Amer St 310-0-1 The Chicago Way: Urban Spaces and American Values
Urbanologist Yi Fu Tuan writes, "What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place when we get to know it better and endow it with values." In The Untouchables, Sean Connery tells Kevin Costner, "You want to get Capone? Here's how you get Capone. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He puts one of yours in the hospital, you put one of his in the morgue. That's the Chicago way." In this class, we will examine "the Chicago way" from many different angles in order to interrogate the values with which various artists have endowed Chicago. We will read in a broad range of media: journalism, poetry, song, fiction, film, and sequential art to see how a sense of Chicago as a place works over time. We will pay close attention to depictions of the construction of American identity, and to the role of the artist and intellectual in the city.
From earthquakes to hurricanes, fires to floods, we tend to think of natural disasters as spontaneous occurrences. The word disaster originates in the idea of being born under an unlucky constellation or struck down by an uncaring universe. When homes are flooded or crops are destroyed, we see the natural world encroaching on lives and livelihoods in seemingly unpredictable and certainly unwanted ways. But are these disasters truly a product of nature? In this class, we will engage with the complex history of natural disasters: how people experience and rationalize these events, how communities respond to them, and how the causes of disaster are explained by various stakeholders, from victims to insurance companies. By the end of the quarter, students will have developed historical, cultural, and theoretical tools for understanding the nature of the natural disaster.
Freshman seminar for students in the NU Bioscientist Program that addresses the history, ethics, and longstanding challenges of research in human biology and health. Co-listed with Bio Sci 115.
This course is an introduction to the anthropological subfield of archaeology, its theories and methods, and the political and social issues that arise when we study human pasts. In this course, we look at the history of the discipline and its theoretical underpinnings, as well as methodological topics including how archaeologists create research designs, discover and excavate sites, and analyze artifacts and features. We will also explore how archaeology confronts and deals with contemporary issues critical to the archaeological project and the communities that archaeologists engage with: e.g. heritage preservation and Indigenous/community rights, Black lives and Black histories, environmental degradation and sustainability, feminist archaeology and gender equality. Throughout the course, students will learn about archaeological case studies from around the globe and from a variety of historical periods.
What is a more important predictor of how long you will live, the genes you inherit from your parents, or the zip code of where you grew up? This course aims to answer this question, as well as others, regarding the origins of social inequalities in health in the US. The course will also consider the broader global context, and ask why the US spends so much money on health care, but lags behind many nations in key indicators of population health. It will examine how social stratification by race/ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, education, and neighborhood quality shapes our biology and the health status of individuals, families, and populations; and, conversely, how health itself can be a fundamental determinant of key social outcomes such as educational achievement.
At the advent of "globalization" some scholars argued that the movements of capital, goods, people and ideas across nation-states have rendered their borders increasingly porous. The erosive effects of this porosity in the age of the multi-national corporations heralded the death of the nation-state. Yet, in the epoch of border walls and offshored refugee processing centers, this assumed porosity of borders begs a reexamination of broader geographies of power and tactics of movement. In this course, we ask: What is a border? Is it the physical line drawn between two states? When is a border artificial and when natural? Who gets to draw these lines? How does the border become an architecture of regulation that extends access to mobility to some and denies it to others? We will probe these questions by working towards rethinking borders as equally the products of mobile social actors, contraband commodities and fluctuating values as they are of state policies aimed at managing their movements. By the end of the course students will be exposed to diverse theories of space and formations of borders in the Americas, Europe, and South Asia. They will be able to articulate what an attention to space and the relations of power inscribed in border formations can contribute to our conceptions of space and power.
Anthro 290-0-1 Race, Gender and Sexuality in Science and Anti-Science
Is race "real"? Do men and women have different brains? Is sexuality a choice (and should that matter)? This course examines the way these and other questions have been taken up in scientific discourse and how, in turn, scientific discourse has become a battleground in political disputes over trans rights, gender equality, and racial justice in the United States and beyond. We will approach race, gender, and sexuality as biosocial constructs, exploring their roles in debates about the relationship between biology and society, nature and culture, human similarity and difference, and knowledge and politics. Course modules will: contextualize how cultural understandings of human difference have shaped—and still impact--the development of Western science; examine contemporary scientific questions related to sex, gender, race, & sexuality, genetic diversity, medicine, technology, and the role of science in contemporary politics; explore how social inequalities can become embodied and produce biological effects; and interrogate the contemporary politicization and instrumentalization of scientific discourses related to race, gender, and sexuality, including by White supremacist, anti-trans, and anti-feminist movements.
This class explores food in all its cultural and social dimensions. Lectures and readings will begin with the deep history and origins of our foods, with a focus on ancient foods of the Americas; then, we turn to the social, economic and political organization of the modern food industry, from industrial production and fast-food empires to small-scale local farms and restaurants; and last, the cultural significance of food, whether as cherished ethnic tradition or in the rise (and fall?) of celebrity chefs, cooking shows and competitions. Individual research projects will allow an in-depth study of a favorite (or least favorite) food, and experiential assignments will take students out of the classroom and into local and regional stores, restaurants, and markets to meet the people who make and sell our food.
In what appears to be an age of unprecedented global distress, what is the role of media in shaping discourses, representations, and experiences of mental illness? Western psychiatric frameworks are increasingly defining mental health/illness around the world via multilateral health organizations that intervene across cultural contexts. These frameworks are also circulated via Western media narratives that shape the meanings people associate with mental health and illness. What other narratives of mental health might be told? What experiences of distress and resilience are obscured by these dominant frameworks? In this course, students will learn about the ways in which cultural meanings and social structures shape mental distress and how it is expressed and experienced by people across time and context. We will critically examine dominant U.S. models of mental health and illness and ask what underlying cultural assumptions and expectations about self, personhood, emotion, mind, body, well-being and success are embedded in these narratives. We will explore how representations in film and television serve to reflect, reinforce, or re-imagine such assumptions and analyze the political and social implications and power dynamics associated with certain ways of thinking about and depicting mental health. Through a combination of engagement with scholarship on culture and mental health, media studies, and our own critical analyses of media objects from film and television, we will explore these questions and work to generate creative and collaborative ideas about how to rewrite media narratives, in order to better reflect the broad spectrum of experience.
Anthro 290-0-24 Before Binary: Archaeologies of Sex, Gender, Sexualities
Since the latter half of the 20th century, Queer and Feminist scholars have shown how binary identity systems (male/female; man/woman; straight/gay; cis/trans) constrain and erase variability in the ways people experience and relate to themselves/others as gendered and sexed beings. But what possibilities exist outside this binary system, and how did people understand sex, gender, and sexuality before it was established? In this course, we will explore archaeological and anthropological case studies that investigate what genders, sexes, and sexualities have been made possible by cultural groups throughout human history. Students will learn about queer and feminist approaches to the study of identity and bodies through archaeological case studies. From Venus Figurines depicting voluptuous bodies in Neolithic Europe, sex acts depicted by the Moche Sex pots of Peru, to Ancient Maya rulers collecting blood from tongues and penises for ritual practices, this class will explore the vastly different ways issues of sex, gender, and sexuality have been understood by people around the globe. Beyond learning about the past, we will question and engage with the possibilities and problems that arise when identity categories defined by specific cultural and temporal contexts are utilized or appropriated to interpret bodies shaped by another. Here, students will learn how to analyze the contexts that make expressions of sex and gender meaningful and be asked to communicate these insights in written and oral formats.
Anthro 290-0-3 Technology, Power and Justice in the Anthropocene
Our lives are configured through the routinized functioning of infrastructures that mostly remain invisible until they break down. Material infrastructures such as roads, bridges, grids, and dams connect people, places, ideas, and things across time and space. They promise spatial and social connectivity, environmental control, technological modernization, and development in the age of Anthropocene defined as the era in which human activities play a dominant role in environmental changes. However, they also lead to uneven access to resources, prevent mobility, and produce injustices and socio-political conflicts. This course will scrutinize infrastructures to discuss their social, political, and environmental lives. We will read and discuss anthropological studies that examine how infrastructures are constructed, used, maintained, and repaired in everyday life. In this exploration, we will pay specific attention to power relations, social meanings, and environmental transformations that shape and are shaped by infrastructures. Conceptual themes include, among others, urban citizenship, state power, social conflicts, securitization, violence, community building, and ecology. These themes will be explored through the focus on water systems, renewable energy, road projects, waste facilities, oil extraction, housing, and other infrastructures. We will pay specific attention to infrastructure and its politics in the Global South, through readings and other course materials on regions such as the Middle East and North Africa, South East Asia, Africa, and South America. The course will also cover new understandings of infrastructure beyond material systems; we will discuss the new perspectives that approach social relations and nature as infrastructures that sustain human and non-human life.
Archaeology and nationalism have been closely intertwined at least since the idea of the nation-state emerged in Europe following the French Revolution. Archaeology offers nationalist agendas the possibility of elaborating historical records and extending the past far into prehistory. Its results can be displayed in museums and accessed online. In turn, nationalism has contributed to the development of archaeology as a modern discipline within colonial contexts and problematic theories around race. Global heritage and institutions such as UNESCO's World Heritage Centre have reshaped the political landscape of archaeological sites while introducing new tensions around equitable access to resources and the consequences of increased tourism. This course explores the role of archaeology in creating and elaborating national identities over the last two centuries, emphasizing the critical evaluation of historical and archaeological sources. Issues include the professionalization of archaeology; national museums and practices of display and interpretation; archaeological sites as national monuments and tourist destinations; cultural property legislation and controversies; and archaeology and monuments under totalitarian regimes.
This course provides an introduction to discussions of race and ethnicity within anthropology. We will discuss racialization - the process by which people are assigned to categories of race and the associated stereotypes and traits tied to those categories. Because race is a social construct, anthropology is well-situated to examine how racial categories are created and made impactful through historical and social practice. Throughout the course, will examine racial categories, where they come from, how they vary across societies, and what they are used to signify or mean. With readings from the four main subfields of anthropology, students will learn about ideas and conceptualizations of race through biological, cultural, linguistic, and archaeological approaches. The course will begin by complicating and contradicting the idea that racial categories are in any way natural, scientific, or innate. We will examine the history of these categories and the process of creating and maintaining racial categories. While the course does examine racial categories across globally situated projects, we will focus especially on the United States context. The course will conclude with some models and discussions of anti-racist approaches within anthropology.
Did you know that all the microbes on and in your body weigh as much as your brain? And they can influence your body almost as much as your brain? They can determine how much weight you gain on a certain diet or whether you develop the symptoms of an autoimmune disease, and they can even affect your mood and behavior. Although we have long known the importance of microbes in the context of disease, recent advances in technology have opened up an entirely new field of research that is transforming perspectives on human health. In this course, we will explore the human microbiome beginning with an overview of different types of microbes and the methods we use to study them. Following that, the majority of the course will be dedicated to exploring new research on the microbes of the skin, mouth, gut, and uro-genital tract and their impacts on human health. We will also consider the influence of geography, politics, social structures, and culture on global patterns in the human microbiome and health.
Environmental anthropology is a more recent outgrowth of ecological anthropology, which emerged in the 1960s and 70s as a quantitative focus on systemic human-environment relationships, especially as they pertain to patterns of social change and adaptation. Environmental anthropology became more prominent in the 1980s, and is typically characterized by qualitative research on communities' engagements with contemporary environmental issues. Environmental anthropology has greater commitments to advocacy, critique, and application than ecological anthropology, but as we'll see in this course, the proliferation of "new ecologies" (as opposed to "new environmentalisms") denotes the continued synergy between ecological and environmental anthropologies. This course is divided into two parts. Part I will provide an historical overview of the development of environmental anthropology. We will cover some of the most influential research trends in the field: environmental determinism, cultural ecology, systems ecology, ethnoecology, historical ecology, political ecology, ecofeminisms, and interspecies studies. Part II will then pivot to the application of environmental anthropology knowledge to some of the most pressing environmental issues facing the contemporary world: population pressure, capitalist consumption, biodiversity conservation, sustainable land use, climate change, and environmental justice.
Anthro 390-0-1 Nature, Culture and Environmentalisms
This course examines anthropological treatments of the concept of nature and human relations with the natural environment. We discuss how conceptions of nature are always shaped, transformed, and produced by social relations. Course materials focus primarily on ethnographies on the intersections of political ecology, science studies, and postcolonial critiques. Course topics include the history of the Western nature-culture opposition and its critics, as well as recent scholarship on such topics as food studies, the social life of forests, race and the genome, human-animal interactions, and interspecies relations.
The risk of nuclear war is increasing, from North Korea's nuclear program to Russia's threat to use tactical nuclear weapons in its war with Ukraine. The nuclear arms race is also gaining momentum, as evidenced by China's growing nuclear arsenal and the U.S. "nuclear modernization" program. Cities have always been considered targets for nuclear attack. This advanced course in the anthropology of peace examines the role of cities—city leaders and city residents—in the politics of nuclear weapons through the lens of a broader vision of security in which global nuclear security is inextricably linked to local, national, and regional concerns such as racism, gender inequality, economic inequality, environmental crisis, and memories of past violence. The course introduces students to the history of the development of nuclear weapons, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, various bilateral and multilateral frameworks for nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament, key concepts, theories, and policy tools related to nuclear security, and the evolution of anti-nuclear activism, particularly from the "nuclear freeze" movement of the 1980s to the current global campaign to abolish nuclear weapons. The course will also offer opportunities to hear from a wide range of guest speakers, including defense and security experts, atomic bomb survivors, peace activists, and local government officials. There are no prerequisites for the course, and no prior knowledge of anthropology or security studies is required. Students from all majors and schools are welcome.
This course surveys the social scientific study of misinformation in society. We will query the past to learn about how misinformation has evolved over time as a sociocultural feature of human societies. We will interrogate the present to examine how misinformation figures in the defining political, social, and economic problems of our time. And we will imagine the implications of misinformation for the future and explore our agency in shaping that future. We will draw on case studies, documentaries, and anthropological and social scientific literature on rumor and gossip, conspiracy theories, post-truth politics, deradicalization, and social media to explore topics and concepts such as "fake news," digital populism, algorithmic bias, weaponized disinformation, the "infodemic," deep fakes, and more. Case studies may include COVID-19, election, and climate change denialism; political conspiracy theories from the French Revolution to QAnon; troll farms and other tactics of information warfare; and the role of misinformation in current controversies over sexual and racial politics.
This course examines human relationships to intoxicants, medicines, and substances throughout time and across the globe. From studies of hallucinogens in early societies to the development of Western medicine, we will examine case studies around drug and medicine use in many contexts. We will study the history of psychedelics, opiates, and cannabis, in addition to substances such as coffee, tobacco, and alcohol. Looking at production and distribution from the colonial era through the present, we will examine the labor required to produce these substances for global distribution and the commodity networks surrounding each. How have such substances been used for healing, spirituality, and financial profit? What are the social relations around producing these substances? We will examine archaeological and anthropological literatures around addiction, exploitation, and health in relation to substance-use. Drawing together many case studies from around the world and from all eras, this course will examine and question enduring human uses of intoxicating and/or healing substances as a lens into questions around embodiment, social relationships, and healthcare.
In 2020, ICOM (International Council of Museums) ratified an updated definition of "museum", which states: A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets, and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible, and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally, and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection, and knowledge sharing. What constitutes a museum's responsibilities is a question that undergirds ICOM's definition. In this course we will consider the responsibility of museums, with art museums as our focus. Among the questions that will be raised and debated in the course are: what responsibilities do museums have for the care and stewardship of their collections? What do museums owe to individuals and communities with connections to the objects currently in their care? What obligations do museums have to donors, founders, and funders? What makes museums good neighbors in the communities where they are based? What responsibility do museums have to their histories and the history of museums generally? In the course we will address these questions through readings, dialogue with practitioners and knowledge sharers, class discussions, and short writing assignments. Several case studies will be highlighted. The course will be held at the Block Museum and will include interactions with Block staff and engagement with The Block's current exhibition, Actions for the Earth: Art, Care & Ecology.
This course examines the role of photography in shaping and transforming ideas of Africa—its peoples, cultures, and geographies—from the late nineteenth century to the present. Across colonial and post-colonial contexts, we will examine how artists, amateur and professional photographers, exhibitions, and publications variously register and respond to social, cultural, and political changes on the continent. Through course readings, lectures, and study room visits to the Herskovits Library of African Studies and the Block Museum of Art, we will engage a range of forms including advertisements and popular magazines, colonial ethnography, film, modern and contemporary art, and photojournalism.
Art History 390-0-1 Resourcing Empire: Colonialism and Modern Architecure
This seminar will explore the entangled histories of colonialism and architectural modernism, from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1960s, at the onset of mass decolonization across the Global South. The course will look beyond the "laboratory" narrative of modernism as colonialism's import, paying close attention to the role of local aesthetic and material practices, building technologies, environmental knowledge, and labor in the design of the colonial environment. Exploring stylistic forms of modernism and design theory in the imperial metropole, this course will also trace the European appropriation of indigenous cultural and material traditions and technical innovations. Expanding the scope of analysis beyond the urban scale, the seminar will situate the unique territorial character of colonial expansion during this period, and its reliance on emerging transregional infrastructures, within the broader framework of the industrialized "resource frontier." Our inquiry into the built environment of the colonial past and its relationship to architecture's modernity will be guided by contemporary debates and critical discourse that offer nuanced perspectives on the interlocking struggles over reparation, restitution, and the politics of memory.
Asian Amer St 376-0-1 Memory and Identity in Asian Amer Literature
How can writers represent inaccessible stories, ones lost to the passage of history? This class explores how literature functions as repositories of minority histories and memories, as meditations on the process of assembling and collecting stories, and as imaginings of alternative histories and futures. Given the difficulty of assembling a coherent Asian American identity, our examinations will be defined as much by the absences, gaps, and contradictions of Asian America's collective memory as by what is found within it.
Asian/American gaming is a unique and timely phenomenon. How do games reflect US-Asian geopolitics, from where game hardware is produced and disposed of, and where much video game art and programming is outsourced, to the PR scandal of US-sponsored esports players supporting Hong Kong sovereignty? How does the association of Asians with video games interact with long-standing racial stereotypes of Asians as unplayful or robotic? Students will read and write about gaming, play (and possibly make) games, and hear from Asian/American game developers.
Asian Lang and Cultures 224-0-20 Japanese Cinema II
This course offers a history of Japanese cinema from the beginning of the New Wave movements in the mid-1950s to the present moment. We will consider how cinema has reflected historical moments and shaped cultural discourses in this period. Focusing on films that raise disciplinary questions related to both the cinematic medium and Japan, we will examine, among other topics: the relationship between cinema and the era of high economic growth, the decline of the studio system, postmodernism, and cinematic responses to the post-bubble economic recession. We will also study the shifting position of directors within the broader economic and institutional contexts of Japanese cinema and its global circulation. Students will learn how to critically analyze various films from multiple theoretical perspectives while gaining an understanding of the major figures and trends in the history of postwar Japanese cinema. Syllabus subject to change.
Asian Lang and Cultures 265-0-20 Kings, Courtesans and Khan Artists
India is home to the second largest population of Muslims on earth. It's also host to the world's largest film industry, best known as Bollywood. Little wonder, then, that Bollywood films regularly feature Muslim characters, social spaces, and cultural references that are readily marked or coded as "Islamic." But in spite of a large coterie of Muslims working within the industry - as actors, song writers, or producers - the representation of Muslims in Indian films has consistently raised complex issues around ideas of identity and belonging in a nation where they constitute a clear (and conspicuous) minority. We will read these films against the historical backdrop of the search for national identity and inclusivity in post-colonial India. Students will be given the opportunity not only to learn about Indian (particularly Bombay) cinema, but also to explore how cinematic representations intersect with issues of identity and belonging in the modern nation-state.
Asian Languages and Cultures 240-0-20 The End of a World: South Korean Fictions, Films
What does one talk about when one talks about disasters? Whose world ends in "end of the world" narratives? This course invites students to read and watch South Korean and diasporic narratives centered around disasters, both real and fictional, to engage questions of politics, representation, and inequalities that shape disaster narratives. Ranging from disasters of the past to more contemporary ones such as pandemics and Sewol ferry, the disasters examined in this course have sparked complex conversations surrounding a more just society and the doomed end of the "normal." Engaging scholarship on disasters, speculative fictions, critical race theory, and gender studies, the course introduces students to the varied academic and cultural responses to disasters and the underlying stakes that drive these responses. Students will be assigned a variety of texts to analyze, such as film, paintings, novels, webtoons, and news, as well as choosing a disaster narrative of their own interest to examine. No prior knowledge of Korean culture or language are required to take this course. Students are expected to actively participate in class and work in groups on collaborative projects as well as producing two short papers. Waitlist will be enabled for the course, and all inquiries to the instructor once the course is full should state relevant coursework and why you wish to take the course for permission number considerations.
Asian Languages and Cultures 322-0-20 Video Games in Japanese Culture
This course places video games in the context of Japanese cultural history from the 1990s to the present. It aims to furnish the historical and conceptual contexts necessary to interpret how games reflect upon the crises faced by Japan at the turn of the new millennium. The course centers on a series of dominant narrative paradigms and subcultural tropes—apocalyptic fantasy, world-type, survival, etc.—and asks how these are rendered in game form. While our focus is ultimately on games as a form of narrative, we aim also to understand how the active and interactive nature of the game medium shapes the meanings that these texts convey.
Bio Sciences 339-0-20 Critical Topics in Ecology and Conservation
This course will include reading and writing about conservation issues for both scientific and general audiences, as well as discussions around primary literature and popular media around conservation. Class activities will include small and large group discussions, and other opportunities for active learning, as well as lectures from the course instructors and guest lectures from experts in the different conservation fields.
Black Studies 380-0-20 What's Tech Got to Do with It: Race and Resistancee
Discussions of race in the digital humanities are often approached through a focus on the digital divide. This course will explore the study of race and technology beyond that introductory narrative. Instead, students will understand how the logics and infrastructure of computer technologies perpetuates racial inequalities in the day to day lives of people of color. Using the methods of queer theory, feminist theory and black studies, a central focus will be interrogating the consequences and affordances of technoculture, and more importantly, the cultural, and epistemological contributions to media and information technology by black and other communities of color. The syllabus is organized by theme and examines foundational texts starting in the 1990s up until our contemporary moment.
Chemistry 105-7-01 Science and the Scientist: How We Communicate
Clear and concise communication is highly valued in many STEM fields. Whether conveying the technical details of an experiment for a colleague or translating the impact of a study for the public, scientists need to discuss complex ideas with different audiences. This course analyzes the goals of scientific writing by examining texts that represent different levels of communication, including how to use auditory podcasts and the visual language of comic books for conveying complex scientific ideas.
Biased interpretations of scientific results have been used to justify racial and gender oppression for centuries. It was often argued that people of different races and different genders were fundamentally different, and as such their roles in society should differ as well. Today, many people reject the claim that race and gender have substantial effect on a person\'s abilities or capacity, but how did we get here? More importantly, how did science help facilitate these claims in the first place? In this course, we will explore the role of science in historical oppression based on race and gender. We will identify key scientific studies and their subsequent legacy to reveal the precarious nature of scientific interpretation in the hands of biased individuals. We will discuss how power structures can infiltrate scientific integrity and propose safeguards to prevent this kind of infiltration in the future.
Chemistry 105-8-06 An Analysis of Color Across Science and Culture
This course explores the many facets of color. From the scientific underpinnings of what light is and how it behaves in the world, to the way that color is used in art and film. Requiring no previous science or art background, this course hopes to bridge the gap between these two worlds by exploring how color is vital to so many disciplines. Over the quarter we will focus on the guiding questions of: What is color? How do we perceive color? How do we capture color? How do we create color? and What does color mean to us? We will address these questions through guided readings, outside speakers from across disciplines, and interactive assignments.
Chicago Field Studies 392-0-20 Field Studies in Public Health
Do diseases like Covid-19 actually see race? What does history tell us about the public’s health and how can we predict the future based on where we have been? This course will provide an introduction to the field of Public Health and focus on promoting health equity. Students will explore the global and local history of Public Health as well as its intersection with race and racism, housing, poverty and violence. Using theory alongside the practical experience of their internships, they will unpack the complexities of Public Health and gain an understanding of the potential roles they can play within the field.
This course will explore the history of European and Near Eastern astronomy from the 7th century BCE to the 6th century CE. Students will learn the fundamentals of the geocentric model, ancient methods of observation, and traditions of cosmology. We will study the history of time-reckoning and calendar-making, as well as portrayals of astronomy and celestial phenomena in myth and literature. In addition to reading ancient texts, students will also make their own observations using models of ancient instruments and the methods of ancient astronomers.
Classics 320-0-2 Ancient Medicine: Greek and Roman History
We will study the theory and practice of Greek and Roman medicine, looking at ancient texts in translation, ancient artifacts and materials, and some modern scholarship. As a term project, students will learn to think as ancient physicians, diagnosing and prescribing treatments for patients from the Hippocratic case studies. During class discussion, we will engage critically with primary sources and examine the differences between ancient and modern science from a balanced historical perspective. We will also investigate the social, cultural, and economic forces that have affected the development of western medicine throughout its history.
It is perhaps unsurprising that our time - obsessed as it is with GDP growth, the ups and downs of the stock market, inflation rates, the trade deficit - produces scholarship that studies the ancient Roman economy. This scholarship has made us increasingly aware of how different Rome was from the modern world. This course will focus on what that difference means for the realities of everyday life, both past and present. Questions to be addressed are: What did economic growth mean for the economy of the Romans? Can we even measure it? What role did energy consumption play in economic performance? What was the role of social class in business? What was the influence of a demographic regime with low life expectancy? How was trade conducted over long distances without fast means of communication and transportation? What was the role of technology and technological progress in the economy?
Introduction to Communication Studies as a broad and interdisciplinary field, looking at important domains, processes and perspectives for understanding communication phenomena.
Comm St 395-0-21 History of Theory and Information
We live in an information age, with computers of unprecedented power in our pockets. This course seeks to understand how information shapes our lives today, and how it has in the past. It does so via an interdisciplinary inquiry into four technological infrastructures of information and communication—print, wires, airwaves, and bits.
Comm St 395-0-21 Social Media, Technology and Mental Health
This course will examine the relationship between social media, technology, and mental health. Students will explore and critically analyze the advantages, challenges, and opportunities of using social networking sites and technology (e.g. apps, digital interventions, video games) to communicate about and seek support for mental health disorders. Conversely, students will scrutinize social media, technology, its impact on mental health and wellness, with special attention paid to topics such as social comparison and online self-presentation.
Comm St 395-0-24 Social History of Psychedelic Medicines
This course provides social history of psychedelic medicines (LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, MDMA, ketamine, ayahuasca, nitrous oxide, etc.). It focuses primarily on the United States in the 20th century, however, we will also discuss important developments outside the US and prior to the 20th century where relevant. We will discuss the subjective, mind manifesting, and spiritual effects, the chemical structure, origins, legality, and neurobiology of each of the substances, as well as their clinical, and non-clinical uses and their effects on science, technology, arts, and culture. We will discuss their risks, benefits, and alternatives in a way that will support informed decision making about their use.
Comm St 395-0-25 Digital Propaganda and Repression
Digital media and technologies, often considered as 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 writing-intensive course focuses on the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion by the director Hideaki Anno, generally considered as one of the most celebrated works in this art form. What are the dominating ideas in this series, and how do they evolve? How do discourses of religion, philosophy, and psychology manifest in this series, explicitly or implicitly? How does the saga of Neon Genesis Evangelion achieve its quasi-mythical status, and what influence has it exerted on anime as a form, culturally and economically? The main goal of the course is to introduce students to the conventions and rigors of evidence-based argumentation and analysis in humanistic forms, and we will accomplish this by surveying the original TV series of Neon Genesis Evangelion, its film sequels in the late 1990s, and its more recent Rebuild series with the previous questions in mind. By also reading theoretical works from Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Walter Benjamin, and select contemporary cultural critics, we probe into and reflect upon topics that profoundly inform Anno's series as well as our daily life: the nature of desire, the dynamics of interpersonal relationships, the formation of self-consciousness, among all others.
In this class, we will focus on the foundations of critical theory in the works of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Weber, paying particular attention to the methods they deploy in the treatment of moral and religious phenomena. We will conclude with a section on Charles Mills and contemporary Critical Race Theory. Lectures will primarily involve a close analysis and discussion of the readings.
This course is designed around creative responses to climate change and other environmental crises in recent literary, cinematic, and artistic works from different sites around the world. We will pay close attention to how familiar aesthetic forms and the critical methods used to understand them are (or are not) changing in the face of overlapping existential environmental crises. Are there specific genres or media best suited to addressing climate change and helping to inspire political action? What are the effects of identifying or writing within a "new" literary genre such as "climate fiction"? Can we speak of similar modes in other media: is there such a thing as "climate cinema" or "climate art"? And if there is, how do these categories shape both the art that gets made and how we understand it?
Comp Lit 303-0-20 Finance Fictions: The Japanese 'Economic Novel'
The economic novel is one of the most popular literary genres in postwar Japan. Since their inception in the late 1950s, economic novels have sold as well as, if not better, than mysteries and twice as well as the more high-brow form of "pure literature" (jun bungaku). Centering on the economic realities of life under capitalism, Japanese economic novels portray the workings of financial corruption, the mechanics of production and distribution, and the experience of laboring within one of the largest consumer economies in the world. This course traces this genre from its origins in 1957 to the contemporary moment. Reading works by early practitioners of the form to its more recent inflections in the literature of writers like Oyamada Hiroko (The Factory), Tsumuro Kikuko (There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job), and Murata Sayaka (Convenience Store Woman), we will examine the relationship between literature and the transformations in Japan's capitalist economy. We will consider, among other topics, how this genre depicts changes in the workplace and forms of labor, systemic modes of economic exploitation, the psychological and emotional experience of debt in a financialized economy, and the gendering of particular types of work. Guiding our inquiry will be an overarching question: what are the connections between literary and economic form. The syllabus is subject to change.
Comp Lit 305-0-22 Studies in Film, Media and Visual Culture
This course offers a history of Japanese cinema from the beginning of the New Wave movements in the mid-1950s to the present moment. We will consider how cinema has reflected historical moments and shaped cultural discourses in this period. Focusing on films that raise disciplinary questions related to both the cinematic medium and Japan, we will examine, among other topics: the relationship between cinema and the era of high economic growth, the decline of the studio system, postmodernism, and cinematic responses to the post-bubble economic recession. We will also study the shifting position of directors within the broader economic and institutional contexts of Japanese cinema and its global circulation. Students will learn how to critically analyze various films from multiple theoretical perspectives while gaining an understanding of the major figures and trends in the history of postwar Japanese cinema. Syllabus subject to change.
Earth and Planet Sci 114-0-1 Evolution and the Scientific Method
The scientific method is explored through the role it has played in the development of evolutionary thought. The course tracks the history of evolutionary theory from its earliest origins to the modern consensus, and in so doing, provides examples of scientific method as practiced in biology, geology, physics, and chemistry. It is the story of one of the greatest paradigm shifts in the history of human thought, and is designed to serve the needs of a broad spectrum of non-science majors seeking to satisfy the Area I distribution requirement.
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.
Economics 323-2-20 Economic History of the U.S. 1865 to Present
The course covers the economic and financial development of the United States since the Civil War to the present. Topics include race, education, gender, financial panics, the Great Depression, immigration, innovation, health and the World Wars, among others. The course looks at American economic history since 1865 from four different angles: first, by examining the causes and consequences of important historical events; second, by dissecting the phenomenon of historical persistence and economic scarring over time; third, by discussing whether and how one can draw "lessons from history"; and fourth, by analyzing to what extent economic history can serve as a "laboratory" to test economic theory. The class also seeks to introduce students to modern research designs in empirical economics.
Economics 323-2-20 Economic History of the U.S. 1865-Present
The course examines the economic development of the United States from the Civil War to the present. It focuses both on long-term economic trends (like technological advances and industrialization) and the economic causes and consequences of particular events (like the Great Depression). A specific focus will be on the topics of migration, cities, and innovation, as well as on how economic historians source and use big data, and use econometrics to answer causal questions relevant to economists, economic historians, and the broader public.
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 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.
The environment and our natural resources are scarce yet their values are quite hard to determine. Furthermore, there are a variety of problems with the incentives to use them well. Using the tools of microeconomic analysis and some econometrics, this course will define and examine "environmental problems" in terms of economic efficiency. We will also discuss the methods (and shortcomings of these methods) used by economists and policymakers to place dollar values on environmental amenities (since such valuations will determine what policy options are deemed "efficient"), such as benefit-cost analysis. Then we will apply these tools to look at a particular set of environmental problems caused by negative externalities transmitted through naturally occurring amenities, and the effects of the policies we construct in response to these problems. NOTE: This class is not open to students who have taken Economics 370: Environmental & Natural Resource Economics.
English 105-8-23 Ecofiction 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 children's stories of Dr. Seuss, 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 Pixar's 2008 Wall-E and Buožytė and Samper's 2022 dystopian fantasy, Vesper. Course readings/viewing will include brief readings from literary criticism. We will also consider practical topics such as how University library resources and experts can help students locate and evaluate key sources and develop authoritative arguments. This course will use a traditional grading structure. Content warning: Some readings include references to sexual violence, self-harm, and suicide.
English 274-0 Introduction to Native American and Indigenous Literatures
Native American & Indigenous literatures are currently in the midst of what some scholars call a “second Native American Renaissance.” By this, they refer to the novels like Tommy Orange’s (Cheyenne and Arapaho) There There and Louise Erdrich’s (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) The Round House, and the books of poetry, like Natalie Diaz’s (Mojave/Gila River) Postcolonial Love Poem, which have won national awards, as well as to TV shows like Reservation Dogs that are widely popular among Indigenous viewers and receiving much critical acclaim.
But where did this “second Native American Renaissance” come from? What was the “first” Native American Renaissance? This course will offer an introduction to Native American & Indigenous literatures, with an eye both to the current flourishing of literatures and to their long histories. We will look at the variety of media and genres in which Native American & Indigenous literatures appear, including birchbark pages, pamphlets, pictographic texts and digital platforms, as well as autobiography, political petitions, novels, and short stories. And we will develop a vocabulary for reading, analyzing, and discussing these literatures using key terms and concepts from Native American and Indigenous Studies, including sovereignty, kinship, resurgence, decolonization, and land.
English 281-0-20 Topics in Postcolonial and Comparative Literatures
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.
English 283-0-01 Intro to Literature and the Environment
How is it that the natural world has seemed to writers across time as both comforting and terrifying, a pastoral refuge or a dark threat? How have literary myths of a "green world" spurred us to think about what precisely separates "the human" from other worlds around us? Are humans a part of nature or an exception to it? How do our ideas about nature impose distinct worlds, with distinct rules and rights, on humans, nonhumans, and the places we cross paths, sometimes without knowing it? Tracking these questions through literary forms ranging from Edenic stories and origin myths to Shakespearean drama, Romantic poetry, the modernist novel, and science fiction, students in this course will unearth the unexamined grounds of "green" thought as it appears in literary environments (as well as film, mass media, and the popular imagination). The course will give students an introduction to the "environmental humanities" and a deep dive into the storied concept of "nature," while offering an unusual and broad background on classic literary themes of belonging, justice/ethics, freedom, wilderness, and the everyday.
English 305-0-20 Science, Medical and Health Writing
This writing course will explore various genres used in the health professions and examine these genres with a rhetorical lens; rhetorical study—essentially, the study of persuasion—is a good means of illuminating and recasting problems in health and medicine (Segal, 2005). The course is organized in 4 modules: 1)Rhetoric of Health and Medicine, 2) Science Writing, 3) Medical Writing 4) Health Humanities
In 1893, the Potawatomi writer Simon Pokagon circulated a birchbark book, The Red Man's Rebuke (also titled The Red Man's Greeting), which was printed to circulate at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Pokagon strongly criticized the Fair's celebration of Columbus's "discovery" of the Americas in the book's text, but Pokagon's words are not the only form this critique takes. The birchbark pages, the illustrations, the process by which the books were made and printed: these elements extend Pokagon's critique to questions of environmental destruction, political sovereignty, and gendered experiences of colonialism. This class asks: What is an Indigenous book? We will learn and practice methods for reading materiality (what is paper made of?) and process (who printed the books? Prepared the pages? Circulated them for sale?). In doing so, we will examine how Indigenous writers and artists experiment with the materials of bookmaking to make the book form part of its meaning. We will examine how critically questioning the book form can decenter individual authors; raise questions about many people who participated in making, circulating, reading, and keeping books; and orient us to the trees and plants out of which books are made. This is an experimental, hands-on course where we will not only learn methods for making books but practice them as well. We will learn how to look at Indigenous books that take various forms: these include codices that open like accordions or fans; printed or sewn designs on birchbark; contemporary artist books that combine graphic arts with ancient book forms or that embed material objects like bullets on a page, or books that look like the thing they are about. We will understand processes of making and circulating books and how to connect those processes to the literary meanings on the page. We will consult these very cool and very special books during class sessions at NU's Special Collections and at other libraries, and the class will also include engagement with letterpress printing, as well as discussions with Potawatomi scholars and artists about birchbark books and other objects.
The Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko wrote in 1977 that stories are "all we have to fight off illness and death." 40 years later, in 2017, Orion Magazine published a cluster of poems written by Native writers "for the Water Protectors at Standing Rock." How, this course asks, have stories and poems been part of Indigenous protest movements and decolonial resistance? How have Indigenous writers used novels, newspapers, and films to document, critique, and refuse what Nick Estes calls settler colonial common sense? This course examines the interrelated stories of Native American literatures & resistance movements from the Red Power activism of the 1960s-1970s to the water protectors at Standing Rock. We'll examine how writers like Louise Erdrich have used fiction to intervene in legal protections and policies for Indigenous women. We'll examine how speculative fiction and visual art imagine beyond a world shaped by colonialism and climate change. By pairing these literary texts with Indigenous Studies scholarship, we'll examine the different approaches Indigenous writers have taken to questions of sovereignty, environmental justice, legal jurisdiction, and political recognition.
English 375-0-20 Memory + Identity in Asian American Literature
How can writers represent inaccessible stories, ones lost to the passage of history? This class explores how literature functions as repositories of minority histories and memories, as meditations on the process of assembling and collecting stories, and as imaginings of alternative histories and futures. Given the difficulty of assembling a coherent Asian American identity, our examinations will be defined as much by the absences, gaps, and contradictions of Asian America's collective memory as by what is found within it.
English 378-0-22 The Chicago Way: Urban Spaces and American Values
Urbanologist Yi Fu Tuan writes, "What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place when we get to know it better and endow it with values." In The Untouchables, Sean Connery tells Kevin Costner, "You want to get Capone? Here's how you get Capone. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He puts one of yours in the hospital, you put one of his in the morgue. That's the Chicago way." In this class, we will examine "the Chicago way" from many different angles in order to interrogate the values with which various artists have endowed Chicago. We will read in a broad range of media: journalism, poetry, song, fiction, film, and sequential art to see how a sense of Chicago as a place works over time. We will pay close attention to depictions of the construction of American identity, and to the role of the artist and intellectual in the city.
Some forays into fictional narratives are escapist; they allow us an imaginative respite from our daily reality. Other narrative adventures run in the opposite direction: through fiction, they allow us to engage with present difficulties with greater insight; acuity; context; and (perhaps most importantly) company, reminding us that we are not the first to face even seemingly unprecedented terrors. This course has been organized in the latter spirit, in hopes that engaging intellectually with literary and artistic responses to plagues and pandemics of the past will afford us new intellectual, historical, and effective resources for understanding our present and very recent past. We will look to literary narratives of plague and pandemic as a way to contextualize, historicize, and deepen our comprehension of the way the COVID-19 pandemic has changed our social, economic, cultural, and imaginative realities. Texts will span seven centuries of plague literature, including selections from Boccaccio's Decameron (1348-53) and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1380s); Thomas Dekker's The Wonderfull Yeare (1603); Daniel DeFoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722); Edgar Allan Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" (1842); Jack London's The Scarlet Plague (1912); José Sarmago's Blindness (1997); Colson Whitehead's Zone One (2011); Ling Ma's Severance (2017); and Carmen Maria Machado's "Inventory" (2018).
We often think of the humanities and sciences as opposite pursuits. While the humanities seem to focus on subjectivity and feeling, we see the sciences as objective and fact-based. Yet, attending to the history of medicine demands a troubled acknowledgement that medical inquiry both shapes and is itself shaped by cultural assumptions about race and gender. Indeed, critics have pointed time and again to how the seeming impartiality of medical fact reveals biases about which kinds of bodies feel pain and who is prone to certain diseases, distinctions that have been assigned moral and social meaning. In this class, we will read literature about medical encounters in order to investigate how ideas about race and gender shape medical experiences. How do these individual accounts reflect larger structural injustices? What kinds of barriers and assumptions do women and people of color face when they attempt to receive treatment? What about people seeking gender affirming care? Beginning with the nineteenth century and moving towards the present day, we will examine the surprising history of how medical knowledge often depended on the exploitation of racialized bodies, grapple with the tangled enmeshment of femininity and illness, and explore how claims about medicalized bodies became a metric for citizenship.
This course explores the ways recent American fiction has imagined the internet -- primarily the print novel but also short stories, electronic literature, and film. The course will proceed by reading one novel per week discussing the ways literature expresses, worries about, adapts, or pointedly distorts dimensions of online experience. One of the course's broader concerns will be the question of how literature approaches the internet's broad capacity to trouble what feels real or what even counts as reality. A consideration of genre will also be central to our collective inquiries since we will read text across an eclectic range of generic traditions: from science fiction and the gothic novel to queer fiction, the web comic and graphic novel, and electronic literature. Likely authors will include Allie Brosh, Nick Drnaso, Jarret Kobek, Xta Maya Murray, Lauren Oyler, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Juan Martinez, Jane Schoenbrun, and Jia Tolentino. Assignments will include analytical essays.
Will you support our future robot overlords? Robots have long played a significant role in our cultural imagination, from the earliest science fiction to dozens of recent shows and movies. And with recent advancements in robotics and AI, they are playing an ever-greater role in our everyday life. This course will delve into the cultural history of the robot, beginning with the coining of the term in the 1920 play R.U.R. and moving to contemporary depictions from Blade Runner to Janelle Monáe's Dirty Computer. How do robots serve as mirrors reflecting our own concerns about our humanity? How do cultural depictions of robots as Others—both monstrous and salvific—meditate on questions of race, class, gender, and sexuality? The course will explore cultural anxieties around AI and robotics, their increasing indistinguishability from humans, our ever-greater reliance on them, and the inevitability of robot world domination.
Envr Policy and Culture 101-8-1 Chicago Environmental Justice
The concept of environmental justice in the United States emerged in the early 1980s as Black residents fought hazardous waste sites planned in and around their communities. Since then, the environmental justice perspective has been expanded to include the struggles of other minority groups disenfranchised on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, or class. In the first part of the course, students will learn about the history of the environmental justice movement in the US and its development. Next, the course will take a closer look at environmental justice in Chicago, both past and present. As a final project, students will be tasked with researching an environmental justice organization in the Chicago area.
Envr Policy and Culture 212-0-20 Environment and Society
Our climate is rapidly changing. Rising sea levels and increasing ocean acidity, higher temperatures, more droughts, melting glaciers, wilder weather patterns, and mounting environmental disasters mean that climate change is increasingly visible in our daily lives. What role does human society play in these changes, and what consequences does society suffer as these changes occur? This course is an introduction to environmental sociology during which we will employ an intersectional, sociological perspective to look beyond the scientific basis for environmental problems to understand the social roots of environmental issues. We will cover a variety of topics in environmental sociology, including new directions in sustainable development and how actors such as corporations, the media, and social movements impact public opinion and environmental issues. Further, we will critically examine the gendered, racial, and socioeconomic production of disparate environmental risks.
Envr Policy and Culture 337-0-1 Hazard, Disaster and Society
This course examines how socioeconomic and environmental factors work together to cause hazards and disasters in human society. In this course we learn the main concepts about disaster such as preparedness, vulnerability, resilience, response, mitigation, etc. We learn that a disaster does not have the same effect on everyone (all groups of people), and factors of social inequality such as race, ethnicity, class, and gender, make people more vulnerable to impacts of disasters. Also, this course, with an interdisciplinary perspective, analyzes disasters in the global North and South. This is a discussion-intensive course for advanced undergrad students. The classes are the student-centered with an emphasis on collaborative learning. The class meetings will consist of lecture, discussion, presentations, teamwork, activities, video/audio materials and projects.
Envr Policy and Culture 383-0-1 Environmental Anthropology
Environmental anthropology is a more recent outgrowth of ecological anthropology, which emerged in the 1960s and 70s as a quantitative focus on systemic human-environment relationships, especially as they pertain to patterns of social change and adaptation. Environmental anthropology became more prominent in the 1980s, and is typically characterized by qualitative research on communities' engagements with contemporary environmental issues. Environmental anthropology has greater commitments to advocacy, critique, and application than ecological anthropology, but as we'll see in this course, the proliferation of "new ecologies" (as opposed to "new environmentalisms") denotes the continued synergy between ecological and environmental anthropologies. This course is divided into two parts. Part I will provide an historical overview of the development of environmental anthropology. We will cover some of the most influential research trends in the field: environmental determinism, cultural ecology, systems ecology, ethnoecology, historical ecology, political ecology, ecofeminisms, and interspecies studies. Part II will then pivot to the application of environmental anthropology knowledge to some of the most pressing environmental issues facing the contemporary world: population pressure, capitalist consumption, biodiversity conservation, sustainable land use, climate change, and environmental justice.
Envr Policy and Culture 390-0-20 Culture in a Changing Climate
This course will offer an introduction to creative responses to climate change and associated environmental problems in recent literary, cinematic, and artistic works from around the world. We will pay close attention to how aesthetic forms and the critical methods used to understand them are (or are not) changing in the face of overlapping, existential environmental crises. Are there specific genres or media best suited to addressing climate change and helping to inspire political action? What are the effects of identifying or writing within a "new" literary genre such as "climate fiction"? Can we speak of similar modes in other media: is there such a thing as "climate cinema" or "climate art"? And if there is, how do these categories shape both the art that gets made and how we understand it?
Envr Policy and Culture 390-0-20 Human Rights and the Environment
This political research seminar is for advanced undergraduates interested in U.S. borders of all kinds. We will read widely in politics, history, religious and cultural studies, anthropology, and border studies, paying close attention to the history of U.S. borders, political and religious dissent on and around borders, Indigenous communities and borders, legal aspects of border sovereignty and border exceptionalism, the history of the passport, and environmental politics of the borderlands. We will evaluate border issues from multiple perspectives, including but going well beyond questions of surveillance and enforcement. Students will work with the professor to develop and complete a research paper on a topic of their choice involving border studies.
Envr Policy and Culture 390-0-21 Intro to Ethnobiology Theory and Practice
This class is an introduction to the growing field of Ethnobiology which is the scientific study of dynamic relationships among peoples, biota, and environments. As a multidisciplinary field, ethnobiology integrates anthropology, geography, systematics, population biology, ecology, mathematical biology, pharmacology, conservation, and sustainable development. This class will cover the origins and evolution of ethnobiology theory and practice ranging from folk science, polymaths, taxonomic and colonial practices, the rise of Indigenous science methods, and the contemporary focus on creating networks among researchers of various disciplines to face the challenges of rapid ecological change and shifting political economies.
Envr Policy and Culture 390-0-22 Climate Change Law and Policy
This course examines the potential role of the law in confronting climate change from an institutional and policy perspective, examining the role of treaties, national legislation (in the United States), sub-national responses and judicial and quasi-judicial fora. Among the topics that will be addressed include the science associated with climate change, the role of key international climate treaty regimes, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement, national and state and local responses to climate change in the United States, the role of litigation in confronting major emitters, and the potential role of climate geoengineering approaches. It will also seek to help students develop critical skills of analysis of treaty provisions, legislative language, and court decisions, public speaking and cogent writing.
Envr Policy and Culture 390-0-23 International Wildlife Law and Policy
Many scientists and policymakers believe that we are on the cusp of the world's sixth great extinction spasm, driven almost entirely by anthropogenic factors, including habitat destruction, unsustainable trade, the introduction of invasive species, and the looming specter of climate change. This course explores the role of international law in addressing the biodiversity crisis and efforts to protect wildlife species. An ancillary objective is to provide students with a foundation in international law, including skills in analyzing treaty provisions.
Envr Policy and Culture 390-0-24 The World That Fossil Fuels Made
This course will examine energy use in American history, ranging from the use of wood and water in colonial times, to animal-derived oils and fossil fuels in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to nuclear in the late-twentieth century, and finally to the search for alternative sources in recent decades. We will consider not only how human use of various forms of energy has affected the non-human environment but also what particular energy regimes have meant for the social, political, and material lives of Americans at different points in history.
Envr Policy and Culture 390-0-24 Climate Geoengineering
Climate change is the keystone environmental issue of this generation, and most likely for many generations to come. While the world community and individual countries have formulated policies to address climate change, these policies are almost universally recognized as being wholly inadequate to effectuate the objective of the Paris Agreement to hold global temperatures to well below 2ºC above pre-industrial levels, and to pursue efforts to limit increases to 1.5ºC. Indeed, it has become increasingly obvious that achievement of Paris temperature objectives will require both aggressive emission reduction initiatives and large-scale deployment of carbon dioxide removal/negative emissions technologies and processes (CDR), sometimes also referred to as a major sub-category of climate geoengineering. Moreover, many believe that we will also need to deploy solar radiation management approaches, which seek to reduce the amount of incoming solar radiation, to buy us time as we decarbonize the world economy. This course will discuss the exigency of deploying SRM and CDR approaches at scale, including potential benefits and risks of these options. It also will discuss regulatory and governance considerations at both the national and international level, as well as strategies to incentivize large-scale adoption of these approaches.
Envr Policy and Culture 390-0-25 Environmental Justice in Modern South Asia
Environmental Justice in Modern South Asia is an undergraduate class on the unequal experiences and effects of environmental change in South Asia, drawing primarily on case studies from India. Since at least the early 1990s, rapid economic growth, massive infrastructural projects, democratic transformations and global threats of climate change, have characterized the South Asian region. Such political, economic, and ecological processes come together to worsen the lives and livelihoods of marginalized people typically. They tend to intensify their vulnerability to environmental degradation, with historical structures of inclusion and exclusion profoundly shaping how natural resources are accessed and distributed. While the regional focus is on South Asia, at the heart of this course is a broader concern that environmental questions are always questions of equality and social justice.
Envr Policy and Culture 390-0-26 Red Power: Indigenous Resistance in the U.S. and Canada
In 2016, thousands of Indigenous water protectors and their non-Native allies camped at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in an effort to block the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. That movement is part of a long history of Native activism. In this course, we will examine the individual and collective ways in which Indigenous people have resisted colonial domination in the U.S. and Canada since 1887. In addition to focusing on North America, we will also turn our attention to Hawai‘i. This course will emphasize environmental justice, and highlights religious movements, inter-tribal organizations, key intellectual figures, student movements, armed standoffs, non-violent protest, and a variety of visions for Indigenous community self-determination.
Envr Policy and Culture 390-0-27 Water in Arid Lands: Israel and the Middle East
This seminar will explore how water availability shapes the development of civilizations and drives innovation in water technologies. The course will investigate historical dimensions of water in drylands in the Middle East, starting from ancient civilizations and the water infrastructures that were essential to the development of societies in arid regions. We will use this historical context as a stepping-stone to understand the more recent history of the Middle East, focusing on challenges faced by states in the Jordan River Basin. We will then examine efforts to develop the water resources needed to support burgeoning populations, such as irrigation projects designed to convert barren desert into cultivated agriculture. This more recent history includes geopolitical conflicts over land and water that continue to this day. We will evaluate regional water resources in the context of current and future climate and geopolitical conflicts, review recent advances in water technologies spurred by these limitations, and explore potential social and technological solutions for long-term water sustainability in the Middle East. We will discuss how water access and control contributes to trans-boundary politics and tensions between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in the west Bank and Gaza, along with collaborative solutions developed between Israel and Jordan. Finally, we will discuss opportunities for global translation of innovative water technologies and water-management solutions. Start-up culture and innovation in water technologies for local use, notably in Israel and more recently in other nations of the Middle East, serve as a model for improving water supply in other arid regions. The course will host a symposium on water innovation, featuring national and international experts on water technology, policy, and commercialization.
Gender St 101-8-2 Women's Health Movements 1970's - Present
The 1970s U.S. Women's Health Movement demanded everything from safe birth control on demand to an end to for-profit healthcare. Some participants formed research collectives and published D-I-Y guides to medical knowledge such as the Boston Women's Health Collective's "Women and Their Bodies" or Carol Downer's "A New View of a Woman's Body." Some movement members established battered women's shelters, underground abortion referral services, and feminist health clinics. Others formed local committees and national networks, such as the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA) and the National Women's Health Network (NWHN), with the goal of transforming contemporary medical protocols and scientific research agendas. Because many of these local and national groups are still in existence, original movement goals continue to define the parameters of a "women's health" agenda in the present moment. On the other hand, the Women's Health Movement was (and is) a heterogeneous movement. Then, as now, groups with competing ideas about the healthcare needs of women as a group identified as part of same movement. Thus, an examination of historical and current debates over "women's health" is also a means of assessing several distinct, often competing, paradigms of health and disease. Moreover, how we articulate a "women's health agenda" depends on our (often taken-for-granted) ideas about gender, sexuality, and embodiment itself.
Gender St 235-0-20 Beyond the Binary: Transgender and Race
This course is a 200-level, introductory course that explores racial formation and the boundaries and binaries of gender. This course will overview approaches to understanding gender norms and categories, as well as consider experiences, living, and contestations beyond these binaries. Particularly through reading trans*, genderqueer, and gender nonconforming histories, identities, experiences, and politics, this class will consider the possibilities and problems of categorizing "the beyond." We will discuss shifting conceptualizations of "normal" gender, and what is assumed to defy this "normal" as embedded in the intersecting histories and legacies of race, class, sexuality, nationality, and ability. For instance, what is the relationship between race and gender that specifically shapes and forms the boundaries of gender in the US - both historically and in the contemporary moment? What is the enduring role and stakes of scholarship and discourses in the social sciences, such as anthropology, that seeks to frame the boundaries of gender? How does power in social, cultural, and political arenas impact these discourses? This course aims to recognize and understand these contested histories of gender through the lens of our current moment, and we will consider the potential and limits of visibility, representation, and inclusion that trans activism and liberation, particularly from the legacies of trans of color communities, has continued to challenge within coercive gender systems.
Gender St 250-0-20 Race, Gender and Sexuality in Science and Anti-Science
Is race "real"? Do men and women have different brains? Is sexuality a choice (and should that matter)? This course examines the way these and other questions have been taken up in scientific discourse and how, in turn, scientific discourse has become a battleground in political disputes over trans rights, gender equality, and racial justice in the United States and beyond. We will approach race, gender, and sexuality as biosocial constructs, exploring their roles in debates about the relationship between biology and society, nature and culture, human similarity and difference, and knowledge and politics. Course modules will: contextualize how cultural understandings of human difference have shaped—and still impact--the development of Western science; examine contemporary scientific questions related to sex, gender, race, & sexuality, genetic diversity, medicine, technology, and the role of science in contemporary politics; explore how social inequalities can become embodied and produce biological effects; and interrogate the contemporary politicization and instrumentalization of scientific discourses related to race, gender, and sexuality, including by White supremacist, anti-trans, and anti-feminist movements.
Since the latter half of the 20th century, Queer and Feminist scholars have shown how binary identity systems (male/female; man/woman; straight/gay; cis/trans) constrain and erase variability in the ways people experience and relate to themselves/others as gendered and sexed beings. But what possibilities exist outside this binary system, and how did people understand sex, gender, and sexuality before it was established? In this course, we will explore archaeological and anthropological case studies that investigate what genders, sexes, and sexualities have been made possible by cultural groups throughout human history. Students will learn about queer and feminist approaches to the study of identity and bodies through archaeological case studies. From Venus Figurines depicting voluptuous bodies in Neolithic Europe, sex acts depicted by the Moche Sex pots of Peru, to Ancient Maya rulers collecting blood from tongues and penises for ritual practices, this class will explore the vastly different ways issues of sex, gender, and sexuality have been understood by people around the globe. Beyond learning about the past, we will question and engage with the possibilities and problems that arise when identity categories defined by specific cultural and temporal contexts are utilized or appropriated to interpret bodies shaped by another. Here, students will learn how to analyze the contexts that make expressions of sex and gender meaningful and be asked to communicate these insights in written and oral formats.
Gender studies have traditionally focused on women. Yet critical work on men and masculinities show us how people of all genders are constrained by gender expectations and assumptions. Furthermore, studies of masculinities shed light on practical questions like, why do men die earlier than women? And, why are men more likely to commit mass shootings? In recent years, the public spotlight has cast light on savory and unsavory aspects of masculinity; think about the rise of the term "toxic masculinity," the MeToo movement, the 2019 viral Gillette advertisement, and blogs commenting on the behavior of men on the reality show The Bachelorette. In this course, we will go beyond banal statements like "men are trash" to critically ask, What role does masculinity play in social life? How is masculinity produced, and are there different ways to be masculine? This course provides students with an intensive introduction to the foundational theory and research in the field of masculinities studies. We will use an intersectional lens to study the ways in which the concept and lived experience of masculinity are shaped by economic, social, cultural, and political forces. As we study the institutions that socialize people into gender, we will examine how the gendered social order influences the way people of all genders perform masculinity as well as the ways men perceive themselves, people of other genders, and social situations. Verbally and in writing, students will develop an argument about the way contemporary masculinity is constructed and performed.
This class will investigate how gender shapes politics and policy, and how these in turn shape gender, primarily in the United States. I aim also to provide comparative and global context. Gender is conceptualized as a set of relations, identities and cultural schema, always constituted with other dimensions of power, difference and inequality (e.g., race, class, sexuality, religion, citizenship status). We will analyze the gendered character of citizenship, political participation and representation, social rights and economic rights.
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 women's health movement(s) and Black Panther Party "survival (pending revolution) programs", ACT UP and AIDS activism, reproductive rights/justice movement activism, breast cancer and environmental activism, mental health activism in the era of psychopharmacology, and recent/ongoing "mutual aid" projects. 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 is an historical research seminar in which students will complete a 25-30 page research paper using primary (historical) and secondary sources. The course will begin with common readings about women and labor in US history, and then students will identify, research, and write about topics of their own choosing. In our readings, we will focus on issues of race, class, and sexuality in the history of women's labor, considering not only conventional paid work but also reproductive labor and unpaid housework.
How do developments in the life sciences affect our understandings of who we are, how we differ, and how social inequalities are created, perpetuated, and challenged? This seminar explores how scientific claims and technological developments help transform cultural meanings of race, gender, and sexuality. Conversely, we will consider how cultural beliefs about race, gender, and sexuality influence scientific knowledge and medical practice. By studying controversies, we will explore the dynamic interplay among expert findings, social identities, and political arguments.
This is an historical research seminar in which students will complete a 25-30 page research paper using primary (historical) and secondary sources. The course will begin with common readings about women and labor in US history, and then students will identify, research, and write about topics of their own choosing. In our readings, we will focus on issues of race, class, and sexuality in the history of women's labor, considering not only conventional paid work but also reproductive labor and unpaid housework.
Gender St 341-0-20 Trans-Related Medical Surgeries in Thailand
This course is situated at the intersection of theoretical, cultural, medical, and commercial online discourses concerning the burgeoning Gender Affirmation-related surgeries presented online and conducted in Thailand. Using Gender, Queer, Trans, Asian American, and Digital Humanities Theories, we will discuss the cross-cultural intersections, dialogues, refusals, and adaptions when thinking about medical travel to Thailand for gender/sex related surgeries. We will examine Thai cultural/historical conceptions of sex and gender, debates concerning bodies and diagnoses, and changes in presentations of sex/gender related surgeries offered online. We will also explore how digital archives are created and managed. Investigating transcripts of live interviews, medical discourses, and an archive of web images offering GAS surgeries produced by Thais for non-Thais will serve as axes for investigating this topic.
Gender St 341-0-21 Transnational Perspectives on Gender and Sexuality
This course is situated at the intersection of theoretical, cultural, and medical discourses concerning trans* rights and bodies in several national contexts. Of particular interest will be the notion of universal trans rights, as recently articulated in UN Documents arguing that trans rights are human rights, against the backdrop of Gender Affirmation Surgery (GAS) as it is presented in medical literature, advertised on the world wide web, and practiced both domestically and via the international medical tourism industry. Using "Trans" theories: transgender, transnational, translation, spatio/temporal transitions, we will discuss the intersections, dialogues, refusals, and adoptions when thinking about the language of human rights and medical intervention. We will examine cultural/historical conceptions of sex and genders as well as debates concerning bodies and diagnosis that took place during the drafting of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) and International WPATH Standards of Care, among others. Comparative cultural studies, medical discourses, and an archive of web images offering Trans-related surgeries in both Western and, specifically, Thai contexts will serve as axes for investigating this topic.
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. Our guiding questions will include the following: In what ways are these narratives shaping collective perceptions of the internet? How have virtual technologies challenged experiences of language, gender, community and identity? We will focus on social networking, gaming, artificial intelligence, and literary and filmic representations of these. Following a Cultural Studies model for inquiry, this course will be project-based and experiential. Your attendance and participation are mandatory. No experience needed, only a willingness to take risks and share work.
Gender St 374-0-20 Gender, Sexuality and Digital Technologies
Much recent fiction, film and theory are concerned with representing the internet and the World Wide Web. Sometimes cyberspace is depicted as a continuation of previous media such as television, cinema or telephone, but often it is envisioned as a new frontier. This course will examine the ways in which virtual media appears in cultural discourses. We consider how technological objects and tools participate in shaping elements of our culture that may appear natural, logical, or timeless. We will look examine films predicting the internet, cyberpunk fiction predating the www, and early websites from many sources. In addition, this quarter we will consider various generative AI programs, assessing their strengths and weaknesses. Our guiding questions will include the following: In what ways are these narratives shaping collective perceptions of the internet? How have virtual technologies challenged experiences of language, gender, community and identity? Following a Cultural Studies model for inquiry, this course will be project-based and experiential. Your attendance and participation are mandatory. No experience needed, only a willingness to take risks and share work.
Gender St 382-0-20 Afro Feminist Futures: Race, Gender and Sexuality
This course invites students to explore feminist speculative fiction as a site for social justice advocacy. Students will read classic feminist and afrofuturist science fiction as they prepare their own original short stories for publication. Drawing heavily on the work of feminist afrofuturist Octavia Butler, students will engage imaginative narratives that allow them to think through solutions to the problems of our time. Students will explore the genre elements of short stories and speculative fiction, ultimately integrating these lessons into their own short stories. This is a writing and reading intensive class.
Gender St 390-0-20 Witches, Bots and Trolls: Misinformation
This course surveys the social scientific study of misinformation in society. We will query the past to learn about how misinformation has evolved over time as a sociocultural feature of human societies. We will interrogate the present to examine how misinformation figures in the defining political, social, and economic problems of our time. And we will imagine the implications of misinformation for the future and explore our agency in shaping that future. We will draw on case studies, documentaries, and anthropological and social scientific literature on rumor and gossip, conspiracy theories, post-truth politics, deradicalization, and social media to explore topics and concepts such as "fake news," digital populism, algorithmic bias, weaponized disinformation, the "infodemic," deep fakes, and more. Case studies may include COVID-19, election, and climate change denialism; political conspiracy theories from the French Revolution to QAnon; troll farms and other tactics of information warfare; and the role of misinformation in current controversies over sexual & racial politics.
Germany is often regarded as being at the forefront of European developments concerning issues such as climate change and recycling, transport and renewable energy sources. This class will trace the scientific, political, philosophical, and aesthetic history of Germany as a ‘green nation’ from the 18th century until today. What are the roots of the ideology of environmentalism as it is represented in concepts like environment, ecology, or sustainability, which were all invented or popularized by German scientists (von Uexküll, Haeckel, von Carlowitz)? The course will also examine recent developments in German environmental policies like the so-called “Energiewende” and the “Diesel-Skandal”.
German 346-0-1 Talking Trash: Managing Waste in Culture
Contemporary climate activism and movements for degrowth and sustainable development have made us pay greater attention to our ecological footprint and the impact that our production of waste has on each other and the Earth’s ecosystems. Alongside this growing public concern for political ecology and environmental justice, artists, writers, filmmakers, and theorists have drawn on various kinds of ‘trash’ (e.g., debris, dirt, sewage, litter, spam, as well as ‘trashy’ individuals or places) in their metaphoricity and often threatening materiality, as tools for critiquing ossified aesthetic standards, anthropocentrism, globalization, and ecological damage. This course will provide insight into the environmental humanities through the lens of trash, tracing its varying manifestations from the nineteenth-century figure of the ragpicker to today's spam-generating botnets. Writers and artists discussed will include Walter Benjamin, Amitav Ghosh, Donna Haraway, Wolfgang Hilbig, Hito Steyerl, and Christa Wolf.
Global Health 390-0-27 Native American Health Research and Prevention
Native nations in what is currently the United States are continuously seeking to understand and undertake the best approaches to research and prevention within their communities. This course introduces students to the benefits and barriers to various approaches meant to address negative health outcomes among Native American individuals, groups and communities. This course also demonstrates how harnessing positive social determinants of health can affect broader health status among Native Americans. Important concepts to guide our understanding of these issues will include (settler) colonialism, sovereignty, social determinants of health, asset-based perspectives, and decolonizing research. Students will engage in a reading-intensive, discussion-based seminar, drawing upon research and scholarship from a variety of disciplines including public health, Native American and Indigenous Studies, sociology, history, and medicine.
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.
Global Hlth 201-0-20 Introduction to Global Health
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.
Global Hlth 221-0-31 Beyond Porn: Sexuality, Health and Pleasure
Threesomes. Squirting. Vibrators. Butt plugs. Multiple orgasms. You may have seen them in pornography, but have you ever wanted to study and talk about sex, and specifically, how to have a satisfying sex life? Many people look to pornography not just for entertainment, but also for education about what satisfying sexual encounters look like. Unfortunately, much of what people learn from pornography doesn't lead them to healthy and satisfying sexual encounters and relationships. This lecture class isn't actually about pornography. It goes beyond many presumptions about sex and pleasure depicted in pornography and popular culture, in order to equip students with information that can lead to more satisfying and healthy sexual experiences across their lifespan, regardless of how they identify, or who or what they like. The course also familiarizes students with a wide spectrum of human identities, practices, and attitudes towards sex and sexuality. Topics covered include: physiological and biological sex; gender; sexual orientation; homophobia and heterosexism; navigating sexual risks in a sex-positive way; sexual health disparities; sexual desire, arousal, and response; solitary sex & sex with others; sex toys; unconventional sexual practices; intimacy and effective communication; sexuality & aging; sexuality, disability & intimacy; sexual problems and solutions; sexual pleasure as part of sexual health; sexual harassment and violence; selling sex; and yes, a brief unit on problematics and possibilities in pornography.
Global Hlth 222-0-2 The Social Determinants of Health
This seminar in medical anthropology examines the role of social markers of difference including race, class, nationality, gender, sexuality, age and religion in current debates and challenges in the theory and practice of global health. We will explore contemporary illness experiences and therapeutic interventions in sociocultural and historical context through case studies from the US, Brazil, and South Africa. Students will be introduced to key concepts such as embodiment, medicalization, structural violence, the social determinants of health, and biopolitics. Central questions of the seminar include: How do social categories of difference determine disease and health in individuals and collectivities? How is medical science influenced by economic and political institutions and by patient mobilization? How does social and economic inclusion/exclusion govern access to treatment as well as care of the self and others? The course will provide advanced instruction in anthropological and related social scientific research methods as they apply to questions of social inequality and public health policy in both the United States and in emerging economic powers. The course draws from historical accounts, contemporary ethnographies, public health literature, media reports, and films. Fulfills Area III (Social and Behavioral Sciences) distribution requirement.
Global Hlth 222-0-20 The Social Determinants of Health
The human body is embedded into a health framework that can produce hypervisibility, invisibility, or both. This course in social science and medical anthropology examines the role of social markers of difference, including race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and religion, in current debates and challenges in the theory and practice of global health. We will explore recent illness experiences, therapeutic and self-care interventions, and health practices and behaviors in socio-cultural and historical context through case studies in the U.S., Brazil, and South Africa. The purpose of this course is to introduce students to key concepts such as embodiment, medicalization, structural violence, social determinants of health, biopolitics, health equity, and an ethic of care. Central questions of the course include: How do categories of "Othering" determine disease and health in individuals and collectives? How is medical science and care influenced by economic and political institutions and by patient trust? How do social and economic inclusion/exclusion control access to health treatment and self-care and care of others? This course focuses on the linkages between society and health inequalities in the U.S. and economic powers. It offers a forum to explore policy application with a particular emphasis on definitions that form social factors. This course utilizes historical accounts, contemporary ethnographies, Twitter threads of health experiences, public health literature, media reports, TedTalks, and films to bring to life the "why's" of health differences.
Global health is a popular field of work and study for Americans, with an increasing number of medical trainees and practitioners, as well as people without medical training, going abroad to volunteer in areas where there are few health care practitioners or resources. In addition, college undergraduates, as well as medical trainees and practitioners, are going abroad in increasing numbers to conduct research in areas with few healthcare resources. But all of these endeavors, though often entered into with the best of intentions, are beset with ethical questions, concerns, and dilemmas, and can have unintended consequences. In this course, students will explore and consider these ethical challenges. In so doing, students will examine core global bioethical concerns - such as structural violence - and core global bioethical codes, guidelines, and principals - such as beneficence and solidarity - so they will be able to ethically assess global health practices in a way that places an emphasis on the central goal of global health, reducing health inequities and disparities. With an emphasis on the ethical responsibility to reduce disparities, we consider some of the most pressing global bioethical issues of our time: equity, fairness, and climate change. Particular attention is given to the ethics of research during a pandemic and access to vaccines and therapies for Covid-19.
Global health is a popular field of work and study for Americans, with an increasing number of medical trainees and practitioners, as well as people without medical training, going abroad to volunteer in areas where there are few health care practitioners or resources. In addition, college undergraduates, as well as medical trainees and practitioners, are going abroad in increasing numbers to conduct research in areas with few healthcare resources. But all of these endeavors, though often entered with the best of intentions, are beset with ethical questions, concerns, and dilemmas, and can have unintended consequences. In this course, students will explore and consider these ethical challenges. In so doing, students will examine core global bioethical concerns - such as structural violence - and core global bioethical codes, guidelines, and principals - such as beneficence and solidarity - so they will be able to ethically assess global health practices in a way that places an emphasis on the central goal of global health: reducing health inequities and inequalities.
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. Cross-Listed as History 379-0-20.
Global Hlth 310-1-20 Maternal Health in the 20th Century
Maternal health, in particular, maternal mortality, is a significant concern in global health, and in this class we will consider the historical roots of two areas of focus on improving maternal health and reducing maternal mortality: women having access to skilled birth attendants and birth control options. We will look at this broad international concern by focusing on the work of one organization in the 1960s-1970s, the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM), by examining their papers, held at the Wellcome Library and Archives in London. We will visit the library the week before classes start and this research will form the basis of the seminar course during the quarter. This class will culminate in a major paper using the primary sources from the ICM research done in London.
Global Hlth 318-0-1 Community-based Participatory Research
Oftentimes we hear of research done on communities. What we hear less about is the power inequities, silences, and sometimes, violence, that many research paradigms (un)intentionally produce within their research. This course exposes prevalent assumptions underlying common research methodologies and demonstrates why they are problematic for many of the communities that researchers purport to want to assist. We then delve into community-based participatory research (CBPR), a research paradigm that challenges researchers to conduct research with communities. In this reading-intense discussion-based course, we will learn the historical and theoretical foundations, and the key principles of CBPR. Students will be introduced to methodological approaches to building community partnerships, research planning, and data sharing. Real-world applications of CBPR in health will be studied to illustrate benefits and challenges of this methodological approach to research. Further, this course will address culturally appropriate interventions, working with diverse communities, and ethical considerations in CBPR.
This course draws on perspectives from anthropology, related social scientific fields, and the humanities to provide a critical introduction to psychological trauma and its increasingly significant place in contemporary global health discourses and agendas. We will explore the history of the concept and its applications in Western literature, science, and medicine; consider the relatively recent construction of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a diagnostic category and the clinical approaches developed to treat it; and examine the politics and effects of applying the concept abroad through humanitarian psychiatry and/or global mental health projects. Key questions of the course will include: how and why has trauma become one of the most important signifiers of our era—and a key criterion of "victimhood?" What politics and debates have shaped the development and application of the PTSD diagnosis in recent decades? And how have notions of trauma and their varied applications transformed politics, suffering, and care in diverse communities around the world?
Global Hlth 320-0-20 Qualitative Research Methods in Global Health
This course provides an introduction to the qualitative methods and develops the practical skills necessary to conduct rigorous qualitative field research on global health topics. Through seminar-style discussions, small-group workshops, and out-of-class research exercises, students will become familiar with nature of qualitative research, and they will learn how qualitative methods are applied at each stage of the research process, including design, data collection, analysis, and write-up.
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.
Global Hlth 323-0-1 Global Health from Policy to Practice
This seminar explores global health and development policy ethnographically, from the politics of policy-making to the impacts of policy on global health practice, and on local realities. Going beyond the intentions underlying policy, this course highlights the histories and material, political, economic, and social realities of policy and its application. Drawing on case studies of policy makers, government officials, insurance agents, health care workers, and aid recipients, the course asks: what politics inform which issues become prioritized or codified in global health and development policy, and which do not? How do philosophies and values about "good governance," "best practices," "preparedness," or "economic progress" influence the kinds of policies that are envisioned and/or implemented? How do politics affect global health or medical system governance, and to what effect on the ground? In what ways are policies adapted, adopted, innovatively engaged, or outright rejected by various global health actors, and what does this mean for the challenges that such policies aim to address? Ultimately, what is the relationship between global health politics and global health disparities?
Global Hlth 324-0-1 Volunteerism and the Ethics of Help
Since the early 2000s, there has been an exponential increase in the number of foreigners volunteering in low-income communities, within orphanages, clinics, schools, and communities. This expansion has been echoed by locals, who are also providing voluntary labor in a variety of locales throughout their communities. This class explores the discourses and practices that make up volunteering and voluntourism, from the perspectives of volunteers, hosts, and a range of professional practitioners both promoting and critiquing this apparent rise in "the need to help". What boons and burdens occur with the boom of volunteer fervor world-wide? Why do people feel the need to volunteer, and what consequences do these voluntary exchanges have on the volunteers, and on those communities and institutions that are subject to their good intentions? What are the ethics and values that make up "making a difference" amongst differently-situated players who are involved in volunteering? Given that volunteers often act upon best intentions, what are the logics that justify philanthropy and the differential standards by which volunteers are judged based on where they go and how they engage in volunteering? This class seeks out some answers to these questions, and highlights why the increased concern for strangers that undergirds volunteering should also be, in itself, cause for our concern.
Global Hlth 325-0-1 History of Reproductive Health
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. Fulfills Area IV (Historical Studies) distribution requirement.
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.
This course draws on perspectives from anthropology, related social scientific fields, and the humanities to explore the role of the arts and media narratives in shaping politics and experiences of mental health and illness around the world. We will consider forms of storytelling—including literature, film, and theater—across eras and cultures, tracking shifts in perspectives on normality and pathology and their consequences for the most vulnerable. How does the power of Western psychiatry intersect with that of global media to reinforce reigning paradigms and imperatives for how suffering is to be understood, classified, and experienced? Conversely, what counter-narratives are being produced by artists and their communities? What role can the arts play in individual and collective forms of healing—or in exacerbating pain and grievance? What kinds of voices seem to have power, and which are neglected? Where is the line between cathartic and exploitative representation of trauma and mental illness? How, in short, do the stories we tell about mental illness "get under the skin" and shape forms of suffering and care?
Global Hlth 390-0-19 Silent but Loud: Negotiating Health
To be "healthy" is a complex obstacle course that many individuals living in certain bodies have to navigate. Black bodies, for example, are often the tied to (un)health because they are stereotyped as in need to be controlled, managed, and "guided" into healthfulness. In the U.S., these narrow stereotypes are just a few of the ways Black bodies get defined. In this course, we will move beyond those restrictive stereotypes, guided by questions such as, "How does culture define health?", "How does the food pipeline affect the health of certain bodies?" and "What does it mean to live in an obesogenic environment?" In this course, we examine the connection between health, culture, food, and environment with a focus on what is silenced and what is loud when generating "fixes" for "diseased" bodies. Silence refers to the disregard and dismissiveness of the narratives and experiences around the oppressions attached to the health of certain bodies. Yet, this silence echoes as Loud when connected to their culture, food, and environment when discussing diseases highlighted in Black bodies such as obesity, hypertension, and diabetes.
In this upper-level course exploring approaches to meld traditional data collection methods with alternative techniques, students will review decolonizing ways that Black/African American individuals have used to reveal their truths and construct and reconstruct images of themselves. Students will explore how these same processes can be applied in public health data collection to be inclusive and validate the methods and ways of knowing that have assisted underserved, underheard, and underrepresented communities in advocating for justice to survive. Course readings will consist of text that provides a critical lens to view qualitative data collection methods through and will include studies in historical and traumatic violence that underscore how people living in Black bodies work to survive by Joy DeGruy and the negotiating processes that Black individuals use to exercise agency and evaluate systemic oppressions that impede how they navigate life as articulated by authors such as Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Jean Stefancic.
This course introduces students to pressing disease and health care problems worldwide and examines efforts currently underway to address them. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the course identifies the main actors, institutions, practices and forms of knowledge production characteristic of what we call "global health" today, and explores the environmental, social, political and economic factors that shape patterns and experiences of illness and healthcare across societies. We will scrutinize the value systems that underpin specific paradigms in the policy and science of global health and place present-day developments in historical perspective. Key topics will include: policies and approaches to global health governance and interventions, global economies and their impacts on public health, medical humanitarianism, global mental health, maternal and child health, pandemics (HIV/AIDS, Ebola, H1N1, Swine Flu), malaria, food insecurity, health and human rights, and global health ethics.
Global Hlth 390-0-23 Re-mixing Qualitative Methods
In this upper-level course exploring approaches to meld traditional data collection methods with alternative techniques, students will review decolonizing ways that Black/African American individuals have used to reveal their truths and construct and reconstruct images of themselves. Students will explore how these same processes can be applied in public health data collection to be inclusive and validate the methods and ways of knowing that have assisted underserved, underheard, and underrepresented communities in advocating for justice to survive. Course readings will consist of text that provides a critical lens to view qualitative data collection methods through and will include studies in historical and traumatic violence that underscore how people living in Black bodies work to survive by Joy DeGruy and the negotiating processes that Black individuals use to exercise agency and evaluate systemic oppressions that impede how they navigate life as articulated by authors such as Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Jean Stefancic.
Global Hlth 390-0-25 Re-mixing Qualitative Methods
In this upper-level course exploring approaches to meld traditional data collection methods with alternative techniques, students will review decolonizing ways that Black/African American individuals have used to reveal their truths and construct and reconstruct images of themselves. Students will explore how these same processes can be applied in public health data collection to be inclusive and validate the methods and ways of knowing that have assisted underserved, underheard, and underrepresented communities in advocating for justice to survive. Course readings will consist of text that provides a critical lens to view qualitative data collection methods through and will include studies in historical and traumatic violence that underscore how people living in Black bodies work to survive by Joy DeGruy and the negotiating processes that Black individuals use to exercise agency and evaluate systemic oppressions that impede how they navigate life as articulated by authors such as Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Jean Stefancic.
Global Hlth 390-0-26 Global Circulations and Human Health
Human beings and human parts/products are on the move across the globe, shaped by inequities that drive poor health outcomes for many involved in these circulations. More human beings are being forced from their homes than ever before in history; more and more are being turned away as they seek resettlement. Global economic migration is poorly regulated and rife with exploitation. The flow of human organs for transplantation increasingly moves from the poor in the Global South to the rich in the Global North. Even the production of human babies through international surrogacy is driven by economic inequities. This course examines the role of advocacy, law, politics and ethics to preserve dignity and health as human beings and human parts increasingly circulate across global boundaries.
Global Hlth 390-0-27 Infectious Disease Eradication and Outbreak Control
Despite many efforts across several diseases spanning decades and billions of dollars, global health actors have only been able to eradicate one infectious human disease: smallpox. Why? This course will attempt to answer this question by examining several failed and continuing disease eradication efforts through a multidisciplinary lens. Case studies will include smallpox, malaria, polio, measles, and hypothetical emerging infectious diseases. We will examine the grandiose global health goal of total disease eradication in relation to sociopolitical realities that limit the applications of idealized technological interventions.
From modern pandemics such as Ebola and COVID-19, to ancient scourges such as leprosy and the plague, epidemics have shaped human history. In turn, the response of human societies to infectious disease threats have varied wildly in time and across cultures. We are currently living such an event, and experiencing in dramatic fashion how disease reshapes society. This course will cover several prominent global epidemic episodes, examining the biology of the disease, epidemic pathways, sociopolitical responses and public health measures, and the relationship between the scientific and the cultural consequences of these outbreaks.
Global Hlth 390-0-29 Global Circulations and Human Health
Human beings and human parts/products are on the move across the globe, shaped by inequities that drive poor health outcomes for many involved in these circulations. More human beings are being forced from their homes than ever before in history; more and more are being turned away as they seek resettlement. Global economic migration is poorly regulated and rife with exploitation. The flow of human organs for transplantation increasingly moves from the poor in the Global South to the rich in the Global North. Even the production of human babies through international surrogacy is driven by economic inequities. This course examines the role of advocacy, law, politics and ethics to preserve dignity and health as human beings and human parts increasingly circulate across global boundaries.
Global Hlth 390-0-30 RECIPE - Returning Ethnic Culinary Importance
The characteristics of a good recipe are said to have a list of the ingredients, the amounts needed, and the directions for mixing the ingredients. However, outside of food-based ingredients, there are also social elements that contribute to a good recipe. Food is something that outside of the social constructs of race, phobias, and isms, that can bind us all together. This interdisciplinary course focuses on defining togetherness, belongingness, and the end goal of a recipe— eating. Through the lens of recipes, meal-making, social stigmas, nutrition, and health students will explore how cultural culinary practices have become evidence for illnesses, diseases, and death for certain bodies. Course readings, videos, dialogue, and recipe analyses will provide a critical lens for students to delve into the multifaceted dimensions of culinary practices, their impact on individuals and communities, and how some practices have been sifted through and out.
From modern pandemics such as Ebola and COVID-19, to ancient scourges such as leprosy and the plague, epidemics have shaped human history. In turn, the response of human societies to infectious disease threats have varied wildly in time and across cultures. We are currently living such an event, and experiencing in dramatic fashion how disease reshapes society. This course will cover several prominent global epidemic episodes, examining the biology of the disease, epidemic pathways, sociopolitical responses and public health measures, and the relationship between the scientific and the cultural consequences of these outbreaks.
Global Hlth 390-0-33 Literary Genres + Health: A TBR Reading
When I was an undergraduate student my "To Be Read" list was always really long and often forgotten. As I have re-established my love of reading for fun I see how literary genres influence and challenge our understanding of well-being/health. Fiction, non-fiction, poems, memoirs, novels, young adult fiction, science fiction, mysteries, fantasy, fairy tales, horror, magical realism, and so many other genres influence our definitions of health or wellbeing. They provide insight into how other folks imagine and understanding situations we may or may not find ourselves in. Our course will consider some of these and other genres noted above. The best text allow us to empathize with the characters or challenge what we thought we knew. We will read one book as a class. In addition, you'll be asked to individually select a book to read/listen to, a list of various text will also be provided if you need guidance in choosing a text. You will learn how these materials influence or challenge norms about health and well-being. Professor Reyes will help you access books that aren't easily available or affordable.
Global Hlth 390-0-34 Decolonisation, Knowledge, and Global Health
The field that is currently called "global health" is going through a reckoning with its history and its present. Much of that reckoning is about the colonial origins and underpinnings of the field, with a particular focus on "unfair knowledge practices" or epistemic injustice. In this seminar, we will examine the landscape of unfair knowledge practices in global health - i.e., the pervasive wrongs related to knowledge making, knowledge use, and knowledge sharing in global health - many of which are taken for granted. We will start with the unfairness inherent in how we often define global health itself, and what decolonisation means in relation to "global health". Using a range of conceptual tools, we will then examine various common practices especially in academic global health (e.g., authorship practices, research partnerships, academic writing, editorial practices, sensemaking/interpretive practices, and the choice of research audience, framing, topics, questions, and methods) and discuss when, how, and under what circumstances they may be deemed fair or unfair. We will use practical examples of each category of knowledge practice to think critically about what makes them fair or unfair. Using these examples, we will also examine what strategies might be required to promote fairness or epistemic justice, including the potential roles and responsibilities of the broad range of individual and institutional actors within the knowledge ecosystem of "global health".
History 101-7-24 Scientific Lives - European History
What role has a humanist education played in the lives of scientists and physicians, and how has training in science and medicine fit into a liberal arts curriculum? The chemist/novelist C. P. Snow once claimed that science and literature formed two antagonistic cultures. On one side were scientists who dismissed literature as so much fluff, irrelevant for our technological age. On the other were literary figures like Tolstoy, who condemned science for not answering the all-important question of moral values: "What shall we do and how shall we live?" This course, by contrast, examines at the dialogue between science and literature since World War II. We will read memoirs by scientists, like Primo Levi's "The Periodic Table" and Hope Jahren's "Lab Girl." We will also read fictional portrayals of scientists and physicians, like Bertolt Brecht's "Life of Galileo" and Allegra Goodman's "Intuition." Along the way we will consider how science and the humanities have approached the question of a good education, and how their answers can align—and differ.
Modern computers' capacity to converse and create seems far removed from Charles Babbage's calculating machines. Instead, generative AI and popular notions like "the singularity" recall the romantic tradition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. As this spirit of romanticism increasingly colors our view of technology, we need to revise our understanding of computing's past. Using methodological approaches drawn from across the humanities, this interdisciplinary seminar will investigate aspects of digital history that do not fit neatly into a genealogy of logical machines. By discussing topics—such as internet cults, chatbot sentience, and the AI apocalypse—we will ask how computers came to inhabit their current cultural position. Instead of viewing computing as logic materialized, we will ask how the body, religion, and art became agents of technological change.
History 103-7-26 Food, Pets, Kin and Threats: Animals in History
This course takes a global and historical approach to the human-animal relationship. How has this relationship changed over time and how has it varied across different world cultures? How do people's attitudes towards animals change when they are classified (or re-classified) as pets, pests, predators, invaders, commodities, entertainment, a source of food, a member of the family? The very same animal - a rat, say - can be viewed as vermin, pets, or experimental test subjects depending on the individual, the culture, the time period, and the place. We will explore a range of topics together such as animal rights, animal breeding, hunting and fishing, vegetarianism, zoos, vivisection, "invasive" species, animals on trial, animals and capitalism, animals and colonialism. Ultimately, the ways that humans relate to (non-human) animals reveals just as much about ourselves as it does about them.
History 201-1-20 Europe in the Medieval and Early Modern World
This course surveys the history of Europe from the High Middle Ages through the early modern period to the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. These centuries changed the course of European and world history. The Renaissance, the Reformations, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment unfolded at the same time as European empires spread first into the Mediterranean and then across the Atlantic, spurring the growth of global capitalism and the transatlantic slave trade. Political and religious freedoms emerged alongside new forms of persecution, control, and oppression. A divided Europe grew increasingly connected to the rest of the world as commercial goods, people, ideas, and diseases traveled across land and sea. Among the major themes we'll explore are a) how individuals who lived through these tumultuous centuries experienced their changing world and b) how changes in health, disease, and environment - including the Black Death, the Columbian Exchange, and the climactic cooling period known as the Little Ice Age - drove the religious, political, social, and economic upheavals of the late medieval and early modern periods.
Barnett Tu, Th 3:30-4:50pm Notes: SHC Core Course - List A
History 251-0-20 The Politics of Disaster: A Global Environmental History
The term ‘natural disaster' conjures images of tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes, and other powerful forces of nature that strike without warning, inflicting massive suffering on a powerless and unsuspecting populace. We now have several decades' worth of research from the social sciences and humanities showing that so-called "natural" disasters are not very natural at all. Instead, they are deeply political and profoundly man-made. This course adopts a historical and global approach in order to denaturalize disaster. From famines in British India to earthquakes in post-colonial Peru, from floods in New Orleans to nuclear disaster in Japan, we will see how disasters expose and exacerbate pre-existing inequalities, inflicting suffering disproportionately among those groups already marginalized by race, class, gender, geography, and age. These inequalities shape not only the impact of the disaster but the range of responses to it, including political critique and retrenchment, relief and rebuilding efforts, memorialization, and planning - or failing to plan - for future disasters of a similar kind. The course culminates in a unit on the contemporary challenge of anthropogenic global climate change, the ultimate man-made disaster. We will consider how memories, fears, and fantasies of past disasters are being repurposed to create new visions of what climate change will look like.
Alder M, W 2:00-3:20pm Notes: SHC Core Course - List A
History 275-2-20 History of Modern Science and Medicine
Science and scientific medicine have profoundly reshaped our world over the past 200 years, transforming our knowledge of nature and the human body, as well as the conditions under which billions of people live. But change has worked in the opposite direction as well: social, economic, and political priorities have also driven scientific innovation and medical practice. This class invites students in the sciences and the humanities to explore the dynamic relationship between science, medicine, and our broader society. One theme is the relationship between the natural sciences and our material world. How has scientific knowledge led to radical new technologies like global telecommunications and the atom bomb, and how has technological change shaped theories of the natural world, from thermodynamics to climate change? Another is the relationship between the bio-medical sciences and social values. From Darwin to genomics, biological knowledge has developed in conjunction with public mores, altering our approach to health, our understanding of race and sexual difference, and our hopes for the human species. The guiding premise of this course is that science is an intrinsically human activity, so that knowing its history is integral to understanding how the modern world came to be the way it is--and where we are headed.
History 300-0-20 Artifical Intelligence: A History
Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is not new. Long before the term was coined in 1956, engineers and inventors sought to mechanize human thought and behavior. This course will address and contextualize the chronological arc of AI, from eighteenth-century automatons to today's large language models. Together, we will investigate how changing conceptions of human intelligence and creativity influenced the development and implementation of what we now call AI. In so doing, we will familiarize ourselves with changing strategies for creating "intelligent" machines and engage in lively debates over the problems and possibilities of machine sentience. Will this course secure you a six-figure salary working for OpenAI? Sadly, no. It will, however, enrich your knowledge of the historical trajectory and critical concepts of AI.
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 millennium 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; and 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 at the time. 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.
History 300-0-30 Red Power: Indigenous Resistance in the U.S. and Canada
In 2016, thousands of Indigenous water protectors and their non-Native allies camped at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in an effort to block the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. That movement is part of a long history of Native activism. In this course, we will examine the individual and collective ways in which Indigenous people have resisted colonial domination in the U.S. and Canada since 1887. In addition to focusing on North America, we will also turn our attention to Hawai‘i. This course will emphasize environmental justice, and highlights religious movements, inter-tribal organizations, key intellectual figures, student movements, armed standoffs, non-violent protest, and a variety of visions for Indigenous community self-determination.
History 300-0-32 History and Theory of Information
We live in an information age, with computers of unprecedented power in our pockets. This course seeks to understand how information shapes our lives today, and how it has in the past. It does so via an interdisciplinary inquiry into four technological infrastructures of information and communication—print, wires, airwaves, and bits.
How have people understood the body across Asia? This course explores different conceptions of the body, illness, and therapeutics across several medical traditions in Asia, from the ancient and medieval periods up to the present day. We will study primary sources like medical diagrams, the biographies of physicians, and case notes about patients to understand the roles of medical practitioners in a range of contexts. We will explore traditions like Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Galenic medicine, and Tibetan medicine. These traditions were always dynamic, but they also changed dramatically in the modern period, as biomedicine became one of the many medical traditions of Asia.
This course will survey American history from the Colonial Era to the present with two premises in mind: that the natural world is not simply a passive background to human history but rather an active participant in historical change, and that human attitudes toward nature are both shaped by and in turn shape social, political, and economic behavior. The course will cover formal schools of thought about the natural world—from Transcendentalism to the conservation and environmental movements—but also discuss the many informal intersections of human activity and natural systems, from European colonialism to property regimes, migration and transportation, industry, consumer practices, war, technological innovation, political ideology, and food production.
Alder M, W 2:00-3:20pm Notes: SHC Core Course - List A
History 325-0-20 History of American Technology
We are currently living through a technological revolution that is radically reshaping every aspect of our personal and collective lives. In a sense, however, this is nothing new: Americans have long defined themselves and their nation through changes in the material things they own, make, design, use, and trash. This class examines the debate over what America is and should be by studying its technology. Each lecture is organized around the history of a representative artifact, offering a new perspective on canonical episodes and themes in American history—and theories of technological change—right up to the present day. From the telegraph to social media, from the bicycle to SpaceX, from typing pools to algorithmic AI, Americans have identified technology as central to their personal and national destiny. The course's "flipped classroom" approach is echoed by its core assignment, in which students write an original research paper on the social history of an artifact of their choice. They will do so guided by weekly workshop-sections which walk them through the research and writing process. The course poses the question "Do artifacts have politics?" and if so, of what sort?
History 376-0-20 Global Environments and World History
Environmental problems have become part and parcel of popular consciousness: resources are being depleted at a record pace, human population levels have crossed the eight billion threshold, extreme poverty defines the majority of people's daily lives, toxic contaminants affect all ecosystems, increasing numbers of species face extinction, consumerism and the commodification of nature show no signs of abating, climate change wreaks havoc in different places every year, and weapons and energy systems continue to proliferate that risk the planet's viability. This introductory lecture course is designed to help you understand the relatively recent origins of many of these problems, focusing especially on the last one hundred and fifty years. You will have an opportunity to learn about the environmental effects of urbanization, industrialization, population growth, market economies, empire-building, intercontinental warfare, energy extraction, and new technologies. You will also explore different environmental philosophies and analytic frameworks that help us make sense of historical change, including political ecology, environmental history, science studies, and global history. The course will examine a range of transnational organizations, social movements, and state policies that have attempted to address and resolve environmental problems.
Tilley Tu, Th 2:00-3:20pm Notes: SHC Core Course - List A
History 379-0-20 Biomedicine and World History
This lecture course uses the Covid-19 pandemic as a point of departure to study the history of global health and biomedicine. We will break the quarter into four segments during which we will consider: 1) the "unification of the globe" by infectious diseases; 2) the role of empires, industries, war, and revolutions in spreading biomedical cultures around the world; 3) the functions played by transnational and global health institutions in different continents; and 4) the growth of the pharmaceutical industry and the narcotics trade. Students will have a chance to apply insights from the readings - about histories of racial segregation, reproductive politics, militarization, and police powers - to the more recent past. Lectures and readings cover all world regions: Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, Asia, Europe, and the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
Do the modern sciences have colonial tendencies? If so, what would it mean to decolonize them? This historiography seminar approaches these questions through historical case studies that explore how postcolonial states and professionals attempted to rid scientific practice of the vestiges of colonialism. There are scientists in nearly every country on earth, and scientific institutions in many of those countries date to the colonial era. Historians are increasingly interested in finding out what happened to colonial science after independence, and we will read exciting new scholarship that approaches this issue from the Americas, Africa, and East and South Asia, on topics ranging from medicine to botany to nuclear physics. We will use these case studies, along with short theoretical essays, to better understand contemporary proposals to decolonize science. As a historiography seminar, the course will also introduce students to the craft of history, exploring what it means to be an academic historian today.
The fourteenth-century Black Death (or bubonic plague) has long been the benchmark against which all other disasters have been measured. Although there were devastating instances of plague in Roman times, and even isolated outbreaks in our own time, the medieval plague was a true pandemic that raged throughout the world. This courses focuses on the bubonic plague in Western Europe. After examining the first visitation of the plague in the Byzantine era (6c), we will then focus on the period between 1346 and 1348, when the Black Death wiped out somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of the population, and the aftermath. At a time when principles of contagion were hazy and medical treatment primitive, the panic-stricken society alternated between regarding the plague as evidence of God's wrath for humanity's sins and desperately seeking scapegoats to blame. This course will approach the plague from multiple perspectives through the lens of primary and secondary sources. Among the topics addressed will be: the immediate causes of the plague; medieval and modern theories of the disease; the plague's impact on both religious personnel and the secular work force; its impact on culture; the relation between plague and persecution, and violence; and the impact of the plague outside of Europe and beyond the Middle Ages.
This course will examine energy use in American history, ranging from the use of wood and water in colonial times, to animal-derived oils and fossil fuels in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to nuclear in the late-twentieth century, and finally to the search for alternative sources in recent decades. We will consider not only how human use of various forms of energy has affected the non-human environment but also what particular energy regimes have meant for the social, political, and material lives of Americans at different points in history.
History 395-0-22 Podcasting the History of Science
This course will provide students with the opportunity to create a podcast on the history of science together. Taking a global approach to the history of science, each student will conduct original research on an object, text, or other source relevant to the theme of the podcast. Students will learn how to record, edit, and produce sound, while we ask: What counts as signal, and what counts as noise? We will take that question to the archive and the editing studio. This course will be highly collaborative at every stage. While students will contribute independent research, writing, and production, we will collectively workshop everything.
Humanites 370-4-20 Red Power: Indigenous Resistance to U.S. Coloniali
In 2016, thousands of Indigenous water protectors and their non-Native allies camped at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in an effort to block the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. That movement is part of a long history of Native activism. In this course, we will examine the individual and collective ways in which Indigenous people have resisted colonial domination in the U.S. and Canada since 1887. In addition to focusing on North America, we will also turn our attention to Hawai‘i. This course will emphasize environmental justice, and highlights religious movements, inter-tribal organizations, key intellectual figures, student movements, armed standoffs, non-violent protest, and a variety of visions for Indigenous community self-determination.
Humanities 101-6-20 What Science Can't Teach Us: A Humanities Approach
NOTE: This class is open only to first-year undergraduates selected to be Kaplan Humanities Scholars.
The great political theorist Isaiah Berlin once said that there is an old quarrel between two rival ways of knowing the world: a paradigmatically scientific form of knowledge that is produced by methodical, systematic inquiry, and a more impalpable alternative that has been variously characterized as good judgment, wisdom, or art. In this course we will be examining various oppositions related to this rivalry, like the distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge, between empiricism and aesthetics, between reason and emotion, and between fact and value. One major aim of this course is to use these oppositions to help explore some differences between the sciences and the humanities. It is often taken for granted that the natural sciences aim at knowledge that is theoretical, empirical, rational, and fact-based; but there is much less certainty about whether the humanities should be guided by the same paradigm of knowledge, or whether it would be better served by adopting a fundamentally different conception of its aims and methods. Are there distinctively literary or aesthetic ways of knowing, different from the sciences? What do arts, practices, feelings and values teach us that knowledge cannot? We will pursue these questions by engaging both literary and philosophical texts.
Humanities 210-0-40 Science Fiction and Detective Literature in the Global South
NOTE: This class is open only to first-year undergraduates selected to be Kaplan Humanities Scholars.
Science fiction and detective literature are genres whose formulaic nature has often been derided or ignored by literary critics. Yet the very formal structures of these genres may be part of the key to their popularity and increasing ubiquitousness. Emerging in England in the nineteenth century from, in part, an urban unease brought on by the colonial encounter, the detective novel form was quickly "translated" back into colonized territories, soon becoming one of the most truly transnational literary genres in the world. Similarly, while science fiction's early narratives drew from the scenarios and power dynamics of the colonial encounter, it has more recently become a space from which to contest official histories as well as posit decolonial futures. Focusing on the spaces of the Global South, late colonial and postcolonial South Asia and (post)colonial Latin America in particular, this course will trace how and why these popular genres have emerged as a mode of narration with which to confront political and social transformations and contemporary crises.
Humanities 220-0-20 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 healthcare in the United States and also consider potential solutions.
Humanities 325-4-20 Refugees, Migration, Exile: Digital Storytelling Workshop
In this course, students will research a case study from among the many refugee and migration crises that have dominated the news cycle in recent years. The final project is a short video about your case study. To develop your research projects, the class foregrounds different methodological approaches: 1) To move beyond journalism, we will conduct primary and secondary historical research to understand the complex historical roots of each case study. 2) We will analyze and practice forms of ethnographic writing to better situate and describe the lived experiences of migration and exile, both past and present. 3) We will pay attention to various forms of media, whether print culture, sound, or visual media, to interrogate but also experiment with contemporary modes of narrating and conveying human experience in the digital age. Our work in class will be collaborative, thus a key prerequisite is that you are mature and self-motivated. You do not need to have prior research experience, but you need to demonstrate a desire to dig into your topic and hone your ability to write deeply informed, rigorous, and nuanced arguments and to think about creative ways to bring rigorous historical and ethnographic detail to visual storytelling.
Students are required to petition for permission to enroll in the class by writing a brief statement, which should be sent to Professor Molina at molina@northwestern.edu. Your brief statement should include: Your name, your major(s), one short paragraph stating the reason why you have an interest in honing your research skills in the direction of the digital humanities, and a second short paragraph on a topic about migration and exile that motivates your desire to do further research on the topic. Attach a recent news item (article or video) about the topic that drives your interests. This will help me organize our first sessions in fall quarter.
Archaeology and nationalism have been closely intertwined at least since the idea of the nation-state emerged in Europe following the French Revolution. Archaeology offers nationalist agendas the possibility of filling in national historical records and extending the past far into prehistory. Its results can be displayed in museums, occupy entire sites, and be readily accessible online—thus potentially reaching many new audiences beyond traditional print media. In turn, nationalism has contributed significantly to the development of archaeology as a modern discipline that emerged largely within colonial contexts deeply embedded in imperial motivations and problematic theories around race. More recently, the growth and influence of global heritage and institutions such as UNESCO's World Heritage Centre have reshaped the political and cultural landscape of archaeological sites conceptualized as loci of national identity and pride, while introducing new tensions around equitable access to its resources and the often contradictory political and economic benefits of increased tourism. Drawing on new critical approaches and case studies selected from a wide geographical range, this course explores the role of archaeology in the creation and elaboration of national identities from the late eighteenth century to the present day. It emphasizes the identification of historical and archaeological sources and their critical evaluation. Issues include the professionalization of archaeology and its institutionalization in universities and antiquities services; the development of national museums and associated practices of display and interpretation; the creation and maintenance of archaeological sites as national monuments and tourist destinations; cultural property legislation and controversies over the repatriation of artifacts, often those removed during the era of colonial rule; and the special role of archaeology and monuments in cultural politics under totalitarian regimes.
Humanities 370-3-20 Race,Gender, Sex and Science: Identities and Difference
How do developments in the life sciences affect our understandings of who we are, how we differ, and how social inequalities are created, perpetuated, and challenged? This seminar explores how scientific claims and technological developments help transform cultural meanings of race, gender, and sexuality. Conversely, we will consider how cultural beliefs about race, gender, and sexuality influence scientific knowledge and medical practice. By studying controversies, we will explore the dynamic interplay among expert findings, social identities, and political arguments.
Humanities 370-3-21 Environmental Justice in Modern South Asia
Environmental Justice in Modern South Asia is an undergraduate class on the unequal experiences and effects of environmental change in South Asia, drawing primarily on case studies from India. Since at least the early 1990s, rapid economic growth, massive infrastructural projects, democratic transformations and global threats of climate change, have characterized the South Asian region. Such political, economic, and ecological processes come together to worsen the lives and livelihoods of marginalized people typically. They tend to intensify their vulnerability to environmental degradation, with historical structures of inclusion and exclusion profoundly shaping how natural resources are accessed and distributed. While the regional focus is on South Asia, at the heart of this course is a broader concern that environmental questions are always questions of equality and social justice. The class will examine how issues of justice and nature are framed within law and official policy debates, within social movements and right-based struggles, as well as within people's moral imaginations and everyday lives.
This course is designed around creative responses to climate change and other environmental crises in recent literary, cinematic, and artistic works from different sites around the world. We will pay close attention to how familiar aesthetic forms and the critical methods used to understand them are (or are not) changing in the face of overlapping existential environmental crises. Are there specific genres or media best suited to addressing climate change and helping to inspire political action? What are the effects of identifying or writing within a "new" literary genre such as "climate fiction"? Can we speak of similar modes in other media: is there such a thing as "climate cinema" or "climate art"? And if there is, how do these categories shape both the art that gets made and how we understand it?
Legal St 376-0-21 Surveillance, Policing and the Law
How are surveillance technologies shaping daily life and society, especially in terms of shaping what we think, see, and do? Building on the interdisciplinary field of surveillance studies, this course explores the intersection of policing, surveillance, and the law and raises questions about (in)security, civil liberties, control, and privacy. Topics will include The Patriot Act, biometrics, algorithm and predictive policing, and citizen surveillance. Students will also engage with the political, ethical, and methodological concerns that increased surveillance raises.
Legal St 383-0-1 Gender, Sexuality and The Carceral State
This course explores the rise of the carceral state in the United with particular attention to ethnographic, sociolegal, feminist, queer, and transgender theoretical approaches to the study of prisons. The course centers on girls, women, and LGBT people's experiences with systems of punishment, surveillance, and control. In addition, students will learn how feminist and queer activists have responded to institutions of policing and mass incarceration; investigate how they have understood prison reform, prison abolition, and transformative justice; and consider the political, ethical, and methodological concerns that policing, and mass incarceration raise.
In this course we will be exploring several traditional topics within philosophy. These include the problem of free will, ethics and social issues (including issues of race and gender), and existential issues (death and the meaning of life). Students will be expected (i) to comprehend the various philosophers' arguments on these topics, (ii) to develop their own views on the topics, and (iii) to present their own views, as well as the views of the philosophers we read, in clear, succinct, and forcefully argued thesis papers.
Philosophy 210-3-20 History of Philosophy - Early Modern
The transition from the Medieval to the Modern era in philosophy began, roughly, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries and ended, again roughly, in the late 18th century. New methods of acquiring knowledge, along with a radically different conception of the world, permanently transformed the philosophical enterprise and the broader culture. In this course we will examine the views of some of the most important modern philosophers—especially Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Leibniz, Bayle, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Du Châtelet—on the nature of God, causation, substance, mind, knowledge, and the material world. Additional readings will be drawn from Elizabeth, Galileo, Masham, Boyle, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Shepherd, and Cordova.
Philosophy 221-0-20 Gender, Politics and Philosophy
This course is an introduction to philosophical problems concerning gender and politics. What is gender and what is its relation to sex and sexuality? What is gender injustice and why is it wrong? What are the causes of gender injustice and how could we overcome it? And what is the relation of feminist theory to lived experience and to political action? We will read and critically discuss both historical and contemporary texts addressing these questions.
Philosophy 262-0-20 Ethical Problems and Public Issues
This course is a study of ethical problems arising in public policy, as well as philosophical approaches to addressing these problems. In this course we will think within, and critically examine, contemporary philosophical theories of morality such as utilitarianism, contractualism, virtue ethics, and care ethics. We will examine these moral theories through the lens of disputed moral issues such as punishment, immigration, racial integration, climate change, and freedom of speech, paying special attention to these issues as they figure in the contemporary social and political landscape of the United States. We will explore historical and contemporary structures of inequality in the US, particularly related to race, gender, and class, and we will critically reflect on our own positions within these structures.
Horne Tu, Th 2:00-3:20pm Notes: SHC Core Course - List B
Philosophy 269-0-20 Bioethics
This course is a study of moral and political problems related to biomedicine and biotechnology. In the first part of the course, we will study the physician-patient relationship. We will consider what values ought to govern that relationship, how those values may conflict, and how such conflicts are best resolved. In the second part of the course, we will turn to some specific ethical challenges related to biotechnology, including abortion, genetic manipulation, and physician-assisted suicide. We will close the course by surveying the field of public health ethics, with particular attention to ethical issues related to global pandemic preparedness and response.
Horne Tu, Th 9:30-10:50am Notes: SHC Core Course - List B
Philosophy 269-0-20 Bioethics
This course is a study of moral and political problems related to biomedicine and biotechnology. In the first part of the course, we will study the physician-patient relationship. We will consider what values ought to govern that relationship, how those values may conflict, and how such conflicts are best resolved. 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.
Philosophy 270-0-20 Climate Change and Sustainability: Ethical Dimensions
This course is an introduction to some central concepts and problems in philosophical environmental ethics, with an emphasis on issues related to anthropogenic climate change. In the first part of the course, we will explore the problem of "moral standing:" the problem of who or what is deserving of ultimate moral consideration. For example, do sentient non-human animals like pigs or polar bears have moral standing? What about non-sentient life, such as plants or fungus? Might whole ecosystems or even nature as such have standing? We will examine recent arguments on these questions and their implications for moral theory. In the second part of the course, we will turn directly to the issue of global climate change. We will explore the standard economic analysis of climate change as a collective action problem and the philosophical presuppositions of that analysis. We will consider the question of the fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of climate mitigation globally, and we will discuss the ethics of geoengineering. We will close by considering the issue of "anthropocentrism" in ethics, asking whether and why anthropocentrism might be a problem for moral theory.
Horne Tu, Th 9:30-10:50am Notes: SHC Core Course - List B
Philosophy 326-0-20 Political Philosophy of Health and Health Care
This course will be a study of philosophical issues related to health inequalities. Many theorists hold that inequalities in health (or in access to health care) are more troubling than other inequalities, such as inequalities in wealth. Is that so? What makes inequality bad in the first place? What (if anything) is special about health inequalities? Should we be concerned with inequalities between individuals or inequalities between groups? Are health inequalities less troubling when they result from individuals' health behaviors?
Disability is a protected class alongside race and gender. But what characterizes disability? Is disability grounded in people and their limitations, in how social institutions make it easier for some but not others to exercise their abilities, both, or something else entirely? Institutions like schools or businesses are regulated to support the lives of disabled persons. For example, the American with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits associated discrimination. But, at present, is social life arranged such that persons with disabilities are treated justly? What does justice require for disabled persons? This class will explore these and related questions to better understand what disability is, and what justice requires in connection to disability. In addition to written assignments, students can expect practical assignments to help them explore topics like accessibility at Northwestern.
The scientific enterprise, over the centuries, has often interacted with human spirituality and religion. This interaction has at times been synergistic and at times antagonistic. This course will focus on recent developments. We will look at relevant writings of influential scientists, including mystics, believers, agnostics, and atheists. At students' discretion, we might also touch at times on science related to spirituality and spiritual experience. In-class discussion will at all times be respectful, to allow productive dialogue on these deeply personal topics.
This seminar introduces students to recent research on the cultural problems that have wittingly and unwittingly arisen from the prevalence of digital technologies in multiple spheres of life today (e.g., internet, AI, generative AI, social media, cloud computing, internet of things, big data). We will focus on their political implications. Some researchers are deeply worried while others are optimistic. Some researchers call for the development of ethical standards for data scientists. Some call for policies and regulations of the relevant industries to protect "users." Some call for rethinking the demands of freedom, equality, autonomy and democracy in light of these new technologies. Overall, our learning objective is for students to gain a facility with some conceptual material of value for thinking critically about the political dimension of this moment in the history of technology. No tech background will be assumed or needed. The title of the seminar is a nod to a book we read to start our critical inquiry, You Are Not a Gadget, by visionary computer scientist Jaron Lanier. Other researchers whose work we will consult include technology ethicist Tristan Harris (Center for Humane Technology), economist Shoshanah Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the Frontier of Power), mathematician Cathy O'Neil (Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy), tech writer Nicholas Carr (The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains), journalist Max Fisher (The Outrage Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired our Minds and Our Worlds), "poet of code" and AI researcher Joy Buolamwini (The Algorithmic Justice League). Documentary films also feature in our sampling of recent research. Frequent short student oral presentations.
Political Science 390-0-26 Climate Change Law and Policy
This course examines the potential role of the law in confronting climate change from an institutional and policy perspective, examining the role of treaties, national legislation (in the United States), sub-national responses and judicial and quasi-judicial fora. Among the topics that will be addressed include the science associated with climate change, the role of key international climate treaty regimes, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement, national and state and local responses to climate change in the United States, the role of litigation in confronting major emitters, and the potential role of climate geoengineering approaches. It will also seek to help students develop critical skills of analysis of treaty provisions, legislative language, and court decisions, public speaking and cogent writing.
Political Science 395-0-30 Human Rights and the Environment
This political research seminar is for advanced undergraduates interested in U.S. borders of all kinds. We will read widely in politics, history, religious and cultural studies, anthropology, and border studies, paying close attention to the history of U.S. borders, political and religious dissent on and around borders, Indigenous communities and borders, legal aspects of border sovereignty and border exceptionalism, the history of the passport, and environmental politics of the borderlands. We will evaluate border issues from multiple perspectives, including but going well beyond questions of surveillance and enforcement. Students will work with the professor to develop and complete a research paper on a topic of their choice involving border studies.
Psychology 101-7-1 Mental Health Diagnosis and Treatment
While those going into the field of mental health typically think about it as a "helping profession", there is much more than meets the eye when it comes to the psychological, economic, and political forces that have defined the development of the field. The course will focus on the contemporary framework for defining mental illness - the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (now in its 5th edition) - with a particular focus on some of the problems that have emerged from the disease-based framework utilized in the manual, and the assumptions that it makes about disorders and typical development. We will explore the role of state mental hospitals in the U.S. in the early to mid-20th century, and we will examine the political forces that drove the de-institutionalization movement of the 1970s and 1980s, with additional consideration of the contemporary implications of the closing of state hospitals. Finally, the course will focus on the evolution of psychotherapy in the modern marketplace, and some of the challenges posed by the demands of the health insurance industry and academic research. The aggressive way in which the DSM has been marketed internationally and the implications of culture for diagnosis will also be discussed. Along the way, we will explore critiques of the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance industry, and modern psychiatry. Some of these themes will also be explored through analysis of popular films and other media. Students will be evaluated on the basis of class attendance and participation, co-leading a class discussion with peers, and writing assignments including short reaction papers and a longer research paper.
This course will examine the complex issues involved in applying the science of psychology to the field of law. Among the topics we will cover:
How psychological research can apply to policies and practices in the legal system Expert testimony Methods, uses, and limitations of forensic assessment Determination of legal competence The insanity defense Syndromes (Battered Women's Syndrome/Rape Trauma Syndrome) in the legal arena Criminal profiling types, methods, and limitations Eyewitness testimony and other memory issues Interrogation and confessions Jury selection and decision making Prisons and death penalty
Religious St 172-0-21 Intro to Religion, Media and Culture
This course offers undergraduates an introduction to studying the phenomena of religion in relationship to dynamics of media, society, and culture. The course content highlights a variety of themes, issues, figures, and narratives, while examining diverse religious practices, productions, communities, representations and identities. In this course, we dive into one of today's most exciting and rapidly growing areas of scholarship - the intriguing intersections and complex entanglements of religion and media in popular culture. Drawing from a diverse array of interdisciplinary sources, we will explore what media studies and communication theories have to offer the study of religion, and reciprocally how religious studies scholarship might enrich media studies. Our primary sources are drawn from such areas as religious television, film, and radio, digital gaming worlds, billboards, advertisements and media campaigns, popular music, comedy, streaming video, social media, memes, and even tattoos, body art, and graffiti. We will look at such areas as: how religion gets mediated; the religious dimensions of transmedia storytelling and media world-building; religion as communication; online group identity formation and religious identity construction; media representation of religions; the blurred boundaries between the so-called "sacred and the secular" in the study of religion and media; and controversies in overlapping religious worlds and media worlds vis-à-vis the authorized and unauthorized circulation of content. Of particular interest in this course will be the impact of digital culture on the media-religion interface. Students will be asked to research and analyze a primary source of their choice and then to make their own media to communicate their original analysis and research findings. This course will involve your own creative mediamaking. Please note format: This course is a mixture of lecture and in-class participatory discussion. The professor asks provocative questions throughout class to actively engage students in the material and to invite them into sharing their points of view.
Religious St 349-0-22 Medicine, Miracles and Magic: Healthcare
Today, religion and science are often regarded as separate spheres of knowledge and practice, but was this always the case? In this class, we will explore the overlapping uses of medicine, miracles, and magic in premodern healthcare. We will ask what kinds of people were able to practice medicine (priests? physicians? nuns? magicians?), why a person's barber was also their surgeon, how the dead supported the health of the living, and why rituals like confession could treat stomach aches and other ailments. We will learn what a vial of urine could tell a medieval physician about a patient's habits, consider how an individual's astrological sign influenced their treatment plan, and discuss what an excess of garlic in a person's diet might tell us about the moral state of their spirit. By the end of this course, students will be able to identify and analyze the complex, nuanced systems that medieval people used to theorize the body and its relationship to the soul, and will be able to articulate how physical, spiritual, and even supernatural medicines were often combined to treat both. As we study the nuances of premodern medicine, we will also work to rethink the relationship between religion and science in our own world, and consider whether and where our modern healthcare practices align with the past as much as they depart from it.
When the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Kentucky was one of 13 states to begin enforcing a "trigger law" that effectively bans abortion. That October, three Jewish women brought a lawsuit arguing that Kentucky's ban violated their religious freedom, writing, "Jews have never believed that life begins at conception." In Missouri, an interfaith group of Christian and Jewish religious leaders filed a similar suit to block their state's abortion ban. And in Idaho and Indiana, the Satanic Temple did the same. These lawsuits illustrate how religious views on abortion are varied and complex. Moreover, religious people's ethical reflections and medical decisions may run against the grain of official doctrine. This course examines why some religious groups have opposed abortion rights, while others have actively campaigned for them. We will also discuss how some traditions have created space for people who have abortions to receive spiritual care or participate in special rituals, such as funerary rites for aborted fetuses in Japanese Buddhism or full-body immersion (mikveh) in some forms of Judaism. The legal challenges discussed above also highlight the fraught intersection between religious practice, medical ethics, and abortion law. This course focuses on four case studies to explore these issues: the United States, Ireland, Israel-Palestine, and Japan. Readings comprise historical and legal studies on abortion alongside anthropological, autobiographical, and artistic representations of the women, trans men, and nonbinary people who seek abortions. Student evaluation is based on participation, short writing assignments, and a final project. Required readings will be made available on Canvas or through links printed in the syllabus.
SESP-Learning Sciences 301-0-20 Design of Learning Environments
Issues in designing and studying innovative learning environments. New models of classroom interaction, particularly using technology to enable new cognitive and social roles for students. Topics include simulations, tutors, computer-mediated communication, project-based learning. Theoretical motivations in cognitive and social-interaction learning theories, empirical studies evaluating their effectiveness, and prospects for propagation of such innovations.
In this course, we will explore the relationship between gender and globalization. We will study how gender and sexuality are produced as global social categories. The course will survey liberal approaches to gender and sexuality categories as sites for transnational claims-making. It will then turn to postcolonial and transnational feminist critiques of taken-for-granted social groupings, such as "woman" and, more recently, "gay" and "transgender," that are assumed to be globally relevant. Critical approaches to gender and sexuality challenge conventional "born this way" narratives about gender and sexual identities as innate and therefore universal. This course will raise questions that will make us uncomfortable and, hopefully, give us tools to critically reflect on our own gender and sexuality identities and practices.
What is Latinx futurism? Most of the imagined futures we are exposed to in the United States have been crafted by white authors. From Isaac Asimov's science fiction novels about robots to high-production value blockbusters. An alternative cannon, Afrofuturism, has begun to blaze a path for understanding why the political, racial, and cultural position of those doing the imagining matters. In do so, Afrofuturism aims to inspire us to think carefully about how we deal with the pressing social issues of our time and have offered a new lens for thinking about the future. This discussion-based seminar takes this as a departure point and works towards including Latinx futurism in this frame. This seminar is an introduction to a way of thinking sociologically about technology, science, and society from the perspective of Latinx and Latin American communities. In their reading and writing assignments students will explore a broad array of topics, from the origins of postcolonial states, Zapotec science, and borderlands epistemology.
This class will investigate how gender shapes politics and policy, and how these in turn shape gender, with a focus on the United States, in comparative and global context. Gender is conceptualized as a set of relations, identifications and cultural schema, always constituted with other dimensions of power, difference and inequality (e.g., race, class, sexuality, religion, citizenship status). We will analyze the gendered character of citizenship, political participation and representation, social rights and economic rights. We aim to understand gendered politics and policy from both "top down" and "bottom up" perspectives. What do states do, via institutions of political participation and representation, citizenship rights and policies, to shape gender relations? How do gender relations influence the nature of policy and citizenship? How has feminism emerged as a radical challenge to the androcentrism and restricted character of the democratic public sphere? And how have anti-feminism and "anti-gender theory" come to be significant dimensions of politics? We expand on conventional conceptions of political participation and citizenship rights to include the grassroots democratic activism that gave birth to modern women's movements. We explore how women's political efforts have given rise to the creation of alternative visions of democracy, social provision and economic participation, as well as reshaping formal politics and policies. And, finally, we will take advantage of the fact that we are in the run up to a Presidential and congressional election to examine the gendered aspects of the political landscape in the contemporary United States.
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 new directions in sustainable development and how actors such as corporations, the media, and social movements impact public opinion and environmental issues. Further, we will critically examine the gendered, racial, and socioeconomic production of disparate environmental risks.
Gender structures our daily lives in fundamental ways, yet we are often unaware of its effects. For example, why do we associate blue with boys and pink with girls? Why do most administrative forms only have two categories (i.e. Male and Female)? Why do male doctors, on average, have higher incomes than female doctors? The course introduces students to the sociological analysis of gender as a central component of social organization and social inequality in the US context. We start by reviewing key sociological concepts that are important to the study of gender. Next, we explore the causes and consequences of gender inequalities in important social institutions such as the family, the education system, and the labor market. We conclude by considering gender inequality in an international comparative context to understand crosscutting similarities and differences between the US and both high- and low-income contexts. This allows us to explore the role social norms and policies play in perpetuating and/or mitigating gender inequalities.
Molina Tu, Th 2:00-3:20pm Notes: SHC Core Course - List B
Sociology 220-0-20 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.
In this course, we will examine how the Western medical system and accompanying health practices impact people of different genders, as well as how healthcare as an institution and practice produces gender categories. Using interdisciplinary research with a focus on sociological studies, we will interrogate the social, institutional, and biological links between gender and health. We will discuss health inequalities between women, men, and trans* people from different race, ethnic, and class backgrounds, using sociological research to understand why these inequalities and forms of difference emerge and are sustained. We will explore how modern Western medicine views male and female bodies and defines their health and illnesses accordingly. Students will complete two short research projects over the term in which they use different data sources (interviews and media content) to examine gendered perceptions of health, health behaviors, help-seeking behaviors, and experiences with medical institutions.
Sociology 376-0-20 Race, Gender, Sex and Science: Identities and Difference
How do developments in the life sciences affect our understandings of who we are, how we differ, and how social inequalities are created, perpetuated, and challenged? This seminar explores how scientific claims and technological developments help transform cultural meanings of race, gender, and sexuality. Conversely, we will consider how cultural beliefs about race, gender, and sexuality influence scientific knowledge and medical practice. By studying controversies, we will explore the dynamic interplay among expert findings, social identities, and political arguments. This course is cross-listed with GNDR_ST 332-0-21 and HUM 370-3-20.
Sociology 376-0-20 Transnational Gender and Sexuality
Since the 1980s, third wave feminists have critiqued fundamental assumptions of second-wave feminism and worked to incorporate perspectives and voices outside the "West." In more recent decades, a similar movement has happened among queer and trans theorists. In this course, we will engage this work, much of which has been published in the past decade and a half. Course readings, which will survey scholarship on gender/sexuality in many regions of the world, will draw our attention to the ways in which gender/sexuality are implicated in capitalist, imperial and post-colonial projects as well as how gender and sexuality operate outside the "West," both in practice and identity. Finally, we will consider the possibilities and limitations for studying gender/sexuality beyond our own societies. Critical approaches to gender and sexuality challenge conventional "born this way" narratives about gender and sexual identities as innate. This course will raise questions that will make us uncomfortable and, hopefully, transform our understandings of our own gendered and sexual identities and practices.
Sociology 376-0-21 Neoliberalism, Postcolonial Theory and Human Rights
International human rights frameworks have been promoted as a central mechanisms through which transnational activists and international organizations pursue justice globally. In this course, we will examine whether human rights paradigms live up to this promise. Readings will consider the geopolitical and economic context in which human rights frameworks are forged, both in terms of neoliberal economic relations and postcolonialism. We will examine the history of human rights documents and how discussions of human rights frameworks have changed over the last century. We will also examine contemporary efforts to expand human rights frameworks to "new" rights, including those based on gender and sexuality rights.
Technology is ubiquitous. This course covers central tenets in the sociology of technology by pairing an empirical focus on a different technology each week with a theoretical paradigm. A total of eight technologies will serve as the exemplars through which the question(s) concerning technology will be explored: bicycles, cars, computers, facial recognition, genetic sequencing, soap, shipping containers and virtual reality. Each of these technologies is approached as a window into the social, political, racial, and economic determinants of technological innovation. The central goal of the course is to equip students with the tools for unpacking the technologies societies take for granted and critically engaging with new technologies that may reproduce social inequities. While much of the scholarship we will consider is broadly sociological, some of it is drawn from other fields, and part of the goal of the course is to show what is gained when we think about technology from an interdisciplinary perspective. Students from other disciplines are welcome.
Sociology 376-0-22 Media, Movements and Social Change
Social movements are formed through communication and it is through communication that they achieve much of their strategic objectives. This course explores the complex relationships between communication and social movements, bringing together theories from communication studies, sociology, and political science, as well as tracing historically how social movements have developed new practices of achieving social change.
Sociology 392-0-21 American Obsessions: Crime, Health and Social Control
Crime and violence are among the most defining and seemingly intractable problems of American society. There is scarcely a part of our public and private lives that is not in some way touched by the criminal justice apparatus, regardless of whether or not we personally experience victimization. Entrenched health epidemics around gun violence, addiction, and police brutality regularly vie for our focus. Likewise, myths and moral panics about crime, when taken to the extreme, extend punitive action deep into our social fabric in the name of protecting individual and public health. This course delves into these intricate connections linking crime, health, and social control. We will spend much of our time together examining three interrelated topics. At the center of this course is how different groups experience crime and health and the role social institutions play in abetting and reproducing these processes. We will also examine what behaviors become criminalized and why - from abortion to drug use and sexual behavior. Finally, we will explore which of the behaviors defined as criminal are punished and, just as importantly, how laws around criminal behavior are unevenly enforced. Taken together, these topics will help to shed light on the role that interlocking systems in our society play in shaping our gendered, racialized, and profoundly American experience.
This course invites students to explore feminist speculative fiction as a site for social justice advocacy. Students will read classic feminist and afrofuturist science fiction as they prepare their own original short stories for publication. Drawing heavily on the work of feminist afrofuturist Octavia Butler, students will engage imaginative narratives that allow them to think through solutions to the problems of our time. Students will explore the genre elements of short stories and speculative fiction, ultimately integrating these lessons into their own short stories. This is a writing and reading intensive class.
SPCH-Comm St 394-0-1 Technology, Power and Resistance
Digital technology can be used to reinforce existing power structures, but also challenge and resist them. This course will examine the ways technology is used to disempower people with a focus on digital inequalities, the politics of algorithms, surveillance and big data, and the hidden labor and environmental costs of the technology we use. Yet we will also explore the ways digital technology can empower people and advance social justice, with a particular focus on historically marginalized communities.
SPCH-Comm St 395-0-21 The Experience of Illness: Body, Self and Story
This course examines the experience of chronic illness from the perspective of the ill person. It introduces the trajectory model of chronic illness, a model that sees health as the result of a stable alignment of body, self, and life story. It uses this model to understand adherence to medical regimens and to describe how it is possible to heal from chronic illness without being biomedically cured of the underlying disease.
SPCH-Comm St 395-0-22 Interactive Museum Exhibit Design
This course is for undergraduate students interested in the design of interactive museum exhibits. Students will engage with readings about the role museums play in public education/communication, how to design museum exhibits, the role technology can play in making museums interactive, and methods for evaluating learning and engagement at museum exhibits. Readings will primarily focus on interactive exhibits for science communication, with secondary opportunities to explore other types of museum exhibits. Individual assignments will include analyzing and presenting on an existing museum exhibit and creating a design concept/plan for a novel museum exhibit. Students will work in groups towards the end of the quarter to develop an in-depth design and evaluation plan for a novel museum exhibit and, as the final project, create a paper prototype of the exhibit. No previous design or technology experience is needed for students to enroll in this course.
This course focuses on current issues in the field of Critical Internet Studies, with special attention directed to power dynamics related to the use and of internet-related technologies. We will touch on the economic, political, social, and cultural significance of the internet, and work to identify, understand, and analyze, the relations between existing oppressive power dynamics relating to racism, gender-based violence, and other forms of discrimination are entwined in various media issues. Readings focus on the cultural, social, economic, and political aspects of internet use, including creative uses. This class offers an opportunity to discuss the internet in a fundamental way, to engage with complex ideas, and to develop and refine critical thinking, verbal, and writing skills. We will explore timely topics (e.g., memes, misinformation, surveillance, algorithmic bias, tech and social justice, and more) across media and from historical, transnational, and multiple methodological perspectives.
