This course will provide a graduate level introduction to the anthropology of mind, body, and health, addressing broadly the question of how people use cultural resources to cope with pain, illness, suffering and healing in specific social, cultural and political contexts. In addition, we will analyze how body and mind, health and illness, are socially influenced and socially constructed, how these constructions articulate with the material body, and how they are influenced by and implicated in power. We will give special attention to trauma, as a diagnostic category, biopolitical construct, and an experiential domain. We will also explore in depth the concept of embodiment, its various uses and meanings, especially in the context of the social determinants of illness and healing. The course will combine an examination of current theoretical paradigms with ethnographic case material from around the world, including Brazil, Japan, Mexico, the US, and Canada. The goal of this comparative endeavor will be to analyze similarities and differences across understandings of mind and body and systems of healing, and to examine medical systems, behaviors, practices and institutions critically in order to understand the implications of the ways in which they are socially and politically embedded and culturally specific.
Critical evaluation of hidden epistemologies embedded within cultural constructions of mind and body, health and illness. Examination of cultural, social, and political-economic influences on health and exploration of the concept of embodiment. Comparative investigation of how humans cope with pain, illness, and suffering.
This course will engage scholarship that traverses studies of race and difference, technology and science, and a variety of information systems and platforms. The objective is to develop a scholarly foundation of the literatures relevant to the ways racially marginalized communities experience, navigate, and inhabit information infrastructures. A special emphasis will be placed on understanding how the concepts of trust, justice, and equity function within these relationships, both historically and at the contemporary moment.
This seminar examines the late twentieth- and twenty-first century emergence and saturation of contemporary culture by personalized electronic and computational technologies, primarily in the Anglophone West. The increasing cultural prominence of portable devices such as the Sony Walkman and the newly domestic character of "personal" computing -- from the Apple Macintosh to laptops to smartphones and networked applications -- through Michel Foucault's late career idea of "techniques of the self." For Foucault, such practices "permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality." While Foucault had a much longer historical perspective in mind, we will consider the novel prominence of technologies of the self and selfhood within the context of neoliberalism where the task of entrepreneurial self-management comes to define the ideology of personhood. Central to our inquiry, then, will be not only the literal technologies of the historical present but also the ways in which media technologies as well as aesthetics newly conjugate subject and environment in terms of a felt pressure to manage that relation. Notions of ambience and the ambient will be central to our investigations as well as the role of technological aesthetics in providing not only beauty or entertainment but rather moment-to-moment tactics of mood management. Topics may include ambient music, ASMR, self-care, and habit. Aesthetic texts may include works by Brian Eno, Tan Lin, Claudia Rankine, and Tsai Ming-Ling. Scholarly texts may include work by Nikolas Rose, Alan Liu, Lauren Berlant, Paul Preciado, Scott Richmond, Paul Roquet, Melissa Gregg, Mack Hagood, and others.
Comp Lit - 488-0-20 From Biopolitics to Necropolitics: Foucault, Agamben, Mbeme
In this course, we will take a comparative approach to reading the fundamental texts that in recent decades have shifted entirely the site of the political: Foucault’s essays on biopolitics, Agamben’s Homo Sacer, and Mbembe’s Necropolitics. If for Foucault the possibility of an affirmative biopolitics still exists, such a prospect is no longer true for Agamben and Mbembe. To understand the implications of this shift, we will focus first on Agamben’s Homo Sacer and its reinterpretation of biopolitics as thanatopolitics, paying attention to the text’s epistemic and geopolitical limits and its ongoing relevance for refugee studies. We will then explore Mbembe’s post-colonial redefinition of biopolitics as necropolitics, or the racist subjugation of life to the power of death of unwanted population. What is the relationship between sovereignty and biopolitics? Is racism an effect of biopolitics or its premise? In order to confront these questions, we will reflect on a specific constellation of notions in our contemporary philosophical lexicon that have originated in these and other key texts: state of exception, the ban, homo sacer, bare life, the living dead, death worlds, enmity, abandonment, wars, borders, and brutalism. In addition, we will assess the meaning of the different paradigmatic sites of the modern politicization of life: the camp for Agamben and the plantation, the colonies, and the occupied territories for Mbembe. In the last phase of the course, we will read recent essays by Mbembe in which he tries to conceive forms of resistance to necropolitics. We will pay special attention to Mbembe’s concepts of restitution, reparation, and care. Seminar participants are strongly encouraged to find a way to use Foucault, Agamben, and/or Mbembe’s work in their own research projects. Readings will include works by Foucault, Agamben, Schmitt, Mbembe, Fanon, Azoulay, Táíwò, and Weheliye.
English 461-0-21 Contemporary Experiments in Racial Form
This seminar surveys literary experiments in contemporary Ethnic American poetry and narrative that expand notions of what constitutes "ethnic literature," a category historically denigrated as insufficiently imaginative or aesthetically minded. In addition to highlighting the richness and complexity of these literary traditions, our goal in this course is to track evolving referents for racial formation in a "postracial" era defined by the gap between ostensible cultural tolerance and the persistence of structural inequality. Responding to the contradictions of racial representation, scholars of African American, Latinx, Asian American, and Native American literatures have redoubled critical engagement with form, genre, and aesthetics to expand our understanding of race's imbrications with embodiment, aesthetic judgment, cultural belonging, and the constitution of histories and futures. With particular emphasis on familiarizing students with foundational texts of Ethnic American Literature, the class will pressure critical terms and paradigms such as representation, racial formation, genre & form, voice & lyric, and history. Participants will develop skills of close reading for racial formation as a formal feature of textual composition as well as gain proficiency with central and emergent debates within Ethnic American literary studies regarding the relationship between politics and aesthetics. Some conceptual questions for consideration include the following: how do experimental texts by writers of color destabilize conventional modes of understanding ethnic and racial representation? What tensions and resonances arise when critical race and ethnic studies meet theories of the avant-garde? And to what extent do these literary experiments suggest that race itself can be understood as a cultural form or generic object?
English 471-020 Studies in American Lit: Indigenous Archives and Public Humanities
This interdisciplinary, co-taught course introduces students to the texts, theories, and methods of Indigenous archives, while considering and practicing what it means to do interdisciplinary, publicly- and community-engaged humanities scholarship. We begin with these questions: how do writers, communities, scholars, and others use Indigenous archival materials? What are the genres, practices, and ethics necessary to work in and create scholarship from archives that contain Indigenous materials?
Hist 492-0-24 Global History of Science, Medicine, Environment
This seminar examines the historical geography of science, technology, and medicine, focusing especially on cross-cultural entanglements over the last five hundred years. While economic historians have been animated by questions of a "great divergence" between Asian and European economies in this period, historians of science have circled around questions of a great divide between Western and non-Western knowledge systems since the so-called "scientific revolution." The readings will include 8 or 9 monographs and about a dozen articles covering the major world regions: Europe, Africa, the Americas, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. We will historicize a number of relationships, including scientific disciplines and dominant ideas about reality, technologies and industrial economies, pandemics and public health, warfare and digital worlds, geology and geopolitics, racial and indigenous identities, and energy regimes and ecology. Assignments are designed to help students expand their expertise in their chosen time periods and regions.
This course explores diverse approaches to writing history under the rubric of "the material turn." How are our interpretations of the past be transformed by placing material objects at the center of our accounts? Do artifacts have politics? To answer these questions, we will juxtapose several theories of material culture with historical case studies. Our examples will be world-wide, ranging from the Trobriand Islands and early modern Europe to modern America, Asia, and Africa, right up to present-day debates over AI. We will consider the many people involved in the design, production, and use of objects: artisans, engineers, capitalists, laborers, enslaved peoples, children, Luddites, Futurists, and consumers of all stripes, as well as coders, hackers and hobbyists. We will consider the life cycle of banal objects, as well as liminal objects which mediate diverse realms of experience. These perspectives will be examined in light of contending theories of material change: commodity fetishism, the social construction of technology, the anthropology of the gift, gender analysis, evolutionary theory, systems theory, infrastructure studies, and performance studies. The goal of the course is to show how accounts organized around inanimate artifacts can illuminate human histories. A unique feature of this course is that its assignments are themselves "object lessons," in which students practice various short-form academic genres: a peer review, a book blurb, a speaker introduction, a lay-press book review, an undergraduate lecture outline, a one-book one-TGS proposal, etc. For their final assignment, students write a short review essay organized around a material artifact of their choice.
What can historians (and other humanists) do with water? This course surveys the rich and varied literature on water history, a growing subfield that spans all time periods and all corners of the globe. A focus on water opens up critical new perspectives on knowledge, power, energy, technology, mobility, and borders, to name a few. How do rivers, oceans, lakes, and wetlands create and divide communities, fostering sovereignty, dispossession, travel, or migration? How do the use and abuse of water resources correlate to struggles over land use, to concepts of scarcity and abundance, to the sacrality and desecration of landscapes? What can water history teach us about climate change and environmental justice in the 21st century? To answer these and other questions, we will read and discuss key works in water history from Latin America, Europe, Africa, North America, Asia, and Pacifica. Readings may include: Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast (2019); Lucas Bessire, Running Out (2021); David Aiona Chang, The World and All the Things Upon It (2016); Claudia Leal, Landscapes of Freedom (2018); Keith Dawson, Undercurrents of Power (2018); Sugata Ray, Water Histories of South Asia (2020); Vera Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land (2014); Chandra Mukerji, Impossible Engineering (2009); Ling Zhang, The River, the Plain, and the State (2016); Philipp Lehmann, Desert Edens (2022); Richard White, The Organic Machine (1995). This course is open to graduate students in all fields of History and from all disciplipinary backgrounds, including the natural and social sciences, who have an interest in water.
Soc 406-3-20 Contemporary Theory in Sociological Analysis
This course offers an introduction to classical sociological theory. A “classical” work is thought to be a must-read, a foundational text that influenced the older (as opposed to contemporary or modern) ideas that undergird discipline of sociology, both the way we think about it and perform it. We will focus mainly on Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Du Bois, exploring what they have to teach us about the sociological enterprise. Readings and graded assignments focus on determining these foundational disciplinary authors’ (1) methods for viewing and understanding the socioeconomic world, (2) ideas about the proper objects and subjects of study and how sociology should be properly conducted, and (3) key contributions to early sociological thought. Ten weeks is a very short time to acquire and engage with this knowledge, so expect this course to be very reading and writing intensive.
This course is motivated by the assumption that knowledge and technology have become central to the social, cultural, political, and material organization of modern societies. The fundamental goal of the course is to develop intellectual tools to understand not merely the social organization of knowledge, science, and technology but also the technoscientific dimensions of social life. Although much of the course content concerns science and technology, the theoretical and analytical frameworks developed in this course are intended to apply to any domain involving knowledge, expertise, technologies, or formalized techniques. How might sociology as a field of study benefit from closer engagement both with epistemic concerns and with the material aspects of our technosocial world? We will examine: why we believe what we believe (the politics of knowledge production, circulation, and reception); the impact and uptake of technologies and the assessment of technological risks; the character of life in expert-driven "knowledge societies"; the resolution of conflicts around knowledge and technology (and the use of knowledge and technology in conflict resolution); the encounters between and across different knowledge systems, ways of knowing, and epistemic cultures, both locally and globally; the use of technologies to tell us "who we are" and "where we belong"; the social and technological reproduction of inequalities, including those related to social class, race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, location in global hierarchies, etc.; the relations between activists and experts, and the tensions between expertise and democracy; the roles of social movements when intervening in debates about knowledge, science, and technology, as well as the use of knowledge and technology by social movements; and the nature of governance in technologically sophisticated societies—including the character of collective decision-making about knowledge and technology, as well as the uses of knowledge and technology to arrive at such decisions. A lot (but not all) of the course content focuses on the United States, though we will try whenever possible to place developments in a global context and we will benefit from comparative and postcolonial approaches to STS. 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 suggest the interdisciplinary character of STS. Students from other disciplines are welcome.
This seminar is designed to expose students to the realm of sociological research (and research in other disciplines, notably history) that addresses how we think about and memorialize the past. How is history constructed? How are historical events shaped and made socially meaningful? Who are the shapers and who are the shaped?
