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.
This course is an introduction to the anthropological subfield of archaeology. It will expose students to archaeological methods and theory, as well as the political and social issues that emanate from the study of human pasts. In this course, students will learn how archaeologists study and interpret the past using theories and methods. The course is divided into three main sections/aspects. First, we shall examine the history of archaeology and the theories that underpin the discipline. The second aspect looks at archaeological methods and techniques, including how archaeologists prepare research designs, excavate sites, and analyze materials. Finally, we will learn about how archaeology can meaningfully confront present issues such as heritage preservation, Indigenous rights, and feminist archaeology and gender equality. Some other critical topics to be discussed include careers in archaeology and Indigenous scholarship. Students will become familiar with archaeological case studies from around the world and from different historical periods.
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.
Anth 357 Biocultural Perspectives on Water Insecurity
The first objective of this course is to introduce students to the many ways that water impacts humans around the world. We will discuss what the international recommendations for safely managed water are and the health and social consequences of water insecurity. The second objective is to explore why there is such variety in water insecurity worldwide. Influences on access to water will be broadly considered; we will draw on literature in global health, ethnography, the life sciences, and public policy. These discussions will be guided by the socio-ecological framework, in which dimensions ranging from the individual to the geopolitical are considered. The third objective is to develop critical thinking and writing abilities to reflect on the multi-dimensional causes and consequences of water insecurity and the appropriateness of potential solutions. This will be accomplished through readings and documentaries that we have lovingly selected, writing weekly reflection pieces, preparing a short in-class presentation on recent media, and writing an OpEd.
Insurance and medical forms. Prescriptions. Laboratory equipment. Smart phone apps. Anywhere in the world where it is practiced, biomedical spaces are filled with stuff, and that stuff alters the possibilities and limitations for how biomedicine is provided and experienced. This seminar investigates materials used in health care to understand how they impact biomedicine. Readings, podcasts, and films invite students to examine how "stuff" can group people, decide what information is important, and sometimes create—or perpetuate—material differences between patients and health-care providers. By studying these everyday objects, students can better understand how health care works in different countries and cultures.
Asian Lang and Culture 390-0-20 Before AI: Cybernetics Global E Asia
In 1983, Edward Feigenbaum, a renowned computer scientist at Stanford, and journalist Pamela McCorduck warned that Japan's Fifth Generation Computer project posed a challenge to American technological leadership and perhaps to the future of artificial intelligence itself. A few years later, Japan studies scholar and linguist Marshall J. Unger called much of this vision a "fifth generation fallacy," arguing that Japan's heavy investment in AI was inseparable from the distinctive challenges that East Asian writing systems posed in digital environments, as well as from the retraining of its population in preparation for the information age. This course begins from that geopolitical tension and its historicity: today's AI discourse has a long genealogy that reveals the social, political, and cultural nature of technology and media infrastructure. AI has never been only about whether machines can think. With its very definition and underlying assumptions, including what exactly counts as intelligence, changing across different times and places, its longer global history opens up space for critical inquiry into how culture, politics, and different forms of body politics are constitutive of technologies. Today's artificial intelligence—more specifically, the large language models that have come to dominate public discussion of AI—is often presented as a radically new technology transforming labor, writing, and everyday life. With its focus on the twentieth- and twenty-first-century history of global technoscientific modernity, this course encourages students to take a historicizing view. Rather than beginning with contemporary AI systems, it places them within longer histories of cybernetics, automation, writing, and computation, with particular, though not exclusive, attention to East Asia. Drawing on plural, global histories of AI, cybernetics, and media technologies that resist technological determinism, the course is designed to help students develop critical literacy through readings in critical media studies, science and technology studies, the history of science and technology, and East Asian studies.
Biology 339 Critical Topics in Ecology and Conservation
Anthropogenic changes to the world's ecosystems continue to have large, and often context dependent, effects on the abundance, distribution and interactions of species. In this course we will explore major conservation issues of today and examine the ecological processes underlying these issues. This course will include reading and writing about conservation issues for both scientific and general audiences, as well as discussions of primary literature and popular media around conservation. Class activities will include lectures, small and large group discussions, and other opportunities for active learning, as well as guest lectures from experts in the different conservation fields.
Chemistry 105-8-02 Energy, Compute, and Material Abundance and the Energy Transition
Electricity demand in the US and globally has entered into a new regime of growth, powered by rapid scaling of data centers in light of AI, combined with reshoring and electrification of manufacturing. Abundant compute has become a prerequisite for progress across science and industry, and abundant compute rests in turn on abundant energy and on abundant materials: the metals, chemicals, and manufactured components from which generation, storage, transmission, and the chips themselves are built.
This considerable demand growth will need to be fulfilled rapidly; with firm guarantees re: the dependability of the electricity; and affordably. More and more of this energy will have to be lower in its CO2 intensity than has been legacy energy production. The same applies on the materials side, where supply chains for critical minerals, and for bulk industrial materials such as steel, cement, and silicon, will need to grow quickly, securely, and at lower carbon intensity.
This will entail rapid progress in solar and wind with storage; geothermal; nuclear; and blue power. Looking more broadly across sectors, it will require innovative sustainable fuels and chemicals to power transportation, to feed the needs of industry, and to fulfill the growing energy requirements of individuals, including in high-growth emerging economies. It will also require new materials, and new routes to making and recycling familiar ones, since materials constraints bind as tightly as do energy constraints.
We will explore issues of a scientific and engineering nature; as well as of systems, economics, and policy; relating to achieving the needed growth in energy, materials, and compute across the course of the energy transition. We will study the global potential, as well as the realistic technical capacity, of the major current and future contributors to the energy mix, together with the materials and data-center buildout that these depend on; look at areas of science and technology that require advances to enable sustainable growth and maintain global competitiveness; and consider the links to national and international economics and politics.
This course explores how postcolonial writers engage the environment not as passive backdrop but as a contested site of struggle, survival, and resistance. Students examine how colonialism and global capitalism have reshaped relationships to land, water, animals, and climate, and how literature responds to environmental violence, dispossession, and ecological crisis while imagining alternative modes of care, belonging, and sustainability. In addition to novels and memoir, the course features brief poetry interludes, engaging short works by writers such as Niyi Osundare, Kofi Awoonor, Gcina Mhlophe, and Benjamin Zephaniah, among others, foregrounding poetry as a vital form of ecological critique, protest, and cultural memory. Literary texts are paired with accessible theoretical readings in postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental humanities by thinkers such as Rob Nixon (slow violence, environmental injustice), Homi Bhabha (hybridity, colonial ambivalence), Robert J. C. Young (colonialism, decolonization, resistance), Cajetan Iheka (African ecologies, resistance aesthetics), and Elizabeth DeLoughrey (islands, oceanic ecologies, empire), alongside other scholars at the intersection of postcolonialism, ecology, and resistance. The course emphasizes close reading, historical context, and comparative analysis.
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.
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.
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 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.
English 105-8-21 Eco-fiction and Human Metamorphosis
We are all familiar with public discourse about environmental concerns: Descriptions of a future where familiar landscapes have been transformed into alien vistas, newly dangerous and hostile to human life. Recent eco-fiction, however, challenges that familiar narrative, proposing ways that we humans may find ourselves transfigured along with the world around us. In this class we will engage with accounts of such human metamorphosis, considering the characteristics of environmental fiction for children, the hyper-empathy of Octavia Butler, the "new weird" landscapes of Jeff Vandermeer's Area X and a selection of other short works. Film viewings will include Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke (1997) and Pixar's Wall-E (2008).
English 105-8-24 AI: Love it, Hate it, Live with it?
At college graduation ceremonies last spring, speakers touting the bright future of AI were roundly booed by students. The reality of this AI backlash is confirmed by recent surveys that show that students--even those who regularly use chatbots--are increasingly angry and anxious about what AI means for society and for themselves personally. They are concerned about how it will impact their abilities to think, to write, and to pursue their chosen career. In this seminar, we will explore whether it is possible to use AI in ways that promote those abilities. We will also examine the issues raised by AI use in regard to ethics, privacy, and personal relationships as well as questions about the existential risks that AI poses. Each student will have the opportunity to pursue a research project on an AI-related question that interests them and to share the results of that research with their fellow students. As a first-year writing seminar, this course will focus on developing your skills in college-level writing: Posing a question that interests you, gathering information that helps you answer it, making an argument that communicates your answer persuasively, and conveying your argument in a style that is appropriate and effective for your audience.
English 381 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? 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 represent the social struggle of disability? This course examines how disability literatures mobilize not just identity categories, but, in fact, robust models of thought and feeling. We will read Anglophone writing from India, South Africa, Japan, 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. Panning back from textual representations, 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, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, we will think about the frictional registers of belonging and alienation represented in novels, autobiographies, novellas, and art. Texts include Ved Mehtq's Face to Face, Georgina Kleege's Sight Unseen, Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals, IM Coetzee's The Life and Times of Michael K, Eli Clare's Brilliant Imperfection, and Sauo Ichikawa's Hunchback.
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.
How do we understand the world around us? Do we collect, draw, describe, measure, dissect? How have methods of understanding environments near and far changed over time? This class will explore the history of the natural sciences 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.
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.
For a brief period across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, human difference became a question of science, rather than culture. New disciplines seeking to categorize people abounded, such as criminology, anthropology, comparative anatomy, genetics, and most notoriously, eugenics. This course charts the rise, fall, and resurgence of race science and scientific racism from the bible to biometrics. Along the way we will explore the connection between race, colonialism, and the environment. While Nazi Germany dominates cultural histories of eugenics, this was only a short period that developed from expansive programs originating in the United Kingdom and United States. As such, we will explore changing notions of race across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a predominantly Anglo-American context, as well as the lasting legacy of eugenic thought in our contemporary culture. The course is intended to challenge students not only on conceptions of difference and how these notions are enforced, but also the role of science as independent from cultural conversations. How have definitions of race changed throughout history? How did the scientific discovery of deep time, evolution, and genetics transform understandings of human difference? What colonial contexts contributed to new stratifications of societies along class, geography, and skin color? In what ways was science used to enforce race and class hierarchies? How was scientific racism used to promote social and political movements?
Env Pol 390-0-2 Living Archives: Engaging with Historical and Biological Collections
Correspondence, records, and printed books are the essential tools of the historian. Collections of plants, known as herbaria, are used by plant scientists to ground research in areas such as taxonomy, phenology, evolutionary biology, and biodiversity conservation. However, as scholars seek to meet growing environmental concerns, the boundaries between these sources have become blurred. Increasingly, scientists have turned to archival materials such as diaries or common-place books to create new understandings of changing environments, while herbaria have been increasingly mined as new sites of cultural data and scientific histories. In Living Archives we will seek to combine these two perspectives, and explore how to make archives accessible beyond the disciplines they were designed for. We will examine archives, biological and historical, as an object of study, rather than as the mere location of research. We will examine who is included and excluded in the archival system, and what characteristics are required for something to be truly considered an ‘archive', and for whom. Students will also develop skills needed to interpret these varied archives for research in their own discipline, including paleography and plant identification. This class is designed as a learning practicum - not unlike a lab course. As such, class meetings will take place predominantly in McCormick Special Collections and at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Transportation will be provided where appropriate. Additional trips may also include the Field Museum.
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.
Env Pol 390-0-3 Ecology, Cybernetics and the Information Revolution
How did Silicon Valley become the hub of one of the most powerful technology industries on the planet? What were the values, beliefs, and aspirations that drove the early founders, entrepreneurs, and inventors of Silicon Valley before the industry reached its current zenith of power? What sort of legacy did they think they were leaving behind, and what systems of power did they believe they were assembling? The answer, this course argues, is surprising. Contrary to the rhetoric of capitalist growth, productivity, and efficiency gains that dominates today's information technology industry, the early years of Silicon Valley were marked by an entirely different set of priorities: ecological wholeness, transformations in consciousness, the destruction of social hierarchies, and experiments in new ways of life. Drawing on both primary sources and an array of secondary scholarship, students will be immersed in the cultural movements that shaped the early years of Silicon Valley and the emergence of the personal computing industry. Through this examination, we will discuss how countercultural individualism, back-to-the-land environmentalism, spirituality, the new science of cybernetics, and an admiration for the personal use of tools helped shaped the rise of computing and the ethos of early tech founders and creators. A major question that will be raised throughout the course is whether the emphasis on profits, competition, displacement, and dominance within today's tech industry has precursors in these earlier cultural movements, or whether the idealism of the earlier years can be seen as a distinct "road not travelled" that has lessons for us today. Is there anything that we can take from the striking conglomeration of ecological thought, cybernetics and feedback loops, self-reliance, and cultural experimentation in the tech industry's early years that can help us to rethink the direction that technology should go in today's world?
Env Pol 390-0-4 Promethean Visions: Ecomodernism and Accelerationist Political Thought
From Silicon Valley boardrooms to the pages of political manifestos, a new constellation of political ideas has emerged that embraces technological acceleration, planetary-scale intervention, and the promise of a radically engineered future. This seminar examines these theories with critical rigor, asking what these visions assume about nature, progress, and human agency. The course takes as its primary texts a set of recently published manifestos, essays, and books that exhibit the philosophy of accelerationism. Accelerationism is a tradition with a contested history, an uneasy relationship with democracy, and a surprisingly wide range of inheritors across the political spectrum. Accelerationist thought argues that the path beyond industrial capitalism runs through its technologies rather than away from them, and that major challenges relating to human futurity and the environment can only be solved through an acceleration of technological capabilities. We will read statements by Silicon Valley leaders including Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Dario Amodei, alongside representatives of ecomodernist thought. Students will also encounter critical perspectives, drawing on political ecology, science and technology studies, multispecies anthropology, and degrowth economics. A recurring question throughout the course will be whether the differences between left-wing accelerationism, reformist ecomodernism, and Silicon Valley libertarianism are as significant as their proponents believe, or whether they share deeper assumptions that deserve both consideration and scrutiny.
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.
Western political thought has long defined the political community by drawing a line between human beings and everything else. Today that line is contested from two directions at once. Animal advocates argue that sentient creatures are owed justice, representation, and even citizenship, while software developers, ethicists, and lawmakers have begun to ask whether artificial systems could one day bear moral claims of their own. This course treats these debates as a single problem in political theory. We begin with classical and modern accounts of what sets humans apart, then turn to contemporary arguments over animal rights and animal citizenship, the politics of industrial slaughter and racialized species boundaries, and the movement to grant legal rights to rivers, forests, and ecosystems. The final weeks ask whether AI systems could hold rights, and how they are already altering the conduct of democratic government. Throughout, we will examine which capacity (reason, language, sentience, or the possession of interests) grounds political standing, and what follows for democracy if that capacity turns out to be held beyond our species.
Envr Pol 390-0-3 Living Archives: Engaging with Historical & Biological Collections
Correspondence, records, and printed books are the essential tools of the historian. Collections of plants, known as herbaria, are used by plant scientists to ground research in areas such as taxonomy, phenology, evolutionary biology, and biodiversity conservation. However, as scholars seek to meet growing environmental concerns, the boundaries between these sources have become blurred. Increasingly, scientists have turned to archival materials such as diaries or common-place books to create new understandings of changing environments, while herbaria have been increasingly mined as new sites of cultural data and scientific histories. We will combine these two perspectives and explore how to make archives accessible beyond the disciplines they were designed for. We will examine archives, biological and historical, as an object of study, rather than as the mere location of research. We will explore who is included and excluded in the archival system, and what characteristics are required for something to be truly considered an ‘archive', and for whom. Students will also develop skills needed to interpret these varied archives for research in their own discipline, including paleography and plant identification. This class is designed as a learning practicum - not unlike a lab course. As such, class meetings will take place predominantly in McCormick Special Collections and at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Transportation will be provided where appropriate. Additional trips may also include the Field Museum.
This course introduces students to pressing disease and health care problems worldwide and examines efforts currently underway to address them. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the course identifies the main actors, institutions, practices and forms of knowledge production characteristic of what we call "global health" today, and explores the environmental, social, political and economic factors that shape patterns and experiences of illness and healthcare across societies. We will scrutinize the value systems underpinning specific paradigms in the policy and science of global health practice, and place present-day developments in historical perspective. As an introductory course on global health, the class delves into comparative health systems, including comparative health systems in high- and low-income countries. Key topics will include: policies and approaches to global health, key actors in global health, comparative health systems, structural violence, gender and reproductive health, chronic and communicable diseases, politics of global health research and evidence, and the ethics of global health equity.
The human body is embedded into a health framework that can produce hypervisibility, invisibility, or both. This 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 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- 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 power.
Biomedicine (aka "Western" or allopathic medicine) is often represented as neutral and ‘scientific'— the opposite of culture. Yet experiences and practices surrounding biomedicine are influenced by culture, history, (infra)structures, and flows of ideas, people and resources. Thus, this course begins with the premise that biomedicine is produced through social processes, and therefore has its own inherent culture(s). The aim of this seminar course is to expose students to the social and cultural aspects of biomedicine through a geographic comparison between select world regions. Focusing on the interrelations between technology, medicine, science, politics, society, religion, power and place, topics covered will include: medical history, learning medicine, rethinking "care", and unexpected aspects of biomedical cultures and practice. Through a focus on the logics by which biomedicine is practiced, we will be able to get into additional depth regarding how race, class, gender, history, and politics shape what medicine gets to be in different contexts, while also understanding how biomedicine converges with political economy, business, bureaucracy, profit, global health, and humanitarianism.
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.
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 Hlth 318 Community-based Partcipatory 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.
Gbl Hlth 320 Qualitative Research Methods in Global Health
This course is designed to provide global health students with the tools they will need in order to design, revise, conduct, and write up current and future qualitative research projects relating to global health topics. This course is experientially driven, allowing students opportunities to actually "do" research, while providing careful mentoring and engaging in in-depth discussions about ethical and methodological issues associated with qualitative approaches and with working with living humans. Students will learn methods such as: writing research proposals, research ethics, writing ethnographic field notes, doing qualitative interviews and focus groups, analyzing and writing up data.
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.
Gbl Hlth 323 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?
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.
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.
Insurance and medical forms. Prescriptions. Laboratory equipment. Smart phone apps. Anywhere in the world where it is practiced, biomedical spaces are filled with stuff, and that stuff alters the possibilities and limitations for how biomedicine is provided and experienced. This seminar investigates materials used in health care to understand how they impact biomedicine. Readings, podcasts, and films invite students to examine how "stuff" can group people, decide what information is important, and sometimes create—or perpetuate—material differences between patients and health-care providers. By studying these everyday objects, students can better understand how health care works in different countries and cultures.
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. Students will study global and local mechanisms and patterns of the circulation of disease, and their relation to environmental, cultural, socio-economic and political influences. Students will explore and evaluate roles and programs of global and local public, private and civil society sectors in addressing specific health issues and consider ways to improve outcomes. Each student is expected to identify a local organization or program with which they would like to volunteer during the quarter. Students will examine the programs and the geographical regions of these organizations and identify the specific opportunities and roles that are available to them as volunteers, and as professionals. Special attention will be given to understanding due diligence, accountability and mechanisms for measuring and improving impact.
The course Feminist Political Ecology examines how power, gender, and social inequalities, including race and class, shape human-environment interactions. This approach demonstrates that environmental issues and natural resource management are never neutral; rather, they are embedded within broader economic and social structures. It argues that environmental crises and resource management are not gender-neutral and analyzes how women and local communities, particularly in the Global South, struggle for livelihood sustainability, rights, and climate justice. The aim of this course is to introduce students to a critical perspective that enables them to understand environmental issues and climate change as phenomena deeply connected to power, justice, and inequality.
Gbl Hlth 390-0-23 Clinical Materialities: Artifacts of Modern Health
This course engages with the study of clinical material culture. From biometric data, filling out forms and processing paperwork, to photo IDs, even vital records like birth and death certificates, these objects have become artifacts of modern clinical life. However, as new technologies emerge, like the smartphone and phone apps, so changes the materiality of global health care. Readings, podcasts, and films trace the often taken-for-granted artifacts of the everyday in hospitals, clinics, and outpatient care spaces, to explore the sociomaterial contributions of objects to mediate and facilitate global health service delivery. Students will identify and investigate different kinds of objects - physical and digital - to expand understandings of how people produce and use devices to administer or receive treatment, in often very habituated and unnoticed ways. In addition to demonstrating the importance of looking at these features of organizational life, assignments invite students to explore the diverse ways these material practices categorize and sort, but also construct and segregate relationships with providers and recipients of health care cross-culturally.
German 250 Cultural History of Beer and Brewing from Germany to Chicago
This course will provide an overview of many different historical and practical aspects of beer and brewing in German-speaking culture, while also including the rich history of German beer making in Chicago from the 1850s to today. Beyond the history and science of beer in Germany and Chicago, we will read fictional and philosophical interpretations of beer and its cultural impact, from Martin Luther's advocation of drinking and the importance of alcohol in E.T.A. Hoffmann's work, to Friedrich Nietzsche's comparison of beer to Christianity. We will learn about the science of brewing by focusing on the different beer styles and brewing techniques used by German brew-masters and tavern owners from the Middle Ages until the present day. Both an experienced brewer from Germany and an expert on local history will be invited to class. Finally, a beer tasting of non-alcoholic malted beverages will be included as part of the curriculum, as well as a tour of a local Chicago brewery.
The course is taught in English, and all reading material is in English. This course requires no knowledge of the German language, though text will be provided in the original German for those who know German.
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 web, and early websites from many sources. In addition, we will consider various generative AI programs, examining uses and concerns. 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, race, location, community, and identity? Following a Cultural Studies model for inquiry, this course will be experiential—using class exercises to generate both class discussions and more extended written reflections. Your attendance and participation are key necessary factors in this course. No tech experience needed, only a willingness to take risks and share work.
Are you interested in organizing and advocacy work? Do you want to put theories and knowledge from the classroom into practice? Have you been wondering how to build resilient movements, sustain your involvement, and engage across conflict without burning out? This immersive course relies on organizing frameworks and case studies from Asian American Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies to guide students as they move from theory to praxis. By exploring what organizers and advocates have done historically - such as the 1995 Hunger Strike that led to the creation of the Asian American Studies Program at Northwestern - and the ongoing work of organizations in Evanston, Chicago, and beyond, students will learn about and practice skills and strategies for building and sustaining their own advocacy practice. Students will partner with a community-based organization and gain hands-on experience working with seasoned organizers and advocates on a project, such as advocating for fair housing, coalitional organizing for a community benefits agreement, and raising awareness of gender-based violence. Students are expected to attend at least one off-campus excursion (on a Friday).
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.
In this course, we examine how the Wester 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. In addition to smaller writing assignments, students will complete two 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.
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 include the 19th century birth control and eugenics movements, 1970s-era health activist movements (e.g. the women's health movement(s) pre & post-Roe v Wade; the gay liberation/anti-psychiatry movement; the Black Panther Party "survival (pending revolution) programs" and the free clinic movement it inspired), AIDS and breast cancer activism in the 1980s and 1990s, ongoing reproductive rights and environmental justice movement activism, post-Covid "mutual aid" projects, and current mental health activism in the era of psychopharmacology. 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.
The world today is awash in predictions: economic forecasts and military scenarios, climate models and pandemic plans, political polls and betting pools, plus the ever-approaching AI utopia and/or hellscape. But how much of this is new? For millennia now, people have been debating what the future holds. They haven't always been right, of course, but even their mistakes tell us a great deal about the times they were made. Ironically, studying the future is an excellent way to study the past—and reconsider our present. In this course we will study 5,000 years of prognosticators, from Mesopotamian astrologers to today's climate scientists. Along the way we will read sci-fi novelists and religious millenarians, evolutionary theorists and Afro-futurists, eugenicists and high-tech visionaries. We will also play in-class scenario games and revisit Covid predictions to get a feel for how the future unfolded in lived time. This course may not teach you to predict the future more accurately, but it will help you understand visions of things to come. Come explore the alternative worlds of futures past.
This class examines the legal foundations that have created and sustained global inequalities. Through lectures and discussions, we will trace key concepts and their histories, including revolutions and rights, capital and crime, police and property, sedition and social movements, genocide and justice, self and sovereignty, and terror and truth. This will include laws governing outer space, satellites, and artificial intelligence. We will dive into controversial topics each week often connecting them to current events. To what extent, for instance, have international legal regimes arisen out of empires? Why were slavery and settler colonialism so important to many countries' constitutions? How did multinational corporations secure more rights than sovereign states? This course takes up these and other questions in order to make sense of the interplay between laws, empires, states, and corporations around the world over the last four centuries (circa 1600 to 2000).
This course introduces the main episodes and themes of modern history. Unlike other history classes, however, its focus isn't on a particular region or country, but the whole planet. That broad scope will allow us to study large-scale phenomena such as empire, industrial technology, communism, the two world wars, pandemics, and globalization. We'll particularly look at humanity's adoption of fossil fuels, and the prosperity, inequality, and environmental changes that resulted.
Barnett Tu, Th 11:00-12:20pm Notes: SHC Core Course List A
Hist 275-1 History of Early Modern Science and Medicine
This course explores the social spaces of science and medicine in early modern Europe during the so-called 'Scientific Revolution.' We will survey the varied and surprising spaces in which scientific and medical knowledge was produced, from princely courts and grand cathedrals to humble artisanal workshops and Europe's overseas colonies. In so doing, we will see how science and medicine intersected with religion, politics, race, gender, and emerging market economies during the first age of European imperialism, capitalism, and globalization.
This interdisciplinary seminar explores several kinds of scientific ingenuity and technical know-how that have developed in the African continent across the centuries. For the era before European conquest, you'll learn about metallurgy and artistry, landscapes and foodways, architecture and urban aesthetics, and mining and trade, including trans-Saharan and Atlantic trade in people. For the era during and after European conquest, you'll study mapping and human origins research, racial and biomedical studies, transport infrastructures (roads, railways, telegraphy), algorithms and digital tech (radio, cellphones), and large and small scale development projects. We'll do a range of exercises that help you place case studies in their widest context, geographical, linguistic, and sociocultural. 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. We'll likely hold at least one seminar in the Material History Lab.
Crimes, deeds, and spoils of drug traffickers have saturated pop culture for the last decades becoming valuable raw materials for the entertainment industry. This course is designed for students to identify, trace, and analyze audiovisual productions on the so-called narcos in the Americas in order to understand: (a) the plot devices and aesthetic mechanisms with which cultural producers have commodified history as entertainment; and (b) the effects of these types of narratives and imageries in the creation of historical understandings regarding one of the most challenging problems of our times. We accomplish these objectives by watching films, telenovelas and TV shows; reading selected works of history, sociology, anthropology, and journalism (film criticism in particular); and using the tools and technologies of digital humanities in a series of individual and collaborative projects. The ultimate goal is to produce together an open-access digital repository on drug history as entertainment in the Americas.
Hist 292-0-24 Fossil Fuels and Climate Change in Palestine/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.
This course examines the history of cannabis in a global perspective to understand how and why a plant that has been crucial to most civilizations for thousands of years became one of the most consumed intoxicants in human history, and one of the most demonized, criminalized, controversial and profitable commodities of the modern world. We consider archeological evidence to explore the earliest uses and meanings of the plant in antiquity and how it spread from Central Asia to the rest of the planet. We also examine various types of historical works to comprehend what roles cannabis played in the rise of maritime empires and the formation of a global capitalist world. Then, we revisit some of the urban and rural cultures in various parts of the world that modernized the plant's uses and meanings in the 20th century. We also study scientific, legal, and pop-culture materials to elucidate what was at stake in the most heated controversies and campaigns against and in favor of the plant. We conclude analyzing the most recent debates and policies on decriminalization and legalization in North and South America in a comparative perspective, and their socio-economic, political, and environmental implications. We address these topics reading history, anthropology, sociology, political science, and journalism; and watching and analyzing critically songs, advertisement, literature, feature films, and documentary movies.
Tilley M, W 11:00-12:20pm Notes: SHC Core Course List A
Hist 379 Biomedicine and World History
This lecture course takes 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, warfare, 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, genocides, and police powers - to the more recent past. Lectures and readings cover all world regions: Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
We are told constantly, "take care of yourself!" and we do our best to eat well, sleep well, and stay healthy. Our bodies are important to us. They are also important to the institutions we are a part of, including our families, our schools, our jobs, and our country. They are all invested in keeping our bodies healthy and productive. However, the array of institutions interested in the value of our bodies often have additional incentives- our health is surrounded by a hoard of controversies: - Why do some people get better medical care than others? - How should the healthcare system be organized? - How do we balance the risks of new medical treatments with the benefits? - What makes the stigma associated with disease and disability so enduring? - What happens when no diagnosis can be made? This course offers conceptual tools and perspectives for answering these controversies. To do so it surveys a variety of topics related to the intersections of health, biomedicine, culture, and society. We will analyze the cultural meanings associated with health and illness; the political debates surrounding health care, medical knowledge production, and medical decision-making; and the structure of the social institutions that comprise the health care industry. We will examine many problems with the current state of health and health care in the United States and also consider potential solutions.
The effects of Artificial Intelligence (AI) permeate all aspects of life and impact world politics. What are the implications of such technological developments that now outpace diplomatic negotiations toward international regulations and norm creation? What global institutional changes are necessary to avert dangerous and unforeseen consequences of using AI, such as war and interference in democratic societies? How can we prevent unethical and unlawful uses? Will AI benefit humanity and the protection of nature? This course introduces the AI policies adopted by states, explores the implications of AI uses and their impacts in different areas of international relations riven by profound transformations: great power rivalry, challenges posed to global cooperation, provision of humanitarian assistance, achieving the United Nations sustainable development goals, and using AI in the military and warfare. We will examine the application of AI across multiple societal levels and uncover ethical, moral, and international legal implications by grappling with critical questions and answers that must become increasingly central to achieving peace and security in the contemporary world order. This course will closely examine the events, global governance, and diplomacy of AI on the world stage. We will analyze and address the challenges, obstacles, and opportunities of AI diplomacy today.
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.
MENA 390-6-1 Art and Architecture of the Medieval Mediterranean
This course explores the medieval Mediterranean world's art, architecture, archaeology, and material culture from late antiquity to the early modern period, or between the late 4th and 16th centuries. While the Renaissance blossomed in Italy in the 1400s, in the course, we will investigate the medieval art, architectural elements, and art forms that circulated among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities around the Mediterranean until the 16th century. We will study the geographies of the Mediterranean Sea—including Italy, Spain, Egypt, North Africa, the Balkans, Anatolia, the Holy Land, and the Middle East—focusing on their rulers, kingdoms, merchants, craftsmen, pilgrims, and travelers. These figures will guide our investigation into the movement, migration, exchange, and patronage across the region while exploring the role of art and architecture in the sacred and secular lives of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities. Through our study of monuments (including architecture, mosaics, and wall paintings), objects (such as ceramics, metalwork, coins, ivory, and textiles), and historical texts, we will examine the cultural and political dynamics that defined the medieval Mediterranean world.
Phil 254-0-20 Intro to Philosophy of the Natural Sciences
The course will introduce students to metaphysical and epistemological issues raised by modern natural science. We will be guided by nested "what does it take"-questions. For example: What does it take for natural science to be -in societies with a scientific culture—the legitimate authority on matters of fact about nature? What does it take for a system of assertions to count as a good scientific theory? What does it take for a scientific theory to be testable by evidence like observational and experimental data (and: what does it take for certain series of experiences to count as data, observations, experimental results?)? What does it take for a given theory to be better supported by the available evidence than its competitors? What does it take for a given theory to explain the known phenomena in an area of knowledge? What does it take for an explanatory scientific theory to be credited with reference to underlying structures of reality? We will begin with a brief overview of the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17 th century, and then turn to contemporary discussions on the problem of induction, the problem of the underdetermination of theory choice by the available data, the problem of rationality, the problem of realism. This will include reflecting on reasons philosophers of science have established against some common preconceptions about what it takes to be entitled to scientific objectivity, such as that science provides ‘proof', or that there is one simple, context-free ‘scientific method', or that scientific objectivity is free of considerations of values or informed judgment. Many contemporary doubt-manufacturers selectively use parts of such reasons to suggest the skeptical attitude that science produces just one among many optional beliefs about reality, and that others (like religion, or what serves the oil industry) are equally valid. Against this, we will see that the reasons against proof as the standard (and in favor of evidential support and fallibility) in fact don't weaken but instead strengthen the justifications of why we ought to trust scientifically formed belief where it and its institutional and social conditions are available more than any other (purported) sources of information on nature.
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.
Poli Sci 390-0-20 Health, Chronic Illness and Disability Politics
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.
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 COP31—the 31st Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), taking place this year in Antalya, Türkiye (from 9 to 20 November 2026). 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.
Enrollment is by permission only. Interested students should apply through the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. Applications will open in early spring quarter. Additional information, including details on travel funding, can be found at buffett.northwestern.edu.
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.
Poli Sci 390-0-26 Digital Propaganda 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.
This course 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 interconnected world.
Rights of the Nonhuman Western political thought has long defined the political community by drawing a line between human beings and everything else. Today that line is contested from two directions at once. Animal advocates argue that sentient creatures are owed justice, representation, and even citizenship, while software developers, ethicists, and lawmakers have begun to ask whether artificial systems could one day bear moral claims of their own. This course treats these debates as a single problem in political theory. We begin with classical and modern accounts of what sets humans apart, then turn to contemporary arguments over animal rights and animal citizenship, the politics of industrial slaughter and racialized species boundaries, and the movement to grant legal rights to rivers, forests, and ecosystems. The final weeks ask whether AI systems could hold rights, and how they are already altering the conduct of democratic government. Throughout, we will examine which capacity (reason, language, sentience, or the possession of interests) grounds political standing, and what follows for democracy if that capacity turns out to be held beyond our species.
Religious St - 261-0-20 Cultivating Environmental Consciousness
This course is an experimental, constructive, student-led inquiry into the idea of environmental consciousness, a term recently used by philosopher Michael Bonnett to posit an intrinsic relationship between consciousness and nature. He argues that education should be ecologized by aiming to help students develop environmental consciousness as a responsive receptivity to nature. In this course we will explore the idea of environmental consciousness by developing and carrying out nature-based practices meant to help us understand its feasibility as a basis for education. Students will collectively design, undertake, and assess these practices. In doing so we will reflect on our relationship with nature and the environment, the goals of education, conceptions of learning and assessment, the putative distinction between the secular and religious, and the relationship between educational practices and climate catastrophe.
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 the Chicagoland area.
School of Comm - Comm St 375-0-1 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 379-0-1 Digital Propaganda 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.
School of Comm - Comm St 383-0-1 Media, Communications 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.
AI is reshaping the way work gets done in organizations. This course examines that shift from multiple perspectives: the broad questions about AI's effects on jobs and organizational life, and the practical science of leading teams whose members include both people and intelligent machines. We draw on research in team science and organizational communication to understand how AI affects the affective, cognitive, and behavioral dynamics that determine whether teams succeed. A central concern is how to collaborate with AI in ways that maximize learning and preserve human skill, rather than quietly eroding both. Students engage these questions through case studies, leadership activities, and direct experience with AI tools.
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 St - Comm St 395-0-33 Teaming with AI
AI is reshaping the way work gets done in organizations. This course examines that shift from multiple perspectives: the broad questions about AI's effects on jobs and organizational life, and the practical science of leading teams whose members include both people and intelligent machines. We draw on research in team science and organizational communication to understand how AI affects the affective, cognitive, and behavioral dynamics that determine whether teams succeed. A central concern is how to collaborate with AI in ways that maximize learning and preserve human skill, rather than quietly eroding both. Students engage these questions through case studies, leadership activities, and direct experience with AI tools.
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. In addition to smaller writing assignments, students will complete two 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.
Molina Tu, Th 2:00-3:20pm Notes: SHC Core Course List B
Soc 220 Health, Biomedicine, Culture and Society
We are told constantly, "take care of yourself!" and we do our best to eat well, sleep well, and stay healthy. Our bodies are important to us. They are also important to the institutions we are a part of, including our families, our schools, our jobs, and our country. They are all invested in keeping our bodies healthy and productive. However, the array of institutions interested in the value of our bodies often have additional incentives- our health is surrounded by a hoard of controversies:
- Why do some people get better medical care than others? - How should the healthcare system be organized? - How do we balance the risks of new medical treatments with the benefits? - What makes the stigma associated with disease and disability so enduring? - What happens when no diagnosis can be made?
This course offers conceptual tools and perspectives for answering these controversies. To do so it surveys a variety of topics related to the intersections of health, biomedicine, culture, and society. We will analyze the cultural meanings associated with health and illness; the political debates surrounding health care, medical knowledge production, and medical decision-making; and the structure of the social institutions that comprise the health care industry. We will examine many problems with the current state of health and health care in the United States and also consider potential solutions.
Rattan M, W 11:00-12:20pm Notes: SHC Core Course List B
Soc 276 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.
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. In addition to smaller writing assignments, students will complete two 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.
