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).
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.
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.
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."
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.
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. 303-0-3 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.
We will study the theory and practice of Greek and Roman medicine, looking at ancient texts in translation, ancient artifacts and materials, and some modern scholarship. As a term project, students will learn to think like ancient physicians, diagnosing and prescribing treatments for patients from the Hippocratic case studies. During class discussion, we will engage critically with primary sources and examine the differences between ancient and modern science from a balanced historical perspective. We will also investigate the social, cultural, and economic forces that have affected the development of western medicine throughout its history.
This 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).
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 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.
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.
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 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.
This course explores traditional and alternative data collection methods in public health research. The course focuses on decolonizing ways that Black/African American individuals have used to reveal their truths and construct and reconstruct images of themselves. Students will explore how these decolonizing processes can be applied in public health data collection to make research inclusive and to validate methods and ways of knowing that have assisted underserved, underheard, and underrepresented communities in advocating for justice to survive. Course readings and videos will provide a critical lens on qualitative data collection methods, including studies on historical and traumatic violence underscoring how people living in Black bodies work to survive, and negotiating processes that Black individuals use to exercise agency and evaluate systemic oppressions that impede how they navigate life as articulated by authors such as Joy DeGruy, Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Jean Stefanci.
This course draws on perspectives from anthropology, related social scientific fields, and the humanities to provide a critical introduction to psychological trauma and its increasingly significant place in contemporary global health discourses and agendas. We will explore the history of the concept and its applications in Western literature, science, and medicine; consider the relatively recent construction of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a diagnostic category and the clinical approaches developed to treat it; and examine the politics and effects of applying the concept abroad through humanitarian psychiatry and/or global mental health projects. Key questions of the course will include: how and why has trauma become one of the most important signifiers of our era—and a key criterion of "victimhood?" What politics and debates have shaped the development and application of the PTSD diagnosis in recent decades? And how have notions of trauma and their varied applications transformed politics, suffering, and care in diverse communities around the world?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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 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 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 395-0-30 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
