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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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 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 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 390-0-22 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 390-0-24 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 222-0-20 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 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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
