Requirements

This course is designed to provide newcomers with an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of Science & Technology Studies (STS) at the doctoral level. It presents canonical and contemporary scholarship, providing an overview of some of the major themes and issues that occupy the field, with attention to different disciplinary areas of application and concern. STS provides tools for critical analysis of the forms of political, epistemological, and cultural authority that underpin scientific knowledge and technological systems. We will read examples of sociological, historical, and ethnographic approaches to the study of knowledge production, its relationship to technology, and political and social order. This course will provide doctoral students with a cross-disciplinary foundation for analyzing the material and epistemological dimensions of their proposed independent research sites.

Prof. Peter Redfield

Wednesday, 2:00–4:50 p.m.

Examines issues in the anthropology of health, illness, medicine, and the contemporary biosciences

Prof. Christina Dunbar-Hester

Friday, 12:30–3:20 p.m.

Focuses on interpretive methods as applied to digital sites and objects.

Prof. Devin Griffiths

Monday, 2:00–4:50 p.m.

How do we think and write about the environment in an era of environmental crisis? How might our scholarship and creative practices shape the world to come? These questions will be central to our seminar, which will examine major works of the environmental arts and humanities (EAH) to explore how a variety of artists, academics, and activists have explored the interpretation of nature and the place of humans within it. Though centered on the twentieth century, this seminar will explore the wider field of the environmental arts and humanities from its seeds in nineteenth-century natural history and nature writing to its emergence as a full-fledged and deeply interdisciplinary research program in the twenty-first. Our readings will pair primary readings of creative works of fiction, poetry, art, and personal narrative, with secondary sources drawn from fields as diverse as ecological science, history, art history, sociology and anthropology. Over the course of fifteen weeks, we will consider the following topics: Indigenous knowledge and land management; histories of environmental racism; ecofeminism; environmental affects, including climate anxiety and ecological mourning; histories of environmental science, ecology, and ecosystem; deep ecology; the Western conservation movement; “slow violence” and the environmentalism of the poor; extractivism and energy cultures; world perspectives on environmental history and colonialism; nature poetry and locodescription; “cli-fi”; environmental activism and the divestment movement; and green Marxism.

Prof. Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani

Monday and Wednesday, 5:00–6:20 p.m.

“The myth of wilderness,” William Cronon writes, “is that we can somehow leave nature untouched by our passage.” The deep relationship between human cultures and the natural world is the subject of this course, and we will use the social, cultural, historical, and political underpinnings and implications of human–nature interactions in the Middle East to study themes that are at once local and global. In particular, we will examine the co-creation of environments and societies in the Middle East, asking questions about the nature of “nature,” its influence on politics in the region, and vice versa. Using the region’s most pressing environmental challenges sites of exploration, we will study the role of nonhuman forces like mosquitos, monsoons, and natural gas in these stories, and we will in turn analyze how those political systems have created, altered, maintained, and destroyed those same environments.

PSYC 4-599: Luddite Cognition

Prof. Jason Zevin

Monday and Wednesday, 2:00–3:50 p.m.

“Luddite” is most often used as a derogatory term for someone who automatically (and futilely) resists technological change. But the historical Luddites were technologists — skilled textile workers in nineteenth-century England — and their objections were not to technological innovations as such, but to the reordering of social life they promised. In this course we will explore the possibilities for a Luddite approach to cognition. We will consider the early development of cognitive science in the mid–twentieth century. Specifically, we’ll investigate how the “cognitive revolution” was contingent on the development of the digital computer, and related technologies spawned by the boom in scientific research during the Second World War. New theories were preferred over old because they could be written out (or imagined) as computer programs, not necessarily because they provided a more accurate view of the mind or brain. We will ask: What methods, theories, and insights were swept aside because they did not fit this new research program? Are they worth recovering? How might they be recovered? We will also consider the situation today, when AI seems poised to infiltrate every aspect of our lives. When we define cognition in terms of the capacities of large language models, face- and object-recognition systems, and so forth, what is left out? And how do we get it back in?

Professor Aro Velmet

Tuesdays, 9:30 a.m to 12:20 p.m

Professor Andrew Lakoff

Wednesdays, 2 to 4:50 p.m 

Professor Manuel Castells

Section 20955, ASC 228

Tuesdays, 12:30–3:20 p.m.

This is an advanced graduate seminar that aims to explore and analyze the interaction between culture and economy by observing different types of economic practices in a diversity of contexts. The purpose of the seminar will be the generation of new knowledge in this field. Students will be expected to develop research and original thinking and to produce a research paper of publishable quality. Students are welcome to use the seminar as a testing ground in theory and methodology for work related to their theses and dissertations.

Professor Mike Ananny

Section 20851D, ANN-408

Thursdays, 9:30–12:20 Examines models of a democratic public sphere, with special focus on design and use of networked information infrastructures supporting free speech.

Professor Tara McPherson

Section 18187D, SCA 216

Fridays, 10 a.m.–1:50 p.m.

What is the digital? How does the digital reconfigure our understandings of truth, our bodies, the everyday, power, and space? How is the digital intertwined with cultural understandings of gender, sexuality, and difference? Is the digital like and unlike older media? How have digital studies been organized and institutionalized? This course examines various methodologies and theories through which scholars have engaged digital media in order to think through these questions and others. Our concerns will be multiple. We will consider digital media through a variety of lenses: as a technology, as platforms, as code, as a cultural experience, as a variety of texts, as ideology, and as industrial practice. We will focus primarily on digital media within the context of the U.S., but we will also examine the digital’s global contexts at key junctures, and you are invited to introduce international comparisons from your own experience and interests.

Upon completion of the class, you will have improved your ability to analyze digital media through aesthetic, formal, and cultural registers. You will also have a solid understanding of the ways in which intellectuals and scholars have grappled with digital media as an emergent and powerful phenomenon, including a variety of methodologies that have been utilized in the study of digital media. Finally, you will better grasp the ways in which digital media shape our experiences of self, other, nation, race, gender, sexuality, temporality, and place.

Taught by Professor Juan de Lara, this course will introduce graduate students to an emerging field of scholarship that examines how race, science, and technology are mutually constituted. We will draw from a number of academic disciplines, including science and technology studies, ethnic studies, critical race studies, and the social sciences.

The class is divided into three sections. Section one will use scientific objects and genetic coding to illustrate how racial thinking has been shaped by and been central to technological innovation. In section two, we will interrogate the multiple ways that race and technology have transformed governance and human subjectivity. The final section will focus on more recent efforts to contest entrenched networks of power and to push for social justice through online platforms.

This seminar is the “prospectus course,” in which each person completes a draft of his/her dissertation prospectus by the end of the Fall semester. Along the way, we will talk about how each dissertation project fits into the disciplines of American and Ethnic Studies, including practical matters of preparing for the job market and less tangible issues such as theories of these disciplines and their related scholarly and pedagogical practices.

Taught by Professors Andrea Ballestero (USC) with Eden Medina (MIT)

If in the 20th century facts were presumed objective entities, in the 21st facts are up for grabs as manufactured doubt and distrust of expertise saturate the public sphere. To understand the future of facts, we need to expand studies of disinformation with approaches that examine the nature of facts in a global context. This requires going beyond truth/falsehood, fact/fiction discourses. This class takes an expansive approach and examines the making, use, and erasure of facts in Latin America. It will ask: Who produces a fact? Where is it produced? How is it circulated? And, how is it discredited?

Students will learn social science and humanities tools to expand the analysis of facts and better understand what is often referred to as the post-truth era.

Our case studies will include the role of genetic information in violent disappearances in Chile, the making of medical claims in Nicaragua, organizing aquifer protection in Costa Rica, inventing new technologies for the green revolution in Mexico, accounting for the body in legal proceedings in Colombia, distrusting algorithms in Costa Rica, religious facts in Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic, and more.

Featuring:

• Parallel local field trips in Los Angeles, CA and Cambridge, MA. (*fully funded, students will have no out-of-pocket costs*)
• Lecture series on the nature and future of facts.
• Opportunity to interact across institutions and with faculty participants in the Future of Facts in Latin America Working Group

Familiarizes students with foundational debates in feminist science and technology studies; examines new horizons that emerge when feminist STS theories and methodologies are mobilized

Taught by Professor Peter Redfield

Matters of life and death are increasingly matters of contemporary political and ethical concern.  Power exercised in the name of life has addressed an extraordinary range of phenomena, from wellness regimes, vaccination campaigns and rewilding, to biometric systems of identification, concentration camps and aerial bombing.  On the one hand new technologies extend possibilities of protecting and enhancing human (or more than human) existence, on the other they highlight enduring patterns of neglect and active eradication.  In this course we will examine keywords in cultural theory related to biopolitics, looking at concepts they name, and considering how they might inform critical analyses of colonial, state, and corporate control of populations.  In addition to working through a set of influential late 20th century theoretical writings and more recent responses, we will examine a series of case studies in which life and death are centrally at stake.  Part of the course will be open to individual definition for those who might have established projects.

This course introduces students to historical and contemporary debates around how publics are made, what they can look like, and what they should be. It traces normative models of the public across communication institutions and infrastructures, focusing on the role that networked information technologies play in how publics are imagined and realized.

How does knowledge acquire the status of fact, and how does it travel through the world? What is the relationship between science, technology, and social order? It’s tempting to see new technologies, especially new media technologies, as drivers of political and social change. But technological artifacts also embody the values and assumptions — and conflicts — of the societies that produce them, in complicated and surprising ways. This course provides an introduction to the field of Science & Technology Studies, examining the intersection of technology, knowledge, power, and society, with particular attention to cases and theories relevant to the study of communication and media. It takes as its premise that assumptions about society may come to be embodied in technological artifacts and technical knowledge, and undertakes to study how social relations get “inside” technology.

Taught by Professor Jennifer Petersen, the course will draw on literatures including feminist STS, histories of technology, and social theory to investigate the development and implications of AI. The focus will be on a critical genealogy of concepts and forms of knowledge central to AI.

Advanced research seminar examining the interaction between communication technology, society, economy, politics and culture from interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives.

Taught by Professor Christina Dunbar-Hester, the course explores ethnography as research mode including theory and practice of ethnographic research; epistemological and political underpinnings of ethnographic research.

Taught by Professor Manuel Castells

This is an advanced graduate seminar that aims to explore and analyze the interaction between culture and economy by observing different types of economic practices. The purpose of the seminar will be the generation of new knowledge in this field. Students will be expected to develop research and original thinking and to produce a research paper of publishable quality.

Privacy challenges that arise in the world driven by data. An overview of algorithmic and technical approaches to addressing them.
Recommended Preparation: thorough understanding of algorithms, proof-based mathematics, and basic probability.

Taught by Professor Devin Griffiths, this course will examine the dialogue between two of the nineteenth century’s most influential theorists of social change, while tracing their impact on later discussions of race, aesthetics, labor, and environmental thought

Taught by Professor Devin Griffiths

How do we think and write the end of our world? How might our writing shape the world to come? These questions will be central to our seminar, which will examine major works of the environmental humanities to explore how a variety of writers, academics, and activists have explored the interpretation of nature and the place of humans within it.

In today’s world, environmental challenges have become increasingly urgent, complex, and interconnected. Addressing these challenges requires a holistic perspective that draws upon the insights and methodologies of various academic disciplines. This graduate seminar in the environmental humanities invites students to engage in a deep exploration of the intricate relationship between humans and the environment.

Though centered on the twentieth century, this seminar will explore the wider field of the environmental humanities from its seeds in nineteenth-century natural history and nature writing to its emergence as a full-fledged and deeply interdisciplinary research program in the twenty-first. Our readings will pair primary readings of creative works of fiction, poetry, art, and personal narrative, with secondary sources drawn from fields as diverse as ecological science, history, art history, sociology and anthropology. Over the course of fifteen weeks, we will consider the following topics: Indigenous knowledge and land management; histories of environmental racism; ecofeminism; environmental affects, including climate anxiety and ecological mourning; histories of environmental science, ecology, and ecosystem; deep ecology; the Western conservation movement; “slow violence,” and the environmentalism of the poor; extractivism and energy cultures; world perspectives on environmental history and colonialism; nature poetry and locodescription; “cli-fi”; environmental activism and the divestment movement; and green Marxism.

As part of the course, seminar participants will contribute to weekly discussions, select and present one additional primary source document from the historical collections of either the Huntington or Clarke libraries, and produce a 15-page critical research paper with bibliography.

Who Should Attend: This seminar is open to graduate students from a variety of academic backgrounds, including but not limited to literature, history, philosophy, environmental studies, anthropology, communications, and related fields. It is designed for those who are passionate about understanding and addressing environmental challenges through a humanistic lens.

By the end of this seminar, students will be equipped with a deeper understanding of the environmental humanities and will be better prepared to engage with and contribute to the critical environmental discussions and environmental activism of our time.

How do we think the end of our world? How might our writing shape the world to come? These questions will be central to our seminar, which will examine major works of ecocriticism, systems thinking, and organic theory to explore how a variety of writers have conceived the world as an integrated ecology, and how such conceptions of the world system inform out attempts to deal with climate change and the dawn of the Anthropocene.

Focus on how scientific developments drive ethical issues in medicine. Exploration of ethical dimensions of issues such as stem cells, genetic engineering and reproductive technology.

Taught by Professor Andrew Lakoff

This course serves as an advanced introduction to recent developments in sociological theory. It covers roughly the period from the late-1950s to the present. The course will structure a conversation among several parallel but sometimes intersecting strands of social thought. In particular, the readings chosen in this class thematize the question of the role of social theory in articulating a critical and reflective stance toward modern institutions and forms of rationality. In various ways, these readings interrogate the relation between the assumed ‘goods’ of modern life—scientific progress, economic prosperity, individual freedom, and improved health—and ever-encroaching structures of power, as well as the unintended consequences of efforts to improve human welfare.