Teaching

Cyborgs and Cybernetics

Feminist science studies scholar Donna Haraway writes: “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are all cyborgs.” But what does it mean to say that we are all cyborgs? This class will explore the history and theory of cyborgs and cyborgs in the many domains in which they have been influential to offer some answers to that question.

Science and Feminism

This course offers an introduction to STS scholarship on the role of gender, women, and feminism in the sciences of the past, present, and future. We will learn about the role of women in science through readings and multimedia features by and about women engineers and scientists; how gender has been studied in science over time; and how feminism can improve the practice of science.

Science, Technology, and Society

What makes something a scientific fact? What is the social impact of new technologies? Who in society benefits and who is harmed by the rapid development of modern science and technology? These are just some of the questions tackled by researchers in the field of Science and Technology Studies.

How Like a Cyborg: Rethinking the Agency of Users and Things in Innovation

In this workshop, participants will get an introduction to “cyborg anthropology,” a research methodology that proposes deep integration of the analysis of humans and machines, stresses the responsibility of researchers to pay attention to how technologies can perpetuate difference and power dynamics, and centers collaboration.

Life in the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene has ironically come to connote a way of thinking about the climactic, labor, financial, and population problems of our time that decenters the privileged ontological status of humans and human agency. This class will survey the critiques of inequality, Enlightenment philosophy, and environmental exploitation enabled by anthropocenic thinking in social theory in a variety of disciplines.

Disaster Capitalism

Turn on the evening news and you will see a parade of disasters: from banking crises to pandemics, from floods to superbugs, from the instantaneous loss of life following an earthquake to the slowly accumulating effects of global climate change. Why is it that we seem to live in a uniquely calamitous age?

Feminist Futures

Feminist science studies scholars push us to consider whether new technologies—such as those in medicine and computing—will deliver on their promise to make the world a safer, happier, and more prosperous place for everyone, or will instead reinforce the systemic social exclusion of particular social groups.

Imagining Immunity

Through our investigation of the multiple lives of immunity, this class will explore how the strategic deployment of scientific knowledge and medico-technological practices animates a biopolitical understanding of society and embeds modern biomedicine in every aspect of social life.

The Politics of Infrastructure

What does it take to build an infrastructural system? What kind of norms do infrastructures enforce, and what kinds of people do they allow to thrive? What happens when infrastructure starts to break down, or prove inadequate in the face of disaster?

Donna Haraway: Gender, Science and Objectivity

Over a career spanning four decades, philosopher of science Donna Haraway has revolutionized how social theorists and technoscience practitioners understand the situated objectivity of scientific knowledge, with special attention to the ways in which technoscience assigns biological meaning to social categories of gender. While Haraway is most famously associated with Cyborg Theory, this course offered students an opportunity to survey the full scope of her oeuvre.

Becoming Cyborg: Science and Science Fiction

This seminar explored what it means to live in our modern world where myths of human-machine synthesis prefigure our attitudes toward technology and the future, the responsibility of humans toward non-humans and the environment, capitalist accumulation, and oppression based on gender, race, and class.

Drugs and Society

This class interrogated how drugs – both engineered pharmaceuticals and pleasurably addictive illegal substances – gain and reproduce their power in our social life.

Anthropology and Ethnography Theory

Developed as a tool for colonial empire-building at the close of the 19thcentury, the ethnographic method has emerged in the late 20th and early 21st centuries as an important practice for telling the stories of the oppressed and demanding social change.