develop a critical understanding of the interplay between digital media, politics, and civil society.
Energy transitions are often described as technical and scientific achievements that occur when the inevitable growth and expansion of human civilization necessitates new technologies to provide energy. For instance, the transition to coal that took place during the Industrial Revolution is often portrayed as the result of technological invention and geological circumstance, rather than intentional political choices. Similarly, the ongoing effort to transition human societies to renewable energy in the present day is often understood as a challenge of scientific literacy and technological strategies, rather than one of political negotiation. This course examines how the technologies and social arrangements surrounding energy transitions become laden with political and cultural narratives that shape what is possible. We will discuss what truly just and liberatory energy futures might look like, in conversation with enduring debates between eco-modernism and eco-localism, techno-optimism and Luddhism, and other philosophical tensions. This course will include opportunities to pursue research, interact with guest speakers, and participate in immersive learning activities.
Poli Sci 390-0-29 Politics of Health and International Development
How is health both a means and an end of development? This course examines the myriad ways in which health intersects with key aspects of international development. In the beginning of the course, students will learn the foundations of sustainable human development and the symbiotic relationship between politics, economics, social opportunities, and health. In the second part of the course, students apply this foundational knowledge to the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the World Health Organization's Health in All Policies initiative. This course includes an exploration of health-related case studies within many of the SDGs, such as the public health consequences of armed conflict (SDG 16: Peace and Justice) and promoting sexual and reproductive health and rights knowledge to advance women's empowerment (SDG 5: Gender Equality). We also discuss what the shutdown of USAID means for the future of health and sustainable development. Throughout the quarter, we will analyze how ideas, interests, and institutions around health hinder or help the progression towards a more equitable society for all.
Poli Sci 390-0-32 Frontier Technology and Environmental Governance
Recent developments in the research and deployment of frontier technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Geoengineering, Geothermal Energy, Deep Sea Mining, and Nuclear Fusion have divided proponents of environmental sustainability. Many self-described realists and pragmatists argue that these technologies are necessary to save humanity from runaway climate change, while other more critical voices contend that these technologies may cause more harm than good, disempower humanity, or have unintended consequences. This course will prepare students to understand various perspectives within this discourse, and to analyze how political and social forces have shaped the conversation and governance strategies surrounding these technologies. The course will include research opportunities, guest speakers, and immersive learning activities.
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.
Environmental Political Theory challenges the long-standing humanistic emphasis of political thought, insisting that nature is not simply a passive backdrop to human affairs but an active participant in political life. This course explores how social, discursive, and material forces interact to shape political systems, economies, and identities. We will examine how environmental political theorists reconceptualize the state, justice, and economic systems, while also rethinking political action and the meaning of human freedom. Special attention will be given to critiques of mainstream green politics and sustainable development, which, despite good intentions, can reinforce ideologies and institutions that drive ecological degradation. Alongside critique, we will study creative contemporary approaches that imagine new forms of political community and human freedom that do not depend on the domination and devaluation of nonhuman life. Finally, the course will turn to grassroots activism and community engagement as sites of possibility for building more just, democratic, and ecologically attuned forms of social, political, and economic order.
Poli Sci 395-0-21 Politics of the U.S. Energy Transition
Climate change threatens to permanently alter and disrupt weather patterns, ecosystems, food sources, economic production, commerce, and migration. One way to mitigate these harmful effects is to reduce our reliance on the energy sources that contribute most to global warming. In this research seminar, students will examine the challenges and opportunities of transitioning energy production and consumption away from fossil fuels and toward lower-carbon alternatives in the United States. What are the concrete goals of the clean energy transition? What policy tools can be used to achieve them? What political obstacles does the transition face? How can we address the economic, social, and political consequences of its success or failure? Students will explore these questions by reading and applying key theories from political science and economics, as well as consulting policy reports, case studies, and news articles. The course will also teach students how to design, develop, and write a political science research paper. Our class time will be divided into substantive and research design sessions to guide students toward producing original research, presenting findings, and drafting a final paper on a topic related to the energy transition.
Religious St 173-0-20 Religion, Medicine and Suffering in the West
This course explores what religion(s), primarily Catholicism (although I will make references to other religious traditions as we go along), have made of the body-in-pain, what religion may offer to people in pain to assist them in understanding and living with their illness, and how religious people have used physical pain for specific ends, religious, social, and political. Central to the work of the course is understanding pain itself as a phenomenon and thinking about how culture generally, religion in particular, shapes the pain experience. The course counts toward Religion, Health and Medicine (RHM) religious studies major concentrations. The enrollment is restricted to religious studies majors and minors, or by instructor consent.
School of Comm - Comm St 227 Communication 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.
School of Comm - Comm St 248-0-1 Black Feminist Health Science Studies
Black feminist health science studies is an emergent subfield and critical intervention into a number of intersecting arenas of scholarship and activism. Students in this course will examine important issues in healthcare and science by analyzing some of the foundational assumptions in the field of medicine. We will use contemporary as well as historical moments to investigate the evolution of "scientific truth" and its impact on the U.S. cultural landscape. Students will engage theories that range from explorations of the linguistic metaphors of the immune system, the medicalization of race, to critiques of the sexual binary, all in an effort to uncover some of the beliefs that have become central to science. Students will work to make their learning accessible to people outside the institution by creating podcast episodes that address current issues in this area.
School of Comm - Comm St 351-0-1 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.
School 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.
School of Comm - Comm St 383-0-1 Media, Communication and Environment
This seminar investigates environmental and climatological issues in relation to the field of Media, Technology, and Society. The seminar is organized into five themes: Land, Sea, Sky, Animals, Humans. In addition to readings, discussions, screenings, and in-class presentations, students will conduct research relevant to the themes of the class and their own research trajectories. This course will be combined with a PhD course on the same topic.
School of Comm - Comm St 395-0-23 Social History of Psychedelic Medicines
This course provides social history of psychedelic medicines (LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, MDMA, ketamine, ayahuasca, nitrous oxide, etc.). It focuses primarily on the United States in the 20th century, however, we will also discuss important developments outside the US and prior to the 20th century where relevant. We will discuss the subjective, mind manifesting, and spiritual effects, the chemical structure, origins, legality, and neurobiology of each of the substances, as well as their clinical, and non-clinical uses and their effects on science, technology, arts, and culture. We will discuss their risks, benefits, and alternatives in a way that will support informed decision making about their use.
School of Comm - Comm St 395-0-25 Social Media, Technology and Mental Health
This course will examine the relationship between social media, technology, and mental health. Students will explore and critically analyze the advantages, challenges, and opportunities of using social networking sites and technology (e.g. apps, digital interventions, video games) to communicate about and seek support for mental health disorders. Conversely, students will scrutinize social media, technology, its impact on mental health and wellness, with special attention paid to topics such as social comparison and online self-presentation.
School of Comm - Comm St 395-0-26 Digital Propaganda and Repression
This course will examine the relationship between social media, technology, and mental health. Students will explore and critically analyze the advantages, challenges, and opportunities of using social networking sites and technology (e.g. apps, digital interventions, video games) to communicate about and seek support for mental health disorders. Conversely, students will scrutinize social media, technology, its impact on mental health and wellness, with special attention paid to topics such as social comparison and online self-presentation.
School of Comm - 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. What is often called New Space involves activities by many nations, a huge range and diverse scale of venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and inventors, and a largely uniformed public. 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; Point Nemo, the rapidly filling oceanic graveyard of satellites; does The Moon needs its own time zone; mega-constellations of satellites with thousands of satellites in LEO, MEO, GEO and other orbits; new direct-to-smartphone satellites. Each class session usually includes a 30-45 minute PowerPoint, some video screenings, and some discussion. Assignments include attendance, short papers on selected satellites, projects, and corporations, and in-class group oral reports on the readings (all readings online.) No mid-term or final exams. When weather conditions permit (generally clear skies and ice and snow free) the last half-hour of class will be held outdoors as we attempt to observe ISS, Tiangong, BlueWalker 3, and other objects if any are visible in the Evanston night sky. Dress for winter outdoors and look up. This is the New Space of the 21st century, and it is YOUR outer space, your Cosmos. Join us, learn what's really going on up there, and have fun.
School of Comm - Comm St 395-0-31 Generative AI and The Media
Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 generative AI has proliferated throughout society, capturing the imagination of the public with its potential to upend much of how people create and consume media and information. In this course we'll demystify this new technology, understand how it works, how to control it through prompting, and how to implement it in various use cases found in media production and communication. We'll also step back with a critical eye to ask questions of how generative AI changes the larger media system and raises ethical and governance issues around data, copyright, privacy, bias, and more.
School of Comm - RVTF 341-0-20 Cultural History of Artificial Intelligence: Robot
With the explosive growth of generative AI, there has been a flurry of debates over what the role artificial intelligence should be in our contemporary society. Silicon Valley and its tech entrepreneurs often frame AI as a utopic solution to the world's social ills. Hollywood and independent creatives, on the other hand, have often framed AI in a more critical light - imagining what the impact of AI might be in relation to labor, the environment, and our daily socio-cultural relations. As such, this course seeks to understand how film and media have attempted to create a critical consciousness around artificial intelligence. From Charlie Chaplin's commentary on automated labor in Modern Times (1936) to Stanley Kubrick's meditation on technological development and humanity in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to Spike Jonze's ruminations on loneliness, love, and chatbots in Her (2013), film and media makers have long sought to understand AI and its societal implications. Through readings that address the historical development of AI and weekly film screenings, this course will help students unpack the meaning of what is "natural" and what is "artificial," as well as what is "intelligence." Yet, none of these considerations are just about machines, they are questions about humanity too - about our knowledges, hopes, fears and desires. By looking across twentieth and twenty-first century film, media and theory, students will better understand how we have both dreamed of and recoiled from the possibility of machines automating our very human ways of thinking and making.
School of Comm St - Comm St 363-0-1 Risk Communication
What is effective risk communication? If last few years has taught us anything, it is the need for effective risk communication. Readings and lectures will examine discoveries in social psychology and communication that inform our understanding of how people interpret risk information and make decisions. Through discussions, in-class activities, and student-led projects, students will explore the creation and evaluation of effective risk messages. Special emphasis will be given to the context of health and the environment.
School of Comm St - Comm St 394-0-1 Media Power of Influencers - Industry, Publics
This research seminar examines social media influencers as new media actors that wield a distinct kind of influence over media industries and culture, public opinion and behavior, and other domains like politics, education, and science. It engages foundational and emergent concepts such as micro-celebrities and content creators, respectively, and investigates diverse sets of influencers of varying genres, platforms, and social, cultural, and political contexts. This research course is interdisciplinary, drawing from fields like communication, sociology, and cultural studies, and thus introduces a range of perspectives in studying influencer media content, practices, and effects. Throughout the quarter, students develop components of their research paper, scaffolded by research skills development workshops, instructor and peer feedback, and guest lecturers, that allow them to apply and hone their research reading, analysis, and writing skills.
School of Comm St - Comm St 394-0-2 Talking About, Around and With AI
Contemporary AI technologies, including but not limited to generative AI, are increasingly woven into human communication. The course will address communication with and mediated by AI systems, as well as communication about AI as a technology that shapes social practices and public debate. We will learn about the design and impact of technologies like chatbots, AI-generated search summaries, and systems that moderate content and facilitate interactions on social media. Because AI embeds itself within human discourse, it also becomes a subject of that discourse, a dynamic we will explore throughout the course.
This class will explore the nature of race in an effort to understand exactly what race is. It seeks to understand why race is such a potent force in American society. Close attention will be paid to the relationship between race, power, and social stratification. The course will examine the nature of racial conflict and major efforts to combat racial inequality. At the end of the course, students will have an in-depth understanding of the origins of race, the structure of racial hierarchy in the United States, and a fundamental understanding of many sociological theories of race and racial stratification in America.
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 how actors such as corporations, the media, and social movements impact public opinion around environmental issues. Further, we will critically examine the gendered, racial, and socioeconomic production of disparate environmental risks. A primary, central focus of this sociology course is environmental inequality, and students engage with a wide range of theories to examine environmental issues of their own choosing. This is not a public policy course.
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 experiences 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 the social dimensions of a disaster event of their choosing through an analysis of media coverage. This is an introductory level course without any prerequisites.
Rattan M, W 2:00-3:20pm Notes: SHC Core Course - List B
Soc 276-0-20 Intro to Science and Technology Studies
Science and technology are implicated in some of the most pressing issues that face the contemporary world. What is the proper role of scientific experts in democratic policy-making? In what ways are climate change initiatives entangled with questions about distributive justice? If numbers are objective, why do public statistics seem to provoke more debates than they settle? In what sense is artificial intelligence a creature of modern capitalism? What kind of connection might there be between surveillance technologies and the history of colonialism? This course will introduce students to the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) by way of exploring these questions. We will tackle a diverse set of readings in STS, sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, and law, and our geographical focus will range across the Global North and the Global South. All students who are interested in thinking outside of conventional disciplinary boundaries are welcome to enroll. Students who complete the course will be exposed to new perspectives on widely accepted ideas like scientific objectivity, technological progress and expertise. Together we will explore how we can make science and technology work for society's needs, rather than society working towards scientific and technological progress.
This course examines historical and contemporary manifestations of racism/ethnocentrism and anti-racism, and xenophobia/nationalism, concepts that harken to ideas of ancestry and difference. We will explore together theoretical approaches to understanding the social, cultural, political, and economic aspects of racial social hierarchy. The course centers on racialization (how individuals/groups are sorted into races), global and local racial paradigms (the rules of race-making and racial assignment), and why these denigrating mechanisms are so difficult to eradicate. We also touch on histories of racialized chattel slavery and colonialism, and learn what antiracism looks like and how it might be achieved.
Technology is ubiquitous. This course covers central tenets in the sociology of technology by pairing an empirical focus on a different technology each week with a theoretical paradigm. A total of eight technologies will serve as the exemplars through which the question(s) concerning technology will be explored: bicycles, cars, computers, facial recognition, genetic sequencing, soap, shipping containers and virtual reality. Each of these technologies is approached as a window into the social, political, racial, and economic determinants of technological innovation. The central goal of the course is to equip students with the tools for unpacking the technologies societies take for granted and critically engaging with new technologies that may reproduce social inequities. While much of the scholarship we will consider is broadly sociological, some of it is drawn from other fields, and part of the goal of the course is to show what is gained when we think about technology from an interdisciplinary perspective. Students from other disciplines are welcome.
This course examines the relationship between law and the distribution of power in society, with a particular emphasis on law and social change in the United States. Readings will be drawn from the social sciences and history, as well as selected court cases that raise critical questions about the role of race, gender, and sexual orientation in American society. Among the material we will examine are the documents made public in the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Students should be aware that some of this material is graphic and disturbing.
In this course, we examine how the Western medical system and accompanying health practices impact people of different genders, as well as how healthcare as an institution and practice produces gender categories. Using interdisciplinary research with a focus on sociological studies, we will interrogate the social, institutional, and biological links between gender and health. We will discuss health inequalities between women, men, and trans* people from different race, ethnic, and class backgrounds, using sociological research to understand why these inequalities and forms of difference emerge and are sustained. We will explore how modern Western medicine views male and female bodies and defines their health and illnesses accordingly. Students will complete two short research projects over the term in which they use different data sources (interviews and media content) to examine gendered perceptions of health, health behaviors, help-seeking behaviors, and experiences with medical institutions.
Rattan M, W 12:30-1:50pm Notes: SHC Core Course - List B
Soc 376-0-20 The State of Techno-Capitalism
In this course we will rethink two classical ideas—the state and capitalism— in light of contemporary technological change. We move beyond treating technology as a neutral tool and instead analyze it as a social, political, and cultural force that actively reorganizes and is reorganized by power, labor, governance, capital, and everyday life. We explore topics such as the rise of the tech-billionaire class, platform economies and gig work, bureaucracy, algorithmic systems, misinformation, e-governance, environmental regulation, smart cities as intertwined sociotechnical systems rather than isolated innovations. Through comparative works from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the United States, the course sheds light on the global political economy while attending to national differences, local histories and cultures. We will also explore how social actors resist, subvert and contest technological power to imagine alternative futures. The course equips students with classical frameworks and critical conceptual tools for analyzing the intertwining of technology, politics, and economy in modern life.
Individually and collectively, we think about what might happen in the time to come. We consider the future over a range of time-horizons, from the immediate (what will happen in the next hour) to the distant (how will things look in a century). We worry about our own individual futures (will I have a job when I graduate from Northwestern?), we worry about other peoples' futures (will my child get a job after they graduate from college?), and we worry about our collective futures (what will climate change do to our society over the next 50 years?). Frequently, we make plans for the future, either to create a future that we seek, or to avoid a future that is problematic. Public policy is often concerned with how to create better collective futures, and the tricky part is figuring out which alternatives are better than others, and for whom. Sometimes people make contingency plans, deciding what to do if something happens (for example, disaster planning). Such activity generally involves making two types of guesses: what will or could happen in the future, and what will our future preferences be about those various possibilities. In certain cases, the predictions we make are "self-fulfilling" in that the prediction helps to make itself come true (bank runs are a classic example). In this course, we will work through a series of examples where people have thought about the future, sometimes focused on very specific features. Students are expected to participate in class discussions in addition to completing a series of short take-home writing assignments. Readings are a mixture of social science articles (non-fiction) and two novels (fiction) offering visions of the future.
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 a range of cases, we will explore the dynamic interplay among expert findings, social identities, and political arguments.
Soc 392-0-20 Cultures of Care: Mental Health Across Borders
In today's world, we talk more and more about mental health. But what defines "mental health"? Who decides what qualifies as care, and whose knowledge matters? How do diagnoses, therapies, and healing practices travel across cultures, and what social consequences do they bring? This seminar examines how ideas of mind, distress, and healing circulate across cultural, political, and institutional contexts, taking on new meanings and forms of authority. We begin with examples from the United States and other Western settings, then move outward to the Global South to explore how culture, religion, institutions, politics, economies, and colonial histories shape what it means to be well or unwell in the modern world. Each week pairs theoretical questions about culture, power, and emotion with case studies of mental health practice, including psychiatry, psychotherapy, self-help cultures, digital wellness, and grassroots activism. Students will learn how suffering and healing are not only private experiences but also social and moral practices embedded in systems of knowledge, institutions, policies, and everyday norms. The course invites students from all backgrounds to reflect critically and personally on how societies construct normality, illness, and care, and how those constructions shape lives across borders.
Why are younger people more likely to identify as transgender than older people? What are the challenges, opportunities, and dangers of asking about gender and sexuality on the U.S. Census? Can survey researchers account for gender and sexual fluidity? This seminar examines the emerging field of "queer demography," which aims to measure the size and characteristics of the LGBTQ population. We will read and discuss research about queer and transgender families, aging, health disparities, and more. Along the way, we will learn to critically analyze survey questions and statistical methods for assumptions about gender, sex, and sexuality. We will also think deeply about social categories and the politics of measurement more generally. This course is interdisciplinary and draws from sociology, science and technology studies, statistics, gender and sexuality studies, critical quantitative methods, and public health. Students of all backgrounds are welcome—we will work together to break down and contextualize the readings.
Spanish 395-0-3 Reclaiming Lost Ancestries in the Digital Age
The seminar examines migration and cultural memory across transatlantic and transpacific networks, situating contemporary Spanish cultural production within broader global circuits of movement, diaspora, and archival occlusions. Taught in Spanish, while reading and listening Spanish skills are required, participation can be in English. The course foregrounds critical fabulation as a method for addressing archival gaps, interrogating official histories, and reimagining ancestry beyond documentary evidence. Students will examine the ethical implications of AI in shaping historical and genealogical narratives, from archival access and preservation decisions to digital reconstruction. Class sessions will include visits to local community archives such as the Shorefront Legacy Center and Evanston ASPA. The seminar culminates in a digital family history project, completed in Spanish or English. The students will participate in structured in-class workshops to scaffold their progress, ensuring both conceptual depth and technical proficiency. At once experimenting with digital tools and interrogating the limits of historical knowledge, students will create projects with impact beyond the classroom. This course advances the role of digital humanities in transmedia storytelling, memory studies, and contemporary genealogical inquiry. Prerequisite: 1 course from SPANISH 250-0, SPANISH 251-0, SPANISH 260-0, or SPANISH 261-0.
Spanish 397-0-10 The Limits of Nature, Knowledge and the Human
In this course we will investigate the lettered representations of Indigenous cultures, peoples, and knowledges in modern Latin American literature. The primary aim of this class is to analyze textual and discursive strategies by which Andean and Amazonian authors, intellectuals, and communities played into dominant societal assumptions and literary norms while simultaneously reframing them. We will analyze texts and films which illuminate "submerged" or historically marginalized knowledges, specifically non-Western perspectives regarding what it means to be human. The texts and films studied in this course stretch, invert, or dissolve the modern boundaries that divide the self from other and the human from nature. Rather than evaluating works within traditional critical approaches, students can expect an interdisciplinary form of literary analysis privileging native knowledge and anthropological discourse. Through forwarding local narrative logics and epistemic worlds, this course enables students to engage Indigenous literatures, histories, and perspectives from alternative epistemic viewpoints. Some texts included in this course include José María Arguedas' novel Yawar Fiesta, the testimonial narrative Andean Lives, and films set in the Amazonian rainforest, such as Ciro Aguirre's The Serpent's Embrace, and Werner Herzog's Aguirre, The Wrath of God.
How has speculative fiction allowed Latin American creators to reimagine the continent's political projects of national identity through diverse technological contexts and ideological imaginaries? This course will use science fiction textual, visual, and audiovisual products to illustrate Latin American nations' complex relationship with technology and the policies behind the deployment of technology on a social scale. The course follows a chronological order to examine how creators across different regions of the continent use science fiction tools to address the trauma of modernization, political violence, or catastrophic natural events. Through an exploration of short stories, comics, films, and select episodes of TV shows from different regions and historical moments, this course invites students, first, to rethink their definitions of science fiction as they confront how Latin American creators push the limits of the genre; and second, to reflect on how science fiction can play with social expectations about society, civic engagement, gender roles, reproduction, and warfare through generic devices such as alien intervention, technological change, or a simple time difference. Students will engage critically with literature, comics, TV, and film, drawing on academic scholarship on fantasy, science fiction, and literary theory. Taught in English.
