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.
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.
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.
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 course is a survey of some of the main issues of the Industrialized World in the period 1890-1989. Each week, a different topic will be discussed. While the main emphasis will be on Europe, the North-American experience will also be discussed and comparisons with other countries will be made frequently. Because the discussion will be according to topic, the course will not be strictly chronological (though many of the readings are).
English 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
