SISP115F Reproductive Politics (FYS)

This course explores the history and current status of reproductive politics in the United States. By prioritizing issues of difference, including race, gender, sexuality, disability, and class, the course will consider how scientific and bioethical concerns intersect with matters of cultural ideology and social control. Issues covered will include: the history and legacy of the birth control movement; the ideological construction of "infancy"; changing attitudes towards pregnancy and childbirth; gendered and racialized conceptions of parenthood; abortion rights; the fetal personhood debates; the regulation of pregnancy within incarcerated and institutionalized settings; genetic engineering; reproductive justice; and so on.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST115F, FGSS113F
Prereq: None

SISP118 Reproduction in the 21st Century

This course will cover basic human reproductive biology, new and future reproductive and contraceptive technologies, and the ethics raised by reproductive issues.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: NSM-BIOL
Identical With: BIOL118, FGSS118, PHIL118
Prereq: None

SISP120F Uncertainty and the Future (FYS)

The world we live in is full of risk and uncertainty. Science, politics, and economics all tell us that this is a hazardous era in which great changes are inevitable and catastrophes are possible. How do people manage living in such an uncertain world? This first-year seminar introduces students to research and writing in the social sciences by studying a driving factor in the human search for knowledge: the uncertainty of the unknown future. We will consider how the ways in which humans define, relate to, and experience uncertainty influence social well-being and the production of the future. We begin with the anthropological study of uncertainty, which is rooted in the study of ritual and magic, and then consider perspectives in psychology, economics, and ecology. While we will reflect on the "negative" side of uncertainty, such as risk, precariousness, and insecurity, we will also examine the way the creative management of uncertainty is sometimes romanticized and consider the opportunities for creativity, adaptation, resilience, and imagination in uncertain times.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: WRCT120F
Prereq: None

SISP121F Living within the Bio-Logical (FYS)

How do biology and society relate to each other? This first-year seminar provides an introductory overview of how the biosciences have been entangled in social contexts, from the Enlightenment to the current technoscience era. We will examine contemporary case studies where society impacts biology and biology impacts society, particularly those that show the complex interplay between the body and the environment. We will look at how rates of obesity relate to inequality and insecurity, consider the impact of toxins on the body and environment, and discuss emergent research that challenges longstanding beliefs about medical science. This anthropologically informed course provides ethnographic accounts that give crosscultural context to the questions posed. Throughout the course, students will learn to discuss the interrelation of the biological with the social, political, and economic, and we will critically reflect on the influence of politics and economics on human biological agency.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-WRCT
Identical With: WRCT130F
Prereq: None

SISP127F War and Technology (FYS)

In this class, we will discuss technological changes caused by war and accompanying social changes and ethical debates in both militaries and civilian societies. Topics will include technological changes in warfare and weapons, as well as the ways in which societies have responded to new injuries and health issues resulting from war. Subjects may include the development of machine guns, trench warfare, chemical warfare, nuclear warfare, drones, cyber-warfare, and surveillance technologies, in addition to the professionalization of nursing, military psychiatry, medical experimentation, environmental contamination, and disability and health issues for veterans and civilians. We will also talk about the implementation in the civilian world of technologies developed or expanded during war. We will discuss cases from across the globe, focusing chronologically on 1850 to the present. Readings may include selections from Margaret Humphreys, John Ellis, Carol Byerly, Warwick Anderson, Beth Linker, Paul Lerner, Jessica Adler, Edmund Russell, Charles Perrow, Susan Smith, Susan Lindee, Jessica Wang, Kelly Moore, Janet Abbate, Stephen Graham, and others.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Prereq: None

SISP135F Skin, Sex, State, Software: Surveillance & Society (FYS)

Scopophilia is the derivation of pleasure from looking. What pleasures does the surveillance state gain from looking at us? From feeling and documenting us? How do privacy activists fight back against such surveillance, and what might be wrong with privacy rights discourse? Which groups are always already surveilled? In this class, students will play with notions of surveillance--including sousveillance, lateral surveillance, and counter surveillance--as engaged by queer and feminist studies, the cultural anthropology of expertise, and social studies of science and technology. We will draw on case studies ranging from police technologies, facial recognition software, PornHub's data collection projects, TSA airport body scanners, Facebook ads, science fiction like Black Mirror, and more to understand how bodies, races, genders, and sexualities are made known and contested by activists, artists, corporations, and governments. Students will also collect data for a creative personal surveillance project culminating at the end of the quarter.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Prereq: None

SISP190 Introduction to History: Environment

Humans have profoundly altered the character of Earth's environment since the advent of agriculture and settled societies some 10,000 years ago. This course is a study of the historical relationship between human beings and their habitats, with additional attention to arid lands as places of settlement, cultivation, and development. We explore how global problems such as climate change, biodiversity attenuation, and depletion of fossil soils, fuels, and water are linked to social problems such as economic inequality, food insecurity, conflict, and declining public health. The course reviews evidence of major environmental problems; considers how varied academic disciplines address them; and models a historical approach to understanding environmental change.



The course is divided into two parts: "Environmental Concepts," and "Case Studies." In Spring 2022, the case studies will be devoted to biodiversity.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST190, ENVS237
Prereq: None

SISP202 Philosophy of Science

This course is a fast-moving introduction to some central topics in the philosophy of science, aimed at students with some college-level study of at least one natural science. Topics include the norms of scientific understanding or explanation; the relation between finished theories or explanations and ongoing research; the recognition and dissemination of discoveries; the justification of scientific claims; conceptual and technical (revolutionary) change in the science; the significance of instrumentation, experiment, and artifice in science; the places of laws, models, and causal relations in scientific understanding; and whether various sciences differ fundamentally in their aims, methods, and achievements. Considerable attention will be given to examples of scientific practice, both historical and contemporary.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-SISP
Identical With: PHIL287
Prereq: None

SISP203 The Secrets of Ancient Bones: Discovering Ancient DNA and Archaeology

New analyses of ancient DNA preserved for millennia in bones and soils have revolutionized the field of archaeology. Suddenly, archaeologists have gained new insight into human origins, past population migrations, ancient diseases, plant and animal domestication, and even the factors that contributed to the extinctions of megafauna such as woolly mammoths. Recent genetic case studies will provide a lens for learning about the archaeology of diverse world regions and time periods, from Oceania to Mesoamerica and from the Paleolithic through recent history. Topics will include: human evolution and genetic relationships between humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans; the peopling of the globe; extinction and de-extinction; domestication and the origins of agriculture; paleodiseases and paleodiets; and ethics in genetic research.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ARCP
Identical With: ARCP203, ENVS203, ANTH212, IDEA203
Prereq: None

SISP204 Extreme Landscapes of the Anthropocene

The "Anthropocene," a term coined to categorize the current geological epoch, has become a way in which social scientists can critically and creatively engage with the impact of humanity on the ecological well-being of the Earth. The interdisciplinary and uncertain nature of this subject matter provides space for experimental writing styles, innovative approaches to storytelling, and critical discussion and debate. This course is designed to explore and challenge the term "Anthropocene," questioning how narrative and drama are entangled in the dissemination of complex truths, for better or worse.



In this course, we will consider texts, short films, and other mixed media that investigate the everydayness of extreme landscapes, from "capitalist ruins" to the depleting seas. We will dive into the social, political, economic, and scientific power-scapes that influence narratives about the environment, from late liberal ideology to corporate influence on science and the news. Through the course materials and activities, we will question how to communicate complex information with a broad range of people, particularly surrounding issues of climate change, sustainability, and environmental justice. Each student will build their own writing portfolio of short essays for specific audiences. The class will collectively build and design a storytelling website where they can share their work. Students are encouraged to apply an ethics of care and the art of "non-judgmental attention" to their critical engagement with the Anthropocene.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Identical With: WRCT204, ENVS204, ANTH204
Prereq: None

SISP205 Sciences as Social and Cultural Practices

Philosophers long construed scientific knowledge as achieved and assessed by individual knowers, but recent work has recognized a greater epistemic role for scientific communities, disciplines, or practices and has taken seriously the social and cultural context of scientific research. This course surveys some of the social, cultural, and political aspects of the sciences that have been most important for scholars in science studies, including differences between experimental, field, and theoretical science; the role of disciplines and other institutions in the sciences; interactions between science and its various publics; the politics of scientific expertise and science policy; the globalization of science; the social dimensions of scientific normativity, from metrology to conceptions of objectivity; race and gender in science; and conceptual exchanges between sciences and other discursive practices. The concept of the social will also receive critical attention in its purported contrasts to what is individual, natural, rational, or cultural.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Identical With: PHIL288, ENVS205
Prereq: None

SISP209 Reenacting Justice: Guns in America

This seminar, developed in collaboration with visiting guest instructor Glenn LaVertu (Parsons), combines readings, discussion, archival research, storyboarding, project-based learning, legal analysis, and filmmaking in presenting new takes on an old genre: Westerns. We will read and watch Westerns alongside study of the development of the American legal system, considering the aesthetics of justice, narrative, and guns. Students will work on film and theater projects related to the manufacturing, use, and mythologization of "Old West" in popular culture, television, and film. Film projects will be screened and discussed at the Center for the Study of Guns and Society's annual undergraduate conference on Thursday, April 25, and Friday April 26, 2024, and at the presentation of "Stories of Carceral Connecticut," a celebration of student projects for the Mellon Foundation project, "Carceral Connecticut," on Friday, May 3, 2024. (Both events are required). The course will consider the aesthetics of storytelling, guns, and justice, as well as be a lab for creating and narrating new stories. Engaging with contemporary debates about Westerns as manifestations of American gun culture, the purpose of the project is to draw parallels between the way in which gun violence is portrayed in film, particularly period, Western movies, and the realities of gun violence today. The final project is an opportunity to expose multiple points of view regarding gun violence and justice and their socio-political effects, and to write and develop new scripts, storyboards, and film scenes, as well as study old ones.



Assignments and Grading System:

Grading is based on weekly assignments and participation, an in-class midterm on the readings, and a final project.



Requirements:



- Class Participation (20%): Regular attendance, submission of weekly 1-2 pg written critical reflections on assigned topics (e.g. a primary source, an advertisement or magazine article, a report about a field trip or movie, etc. ) Participation in the April 25 evening student mini-film festival and April 26 all-day undergraduate research conference is required.



- Midterm (40%): In-class midterm on the readings and discussions (in class; Thursday before break).



- Final project (40%): (20% for the project; 10% on the written artist's statement; 10% for the presentation at the April 25 mini-film festival night and April 26 panel).





Required Texts

(Available for purchase at the bookstore, and available for free reading on Olin e-reserve through the Course Moodle).



- *Joyce, Justin A. Gunslinging Justice: The American Culture of Gun Violence in Westerns and the Law (Manchester Univ. Press 2018).

- Densley, James ed. The Conversation on Guns (JHU Press, 2023).

- Light, Caroline E. Stand Your Ground: A History of America's Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense (Beacon Press 2017).

- McKevitt, Andrew C. Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture & Control in Cold War America (Univ of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2023).



Additional writings (e-reserve at Olin Library and on Moodle) are by Kelly I. Aliano, The Performance of Video Games: Enacting Identity, History and Culture through Play (2022); Vanessa Agnew et al, Handbook of Reenactment Studies: Key Terms (2023); and Priya Satia; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz; Richard Slotkin; Gillian Rose; Carol Anderson, Jennifer Carlson, Terrence H. Witkowski, Lindsay Livingston, Peter Boag, Joan Burbick, Jelani Cobb, and more.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST209, AMST293
Prereq: None

SISP210 Feminist Technoscience: Making Bodies, Bits, and Bombs

This course focuses on feminist transnational approaches to the study of science and technology. It introduces students to a range of critical and experimental figurations, post/decolonial theories and methods, and interdisciplinary reading and writing practices proposed by leading and emerging scholars who shape today's vibrant field of feminist STS. While the various approaches share strong commitments to justice, difference, and collective agency, they don't always mean the same thing. Students will learn to unpack affinities, tensions, and radical possibilities for living with greater care and less violence in a more-than-human, more-than-Western world. The course has three parts. Part I grounds students in canonical texts that have opened up multiple pathways for critically examining patriarchy, war, and technoscientific progress. These texts challenge binaries and hierarchies of nature-culture, organism-machine, modern-traditional, center-periphery and so on. Part II focuses on analyses of colonialism and racial capitalism, and the material-discursive apparatuses deployed to reconfigure how bodies, bits, and bombs come to matter. Part III looks at new works that refuse the end of history and propose a pluriverse of bold alternatives.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Identical With: FGSS206
Prereq: None

SISP213 Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing: Writing Science, Writing Science Studies

This Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing will give students practice writing about science, technology, and medical studies for general audiences. It will also function as a capstone experience for SISP majors: students will have a chance to reflect on the methodologies and theories they have learned during their time in the program, while also using those methodologies and theories to analyze issues and texts in our world today. Students will work collaboratively, editing each other's work, and significant class time will be spent workshopping student writing. The aim will be to produce publishable pieces of cultural analysis for the popular press.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Identical With: ENGL211
Prereq: None

SISP214 Humans, Animals, and Nature

A variety of important issues are central to understanding the complexity of relationships between humans, nonhumans, and the rest of nature. The goals of the course are to help students to think critically, to read carefully, to argue well, and to defend their own reasoned views about the moral relations between humans, animals, and nature.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-PHIL
Identical With: PHIL215, ENVS215
Prereq: None

SISP215 Metabolism and Technoscience

This course will investigate the scientific idea of metabolism through the lens of technoscience. Metabolism is a flexible and mobile scientific idea, one that has been applied at the micro-level of analysis within biological organisms, at the meso-level of social collectivities, and at the macro-level of global ecologies. Metabolism encompasses all of the biological and technosocial processes through which bodies (both human and not human) and societies (again, human and not) create and use nutrients, medicines, toxins, and fuels. The lens of technoscience enables us to investigate the technological and scientific practices that define and drive metabolic processes within sciences, cultures, and political economies. These processes implicate forces of production, consumption, labor, absorption, medicalization, appropriation, expansion, growth, surveillance, regulation, and enumeration. Accordingly, as we will learn, metabolism is also a profoundly political process that is inextricably linked to systems that create structural and symbolic violence as well as modes of resistance and struggle. In these contexts, we will interpret some of the most pressing metabolic crises facing human societies, including ecological disaster, industrial food regimes, metabolic health problems, and industrial-scale pollution.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Identical With: ENVS222
Prereq: None

SISP220 Human Nature

The idea of "human nature" plays an important role in all sorts of explanations, but what does it mean? What is it to be a human? Are we just rational animals? Do some humans have different natures than others? Is it possible for us to change our nature or is it innate? Are we products of nature, nurture, or some combination? Are humans fundamentally evil or good? By examining philosophical, historical, religious, theoretical, and scientific literatures, this course will examine various answers to these questions.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-PHIL
Identical With: PHIL220
Prereq: None

SISP221 History of Ecology

The word "ecology" has come to have many meanings and connotations: a scientific field dealing with the relation of organisms and the environment, a way of thinking about the world emphasizing holism and interconnection, a handmaiden of the environmental movement, to name a few. This course covers the history of ecology as a scientific discipline from the 18th-century natural history tradition to the development of population, ecosystem, and evolutionary ecology in the 20th century, situating the science in its cultural, political, and social contexts. Along the way, it traces the connections between ecology and economic development, political theory, ideas about society, the management of natural resources, the preservation of wilderness, and environmental politics. How have scientists, citizens, and activists made use of ecological ideas, and to what ends? How have they understood and envisioned the human place in nature? How have the landscapes and places in which ecologists have done their work shaped their ideas? Other major themes include the relationship between theories of nature and theories of society, ecology and empire, the relationship between place and knowledge about nature, the development of ecology as a professional discipline, the role of ecologists as environmental experts, the relationship between the state and the development of ecological knowledge, and the relationships among ecology, conservation, agriculture, and environmentalism.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST221, ENVS211
Prereq: None

SISP222 Disease and Epidemics in Historical Perspective

Disease and epidemics have been powerful agents of historical change as well as determinants of human development before the advent of historical records. In this lecture course we will examine how diseases have changed human societies over time, with special attention given to the place of disease-causing organisms, from viruses to parasites, in the ecological networks they make home. Yet at the same time, we will keep in mind the ways in which human society and culture also have important causal roles in human disease. HIV, for example, arose because of human interactions with animals but reached pandemic proportions, in part, because of cultural, social, and political forces.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST222
Prereq: None

SISP223 Liminal Animals: Animals in Urban Spaces

This course examines the major ways in which nonhuman animals influence and are influenced by human-built environments, with specific attention to the ethical, political, and social dimensions of human-animal interactions in these spaces. Discussions, films, readings, and an independent research project will introduce students to key concepts related to urban/suburban animal life. Specifically, it will focus on topics including the use of animals for food, the use of animals as spectacle or entertainment, animals as human companions, urban wildlife, "invasive" species, "vermin" and "problem" animals, animals and the law, ecological webs, and human encroachment in animal spaces.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Identical With: ENVS225
Prereq: None

SISP224 Critical Design Fictions

Design fiction involves the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change. Through practices of estrangement and defamiliarization, and through the use of carefully chosen design methods, this course experiments with the creation of provocative scenarios and imaginative artifacts that can help us envision different ways of inhabiting the world. The choices made by designers are ultimately choices about the kind of world in which we want to live--expressions of our dreams, fantasies, desires, and fears. As an integrated mode of thought and action, design is intrinsically social and deeply political. In conversation with science fiction, queer and feminist theories, indigenous discourses, drag and other performative interventions, this course explores speculative and critical approaches to design as catalysts for imagining alternate presents and possible futures. We examine a number of environmental and social issues related to climate change, incarceration, gender and reproductive rights, surveillance, emerging technologies, and labor.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ALLB
Identical With: CSPL225
Prereq: None

SISP230 Anti-Psychiatry

This course will investigate anti-psychiatry, the social and scientific movement that has critically analyzed and opposed psychiatry as a field of medicine. No field of medicine is more deeply implicated in creating and legitimating human suffering than psychiatry, from the role that psychiatry plays in managing people's daily lives to the administration of the criminal justice system. We will ask how social and psychic traumas are transformed into discrete psychiatric disorders by exploring the cultural production of diagnostic criteria used to diagnose and the psychopharmacological drugs that are used to intervene on mental states.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Prereq: None

SISP231 Guns and Society

Students will discuss some of the key questions that animate the emerging interdisciplinary field of gun studies, considering guns as objects and symbols and as sites of both shared and contested meanings in everyday life. Readings will include recent scholarship about the evolution of gun technologies and the changing place of guns in U.S. society, from the colonial era through to the present day, exploring how the history of guns in U.S. history is relevant to other histories, including studies of race, gender, class, labor and capital, social movements, and military and civilian life. Special focus will be put on visual studies, museum studies and public history, science and technology studies, public health, and legal history. Assignments include four shorter (2-page) papers and a 15-page final research paper. Each student, working in small groups, will also deliver a 10-minute presentation and have opportunities for site visits to local museums and gun violence memorials such as the Coltsville National Historic Park (Hartford), Springfield Armory National Historic Site (Springfield, Massachusetts), and the Connecticut Gun Violence Memorial (New Haven).



(This course is a prerequisite for individualized humanities "labs" designed for students to delve into a particular aspect of the topic of guns and society in a more applied way in the spring semester, through special projects that can include an individually designed research paper, a museum/archives project, a theater sketch, a podcast, a high school teaching module, an art project, an exhibit in a local museum, an oral history project, or a syllabus, among other possibilities to be discussed with the instructor.)
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST231, FGSS252, AMST231
Prereq: None

SISP236 Race, Gender, and Medicine in U.S. History

This course will examine the intersections of race, gender, public health, and medicine in the United States, largely focusing on the 20th century. Topics will include the racialization of certain diseases, race and health care access, and the history of African Americans in health care professions and health care activism. Students will learn about the history of medicine and public health in the United States, African American history, and historical research methods. We will consider the built environment, the law, and federal and local politics as they relate to medical care in the United States. By the end of this course, you will gain further understanding of some of the major currents in the history of medicine and public health in the United States; you will make connections between race and health care experiences in the U.S.; you will be able to discuss historical research methods and appraise the values and limitations of various kinds of sources. Possible readings may include selections from Sowande' Mustakeem, Rana Hogarth, Sharla Fett, Deirdre Cooper Owens, Jim Downs, Tera Hunter, Samuel K. Roberts, Susan L. Smith, Natalia Molina, Nayan Shah, Wendy Kline, Vanessa Gamble, Jonathan Metzl, Susan Reverby, Alondra Nelson, Keith Wailoo, Jennifer Nelson, and Jennifer Brier.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Prereq: None

SISP240 Research Methods in Science Studies

This seminar exposes students to qualitative research methods in science studies including ethnography, archival and discourse analysis, social worlds analysis, comparative historical analysis, narrative analysis, visual culture and media analysis. The course will survey methodological traditions in science and technology studies, sociology and cultural studies, and feminist and critical race studies that guide the collection of evidence about scientific knowledge and practices, the relationships between users and technologies, and broader sociotechnical infrastructures. Coursework will culminate in small-scale individual and group research projects utilizing qualitative research methods.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Prereq: None

SISP243 Commodities and Addiction

This course will examine several commodities that have often been described as addictive. We will use a case study approach and focus on the following substances: tobacco, sugar, opiates, and alcohol. We will also consider the history of the concepts of addiction and addiction treatment. The course will be largely focused on United States history but will also consider the global history of the production of these substances and the development of global consumer markets. Some of the subjects that we will discuss include colonization, slavery, agricultural and environmental history, advertising, public health, and criminalization of substance use.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Prereq: None

SISP245 Ethnography and Design

Exercising humility and developing methods of meaningful engagement are essential to becoming an effective ethnographer and designer. Collaboration with users provides knowledge that allows designers to imagine artifacts, places, and systems that are thoughtfully enhanced or radically new. This course rethinks power dynamics to better understand how to design both for and with other people. With successful completion of this course students will be able to demonstrate competence in developing, refining, and communicating research interests in a committed, reflexive manner. They will gain an understanding of the strategic and tactical value of design and a sense of the practical problems involved in realizing design solutions and responses that are attuned to the needs of both an institution and individual users. Students will gain experience not only in theoretically framing social and political issues as these are expressed through design, but also in understanding the methodological tools needed to translate problems into creative interventions that are user-centered and compassionate.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Identical With: CSPL245
Prereq: None

SISP250 Sociology of Knowledge

To map power-knowledge relationships, the sociology of knowledge grounds an analysis of knowledge in terms of social structures, the sets of patterned practices that define and give meaning to social life at individual, communal, and institutional levels. In the broadest sense, the sociology of knowledge is concerned with the relationship between the (epistemic) content and the social context of knowledge. How was knowledge produced and with what institutional resources? Who produced knowledge and why did they produce it? Who benefits from the circulation of knowledge? What effects in the world does knowledge engender? Our basic course objectives are to a) introduce sociology of knowledge as a form of critical inquiry, b) describe and distinguish the approaches and research methods associated with the sociology of knowledge, and c) learn how to analyze knowledge and knowledge-making practices in their social context using these methods.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Identical With: EDST251, SOC255
Prereq: None

SISP253 Science and/as Literature in Early Modern England

Seventeenth- and 18th-century Britain saw the development and popularization of the "new science." Microscopes, telescopes, air pumps, automata, and experiments captured the popular imagination. The first important scientific societies and journals were founded, and the public learned about new discoveries through sermons and coffeehouse lectures. British science was brought to its colonies across the globe, and it was shaped, in turn, by the different natural products and the brutal realities of slavery there. This course will trace the literary reaction to these cultural changes. A woman natural philosopher wrote utopian science fiction, and satirists skewered mathematicians and experimenters. While the best of early 18th-century nature poetry takes Newton quite seriously as it depicts the way light glimmers off objects, by the century's end William Blake villainized Newtonian thought as reductive and deadening. We will try to understand what writers found exhilarating, scary, confusing, hilarious, or important about science at this key moment of its development. At the same time, we will read this science as literature--considering, say, Francis Bacon's symbolically fraught "idols" and Robert Boyle's "literary technology," the role of poetry in spreading scientific ideas and the importance of analogy and metaphor to the very logics that structured scientific thought. The disciplines of science and literature were not as cleanly separated in this period as they are now, and we can better understand both by exploring their intersections.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL253
Prereq: None

SISP254 Science in Western Culture

This course offers an introduction to the history of the sciences between the late 17th and early 20th centuries, with the aim of understanding the varied ways of knowing that have come to be called "science" and how they have attained such an important status in shaping modern Western culture. To do so, we will both investigate key intellectual developments--such as Newtonianism, theories of energy and matter, and the rise of evolutionary thought--and consider these ideas in the cultural contexts in which they developed to better understand how people have "done science" in different times and places.



Throughout, we will pay attention to the relationships between science and other knowledge systems, between scientists and nonscientists, and between science and state power by exploring the changing nature of scientific authority, the cultural status of the scientist, and the connections among science, commerce, technology, and empire.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST254
Prereq: None

SISP255 Nature/Culture

In this course, we are going to explore--and problematize--the boundary between the so-called "natural" world and human social and cultural life. Rather than assuming that "nature" is something that already exists in the world that humans have systematically excoriated and transformed, we consider instead the idea that nature and culture are fundamentally co-constitutive concepts--that is to say, that one cannot exist without the other. As we go, we will explore pressing concerns such as the boundaries between human and non-human, the nature of the Anthropocene, the question of what it means to be "modern," and the power of ecological politics in our contemporary orders of global capitalism.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: ANTH215, ENVS218
Prereq: None

SISP256 Race and Medicine in America

This course will trace ideas of race in American medical science and its cultural contexts, from the late 19th century to the present. We will explore how configurations of racial difference have changed over time and how medical knowledge about the body has both influenced and helped to shape social, political, and popular cultural forces. We will interrogate the idea of medical knowledge as a "naturalizing" discourse that produces racial classifications as essential, and biologically based.



We will treat medical sources as primary documents, imagining them as but one interpretation of the meaning of racial difference, alongside alternate sources that will include political tracts, advertisements, photographs, and newspaper articles. Key concepts explored will include slavery's medical legacy, theories of racial hierarchy and evolution, the eugenics movement, "race-specific" medications and diseases, public health politics and movements, genetics and modern "roots" projects, immigration and new technologies of identification, and intersections of race and disability.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST256
Prereq: None

SISP257 Japan and the Atomic Bomb: History, Myths, and Mysteries

Even today, when discussing the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, newspaper and other media sources often refer to "Truman's decision" to drop the bomb, the idea that these bombings conclusively brought an end to World War Two, arguments that they saved more lives than they killed, and assertions that the United States would not have dropped the bomb on Germany since its citizens were white. But what do the historical sources actually say on these and other related points? This course emphasizes the use of archival sources to address these and many other issues. It establishes the historical context for the atomic bombings of Japan by tracing events that led to the War in the first place, how civilians became the targets of mass bombings, and the scientific discoveries that made nuclear weapons possible. It also examines how after the War the American press and government strove to establish a particular perspective on the atomic bombings of Japan. By the end of this course students will have a much better idea about the historical facts, the popular myths, and remaining mysteries related to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST256, CEAS226
Prereq: None

SISP259 Discovering the Person

This course surveys major developments in psychology and psychiatry from 1860 to the present. Through readings and lectures, the course introduces the major schools, theories, and systems in the American "psy" sciences. We examine the kinds of persons who were "discovered," the techniques of discovery, the extensions of psychological ideas to institutions and policy formulations, and the consequences of these discoveries for public as well as private life. We examine phenomena that were located, catalogued, and explained by these sciences, including rationality, gender, cognition, personality, race, emotion, psychiatric disorders, development, intelligence, and the will. Attention is given to the scientific grounds of investigations and the empirical evidence sought in the century-long process of discovering and naming psychological kinds. Readings include primary source documents, histories, and philosophical analyses.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-PSYC
Identical With: PSYC259, AMST259
Prereq: PSYC105

SISP260 Bioethics and the Animal/Human Boundary

In this course, we will explore the construction of the animal/human boundary through the lens of bioethics. We will define bioethics as the study of the ethical consideration of medical, scientific, and technological advances and their effects on living beings. At the same time, we will pay close attention to the cultural contexts in which these advances emerge, imagining the realms of scientific progress and popular culture as mutually constitutive. We will consider topics such as cloning, organ transplantation, pharmaceutical testing, and gestational surrogacy, with a focus on the late 20th and early 21st centuries. We will begin by interrogating how ideas of the "animal" and the "human" are constructed through biomedical and cultural discourses. We will ask, How is the human defined? By intelligence or consciousness levels? By physical capabilities or esoteric qualities? Similarly, how has the human been defined against ideas of the animal? Or, what ethical justifications have been cited in the use of animals in biomedicine? What makes certain species "proper" research subjects and others not? What do these formulations tell us about our valuation of animal and human life, and what kinds of relationships exist between the two? To answer these questions, we will consult a wide range of interdisciplinary scholarship, from authors in the fields of animal/ity studies, bioethics and medicine/science history, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. Students will also be exposed to the basics of biopolitical theory.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST260, ENVS238
Prereq: None

SISP261Z Enlightenment and Science

This course will be a study of how we, as a society, have obtained our views on science. The class will concentrate on the positive and negative ways that twenty-first-century science and technology have been impacted by the Enlightenment. In general terms, the long-eighteenth-century European Enlightenment is taken to be the marker of the modern age--when modern science emerged. The time has now come for a reconsideration of the complexity of science and the scientific method during the Enlightenment as a means of comprehending its direct impact on the modern age in which we are living today. This class will focus overall on the strengths and weaknesses that modern science, technology, and thus society have inherited from the Enlightenment.



This is not wholly a story of science and technology in the West, but a World History story. This class will highlight test cases and ethical choices--to give two modern examples, decisions about resource allocation, that of fossil fuels and vaccines--that we are facing today. These choices are not made simply on scientific, logical lines but also according to the preferences of society. In order to understand our current situation, we must inform ourselves about how we arrived at this situation. Two centuries ago, without government or private sources of funding for science, the emphasis on immediate outcomes in science became common. Practitioners of science (the term "scientist" was not used until the nineteenth century) often had to be showmen to attract attention in order to get funding. Likewise, by the twenty-first century, it is now almost impossible for scientists to get grants for pure research; winning applications have to stress immediate public outcomes in order to get funded. This effectively puts a stopper into the very source of new scientific ideas--pure science--and of virtually all new scientific break throughs, and this is a world-wide trend in the sciences.



In this class, we will examine crucial examples of the key scientific subjects that emerged during the Enlightenment, and social and political responses to these same scientific discoveries, from both the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, which stressed religion over science. We will read responses from non-practitioners of science at the time--educated people trying to make sense of emerging modern science in the midst of politically and economic troubled times. There was, in the eighteenth century, no safety net--such as unemployment benefits--for those who wanted to practice science in a time that there were no jobs in science. There was certainly no safety net for rest of society either. The parallels to our own time are self-evident: political polarization, closely linked to radically different views toward science, in the midst of epidemics and widespread financial distress.



Emerging modern science in the long eighteenth century was relatively open to new types of people, not just new ideas. During the Enlightenment, science and technology were being advanced by artisans in addition to well-connected practitioners of science. Talented young men from less privileged backgrounds were, for the first time, slowly able to gain access to the major scientific circles during the Enlightenment. A surprising number of women (in a time when women had virtually no legal rights apart from their male relatives) were also active in scientific circles. Such accomplished women were rare during the Enlightenment but they should not be ignored. Margaret Cavendish, Emilie du Chatelet, and Caroline Herschel are prime examples of women practitioners of mathematics, physics, and astronomy respectively. Women were also the organizers of the intellectual salons in Paris and the political salons in London. In all these cases, even the political salons, science was discussed as a general topic of discussion, not just a subject for specialists. And those knowledgeable in the sciences were expected to make their work accessible to non-specialists. Later, however, the nineteenth-century professionalization of, and specialization in the sciences led to mixed results. It certainly allowed for a substantial increase in the scale of modern scientific work. Nevertheless, it also led to a less open attitude toward those not trained as scientists in the newly-established manner. Alas, it also resulted in the end of the belief that educated people outside of the sciences should know about it in order to be proper citizens. Overall, this class will address areas of commonality and difference between Enlightenment science and technology and modern science and technology, including lingering problems, as well as possible solutions suggested from past writings and experiences.



There will be many distinctive aspects of this class. One will be the intensive textual analysis of primary documents in class. Another will be the active participation of several guest speakers. There will also be a virtual visit to Special Collections, Olin Library, Wesleyan University.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST261Z
Prereq: None

SISP262 Cultural Studies of Health

Nothing is more fundamental to the human condition than our most basic right--the right to healthy life. Tragically, this right is inequitably distributed across human bodies and populations, especially along axes of race, gender, class, disability, age, and nationality. In fact, persons residing in the U.S. do not have a right to healthy life. Issues of health and illness are, quite literally, matters of life and death that are shaped by broader political and economic institutions in human societies. In neoliberal nation states like the U.S., the guardian of the right to live a healthy life is a highly bureaucratic and technological form of corporate medicine. Medicine comprises a network of social institutions and technoscientific practices that people have created and use to diagnose and heal our bodily and psychic ills. While the practice of medicine has produced dramatic improvements in life expectancy and quality of life for billions of people, most people on the planet do not have access to basic medical care. Who thrives, who gets sick, who dies, and why constitute core questions for social justice.

This course investigates the complex embroidery of biosocial and cultural processes that shape the unequal experiences and meanings of health. Cultural studies of health document the role of medicine as a great instrument of power that both generates and alleviates suffering. As more and more areas of social life and parts of bodies are falling under the control of medicine (a process called medicalization), we must ask, What are the dynamics and implications of medicalization for human societies and cultures? Drawing on provocative readings and media from diverse fields in sociology and cultural studies of science, technology, and medicine, this course will investigate these questions and more with an emphasis on the answers to them might contribute to social justice and improve the conditions necessary for human thriving.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Identical With: SOC259
Prereq: None

SISP263 Atomic Africa: A Technological History of the Cold War

"Atomic Power Programme Moves Ahead: NUCLEAR REACTOR FOR GHANA" In 1962 the Ghanaian Times proclaimed Ghana's atomic ambitions. Strikingly, it was only two years after the West African nation raised the international alarm against France's nuclear testing in the Sahara. In the midst of the global Cold War, African activists, politicians and scientists called for an end to nuclear imperialism and struggled for political and scientific sovereignty. It was an era marked by the struggle for decolonization but also by the promise of a new technological age. As African politicians planned for an Africa of the future, they faced intense political pressures from both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. They also formed partnerships with China and Cuba, reshaping the international lines of Cold War cooperation and the nature of "development." Over the course of the semester, we will examine Cold War stories across the continent including the mining of uranium, the international Congo Crisis, the development of African radiation experts, the use of radio by liberation forces in Angola, the emergence of an African Jet Age, and the building of the Freedom Railway in Tanzania. In addition, we will examine how students, workers, and scientists negotiated the currents of the Cold War and responded in creative ways to produce their own Atomic Africa.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST262
Prereq: None

SISP264 Social and Cultural Studies of Science

This course provides a survey of theories and methods attending the social and cultural study of science and technology. Students will consider the role of design (such as by engineers) and use (such as by consumers), and will learn historical perspectives that frame the question of whether scientific and technological innovation, and the social and cultural configurations involved, are really "new."
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Prereq: None

SISP265 Anthropology of Science

What are scientific facts? How do we know what we know? In this course, students will gain an introduction to thinking about science and technology as cultural practices shaped by power, politics, race, indigeneity, gender, and sexuality. Students will explore how anthropologists, long interested in how "culture" works, have recently turned their gaze toward critically examining the cultures of people in positions of technoscientific power, including nuclear scientists, Wall Street analysts, drone weapon designers, climate scientists, molecular biologists, and more. Students will also be trained in conducting ethnographic fieldwork on a group of experts in their own communities in order to ask questions about scientific rituals, truth-making, and distributions of power and privilege.



Students who received credit for SISP 265---Introduction to Science as Culture may NOT enroll in this course for credit
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Identical With: ANTH217
Prereq: None

SISP266 Eating Others: Histories and Cultures of Animal Edibility

For many people, animals form a significant and cherished part of their diet. Indeed, humans have used other animals as sources of nutrients for hundreds of thousands of years. What can these animal-based dietary practices tell us about humans and their relationships with other animals? Of course, these inter-species relationships have varied as radically across time and cultures as the dietary practices that have shaped them. To better understand some of these practices and the relationships they generate, this course will explore the following questions: How did animal-based food practices develop from pre-domestication to the contemporary era of industrialized animal agriculture? How have cultural categories of "edibility" developed in different cultural contexts? What is meat, and how does it differ from inedible flesh? How have gender, class, race, sexuality, and other categories of difference intersected with and shaped animal consumption practices in different times and contexts? How has animal consumption shaped and been shaped by animal ethics, philosophy, and scientific knowledge production? How has large-scale animal consumption contributed to the ecological crises of the Anthropocene, and how have these in turn affected animal consumption practices? What is the future of animal-based food?



This course will use ethnographies, historical and legal analyses, and philosophical inquiries to examine the histories and cultures of animal edibility. Specifically, it will focus on topics including human evolution, animal domestication, slaughter practices, industrialized animal agriculture, indigenous ecological ontologies, hunting, dairy and egg consumption, cannibalism, cultural conflicts over the edibility of specific species, and recent technological innovations that can produce animal products without animals.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ENVS
Identical With: ENVS279, ANTH279
Prereq: None

SISP267 Development in Question: Conservation in Africa

"Why not plant trees?" In 1977 Wangari Maathai started the Green Belt Movement, a popular environmental revolution, in Kenya. Then in the 1990s Nigeria Ken Saro-Wiwa fought for the rights of local communities against the multi-national oil industry. Like many African activists, scientists, and farmers, they placed African experiences at the center of environmental policy and conservation. Yet, popular images of the continent's environment in perpetual crisis blame African practices or disregard African efforts. Such depictions of "desertification" or "over grazing" have impacted international and governmental policy. Recent scholarship suggests that such common perceptions of the environment in Africa and conservation policy are misleading. This course will allow students to critically study the history of environmental management on the continent and the development of the idea of conservation. We will examine game park politics, the history of resource extraction, climate change, and other pressing environmental concerns. We will also study diverse African environmental perspectives from the guardians of sacred forests to activists such as Wangari Maathai and Ken Saro-Wiwa.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST267, ENVS267
Prereq: None

SISP276 Introduction to History: Science in the Making: Thinking Historically About Science

This course introduces students to a range of perspectives--drawn from history, sociology, anthropology, geography, media studies, and literary studies, among others--on how to write about the history of science. Throughout, the emphasis is on understanding the relationship between the histories of science we can tell and the materials that our histories draw upon, from publications and archival documents to oral histories, material culture, and film. In addition to reading academic literature, students will gain practical experience working with historical sources and conducting original research. They will also familiarize themselves with new digital tools for presenting historical materials by developing a course website that showcases their research projects.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST176
Prereq: None

SISP278 Medicine: An Artful Science or Scientific Art? Physician Writers Since 1900

In this seminar we will read physician authors since 1900 who have bridged the divide between the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. We will trace the evolution of research and practice over this period and contextualize these developments against broader social currents, appreciating that medical practice is a reflection of the best and worst of ourselves.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL278
Prereq: None

SISP281 Post-Kantian European Philosophy

In this study of 19th- and 20th-century philosophy in Europe (primarily France and Germany), special attention will be devoted to the interpretation of modern science, its significance for understanding the world as distinctly modern, and ourselves and the world as natural (or as transcending nature). Related topics include the scope and limits of reason, the role of subjectivity in the constitution of meaning, the place of ethics and politics in a science-centered culture, and the problems of comprehending historical change. Philosophers to be read include Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Weber, Marcuse, Habermas, and Foucault. The course is designed to introduce students to a very difficult but widely influential philosophical tradition and will emphasize close reading and comparative interpretation and assessment of texts and reasoning. This course meets the Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory Certificate's requirement in philosophical origins of theory.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-PHIL
Identical With: PHIL258
Prereq: None

SISP282 Religion and the Scientific Imagination

Where do we get the idea that science and religion are opposed to one another? What did Darwin do to classic proofs of the existence of God and how have those proofs bounced back? What sort of evidence do theologians marshal in support of their hypotheses, and what sort of spiritualities do scientists generate in support of theirs? What do neuroscientists think they're finding when they measure the neural activity of meditating monks? What are the "new atheists" so annoyed about? How do cosmologists talk about the origins of the world, and how do climate scientists talk about its end? In this class we will explore the many ways "religion" and "science" have interacted, conflicted, collided, and combined with one another--in an effort to move beyond the frankly boring "debates" between them.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI282
Prereq: None

SISP283 What Is Rationality?

What does it mean to be rational? Although this question has traditionally been the province of philosophy, reference to reason and rationality is also pervasive in the modern social and behavioral sciences. Humans are rational creatures--or, if they are not in practice, they should be. This course takes an expansive view of rationality and its history, tracing how the concept has changed over time, and critically examining its significance in the sciences and broader culture today. From the role of reason in human flourishing and civic discourse in the ancient world, to early modern conceptions of logic as "the art of thinking," to Cold War attempts to build machines that might reason more reliably than frail humans, this exploration of reasoning and rationality explores several interlocking themes: the relationship between reason and other facets of the mind, especially emotion; conceptions of reason as an evaluative vs. a calculating faculty; the role of reason in human judgment; the relationship between rationality and rules; the relationship between choosing rationally and choosing ethically; and the fraught history of attempts to formulate universally valid principles of rationality.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST283, PHIL154
Prereq: None

SISP284 Chinese Eco-Civilization: History, Experience, and Myths

The course traces the historical roots of the ideas of eco-civilization, a policy platform that appeared in the twenty-first century by examining how Chinese agrarian civilizations and their nomadic neighbors transformed the bio-physical environment over the course of 3,000 years of history.



We will draw on translations of Chinese literary texts including poetry, classical prose, and novels to explore the relationship between power and social inequities as we explore the everyday politics of agrarian civilizations through China's transformation from feudal ages to the modern period. How did Confucian, Legalist, Buddhist, and Daoist teachings alter the dynamics of production and consumption? To what extent did traditional Chinese philosophies promote the ethos of ecojustice? Did competing regimes/dynasties create a sustainable political and economic system? Did bureaucrats improve the well-being of the population and maintain the balance of the ecosystem? Or did they deplete natural resources to meet their short-term needs?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST223, CEAS223, ENVS223
Prereq: None

SISP285 China as Scientific Powerhouse

Science, technology, and medicine played an integral role in the China's transition to modernity and inspired dramatic economic, social, and political transformations. As scholars of modern China developed a keen interest in transnational histories and comparative methodologies, they have paid closer attention to the histories of science, technology, and medicine. This course introduces students to this emerging field of study. It examines broad philosophical questions that motivate the research in history of those areas. We will learn to explore science, technology, and medicine in China on "its own terms" by understanding how the unique political and social challenges of modern China shaped Chinese science.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST386, CEAS222
Prereq: None

SISP286 Philosophy of Mind

This class is a philosophical investigation into the nature of the mind. We will explore such questions such: What kinds of beings are capable of having mental states? Can non-human animals or computers think and feel? What is it to be conscious, and can the subjective, first-personal experience of consciousness be adequately captured by a scientific theory? How do our minds represent the world? By what mechanism do our thoughts, feelings, and desires get linked up to the things around us? We will ask these questions with the goal of shedding light on our nature as thinking, feeling beings, and on the relation of our inner lives to the physical world.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-PHIL
Identical With: PHIL286
Prereq: None

SISP287 Science in Modernity and After: 20th-Century Science and Technology

The 20th century was a time of dramatic achievements in science, from nuclear physics to space exploration to gene sequencing. It also saw the emergence of many of the technologies that underpin our world today: atomic weapons, electronic digital computers, synthetic fertilizers, and high-yield crop varieties, to name a few examples. This course surveys these developments, focusing not only on the histories of specific ideas and techniques, but more broadly exploring the complex relationship between science and technology; the relationship between science, the military, and state power; the changing cultural and political influence of scientists and engineers; the institutions and places where science and innovation gets done; the globalization of science and technology; and the emergence of critiques of science and technology.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-GOVT
Identical With: HIST287
Prereq: None

SISP293 Animal Law and Policy

This course will provide an overview of law and public policy as they apply to non-human animals. The course will explore the historical and philosophical treatment of animals; discuss how such treatment impacts the way judges, policymakers, lawyers, legal scholars, and lay people see, speak about, and use animals; survey current animal protection laws and regulations, including overlap with such policy issues as food and agriculture, climate change, and biodiversity protection; consider recent political and legal campaigns to reform animal protection laws; examine the concept of "standing" and the problems of litigating on behalf of animals; interrogate the current classification of animals as "property" and the impacts of that classification; and debate the carceral turn in animal legal advocacy.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-PHIL
Identical With: PHIL283, ENVS284
Prereq: None

SISP294 Saving Animals: The Politics of Rescue, Captivity, and Care

This course examines the major issues related to captive animal care and rescue across a wide variety of contexts, especially the current global extinction crisis, with specific attention to the ethical, political, and social dimensions of human-animal interactions. Discussions, films, readings, and an independent research project will introduce students to key concepts related to animal care and rescue. Specifically, the course will focus on topics including the ethical dilemmas of care, the politics of extinction and conservation, animal trafficking, wildlife rehabilitation efforts, wildlife refuges, captive animal sanctuaries, and zoos.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: NSM-ENVS
Identical With: ENVS295
Prereq: None

SISP296 Philosophy of Psychology

How does the mind work? So-called "computationalists" think that the mind (and the brain) works as a computer, which first forms and manipulates symbols (usually called "mental representations") according to rules, and then issues "commands" to guide behavior. On the other hand, the "5E" (Ecological, Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended) approach rejects the computer analogy. 5E theorists insist that minds, and minded organisms more generally, cannot be understood in isolation from their environment. Cognition doesn't happen "in a vacuum," and it isn't separable from action. As a consequence, the mind can extend beyond the boundaries of our skull and even of our whole body. This course is devoted to comparing and contrasting the computationalist and the 5E approaches to cognition. We will examine similarities and differences, assumptions and commitments with respect to core debates at the interface of philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science such as, for instance, the nature of visual perception.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-PHIL
Identical With: PHIL296
Prereq: None

SISP299 Medicine and Healing in the Black Atlantic

This course examines the ways in which Black people have conceived of health, healing, and the body since 1500. Readings, lectures, and documentary films will focus on historical case studies in Western Africa, South America, the Caribbean, and North America. We will cover topics such as herbal and environmental medicine; the intersections of religion and healing; gendered medical knowledge and labor; medical racism and exploitation; health disparities; and health activism. To help us situate these topics in the lived experiences of historical actors, we will use a variety of primary sources, including narratives of formerly enslaved people, court cases, correspondence, interviews, and print culture. The goal of this course is not simply to show how Black people have used healing practices to endure racism, slavery, imperialism, and racial capitalism: We will also emphasize how medicine and healing have been sources of joy, conflict, knowledge production, and entrepreneurship within Black communities. Lastly, we will consider the present and future of Black health and think about what it would take to make medicine and health care for all.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AFAM
Identical With: AFAM299
Prereq: None

SISP300 Black Phoenix Rising: Death and Resurrection of Black Lives

The Black Lives Matter Movement has renewed our collective need to theorize the value of black lives within a deluge of death and disappearance in black communities. This movement is part of a deep transnational tradition in black radical praxis that aims to transform scholarly, activist, and public discourse and public policies concerning the systemic and epistemic effects of institutional racisms and the prospects for antiracist futures. How might we envision a black radical praxis that simultaneously recognizes the vitality of black lives and challenges the cultural ideas and social practices that generate and justify black people's death and suffering? This seminar traces a genealogy of black radical praxis that interrogates the necropolitics of race and positions this system of power against the prospect of thriving black people. In doing so, the course erects an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that features scholarship in critical race science studies, intersectionality, and transnational cultural studies as they inform how a black radical praxis can contribute to the uprising and raising up of black communities.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: AFAM300
Prereq: None

SISP301 Unsettling Times: Clocks for Ghosts, Monsters, and Aliens

Tracking the rhythms, cycles, and ruptures of collective life is essential for studies of sociocultural and environmental dynamics. Yet such studies are mostly undertaken with the unquestioned assumption that Western apparatuses of time reckoning and historical periodization can be applied as universal and stable frames of reference for all kinds of phenomena. Temporal units of years, months, days, minutes are used, rendering insensible relations that do not align with such metrics. These simplifying moves limit our capacity to understand continuity and change, and places countless lives and landscapes at great risk.



This seminar draws from the social and natural sciences, humanities, and arts to unsettle these simplifications. Through readings and audio/video screenings, we will consider how apparatuses for time keeping (or clocks, broadly defined) become power tools, creating haunted, monstrous, and alienated subjects. Through exercises and field walks throughout the semester, students are invited to notice, record, and engage with multiple temporalities of more-than-human worlds. The final project will involve research and design of a speculative clock for futures otherwise.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Identical With: IDEA301
Prereq: None

SISP302 Reproductive Politics and the Family in Africa

This course will introduce students to broad discourses and issues related to reproduction and the family in modern Africa. We will study maternal and sexual health and technologies of reproduction, but for us reproduction will be an object of historical inquiry. One of the driving questions for this course will be how reproduction has been given meaning socially. How have African societies understood abortion, infanticide, or other medical means of controlling fertility and childbirth? What has been the relationship between the family and the state? We will also examine ideas about sexuality and love, changing notions of parenthood, childhood health, and what constitutes an ideal family. Finally, we will interrogate how these ideas influenced health policy and political ideologies which, in turn, changed conceptions of motherhood, fatherhood, and the family.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST302, FGSS303
Prereq: None

SISP303 The Race Makers: How the Enlightenment Invented the Most Dangerous Idea in History

The concept of race was first "invented" during the 18th century by anatomists, natural historians, and, ultimately, the century's classifiers. While this seminar is constructed as something of an intellectual history seminar, it will also delve into the lives and (often messy) psychologies of several of the people who helped develop the idea of race during the eighteenth century. We will become familiar with a French king and the signatory of the Code Noir (Louis XIV), the Swedish inventor of the term Homo sapiens (Linnaeus), the theorist of human degeneration from a white prototype (Buffon), the most famous philosopher of the eighteenth century (Voltaire), the theorist of human stage theory (Robertson), a skull-measuring naturalist (Blumenbach), and an American president, in Thomas Jefferson. The class will also examine 16 manuscripts that were submitted to a contest on the source of "blackness" organized by the Bordeaux Royal Academy of Sciences in 1739. The goal of this course is to provide students with an understanding of the origins of race that will inform their reactions to this question as both a historical concept, and an ongoing problem that affects all of us in the present.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RLAN
Identical With: FREN301
Prereq: None

SISP304 Infinity and the Mathematization of Nature: Early Modern Perspectives

The "mathematization of nature" is a hallmark of the so-called "scientific revolution" in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. By privileging quantitative methods for measuring and explaining natural phenomena, thinkers broke with the largely "qualitative" forms of explanation typical of the Aristotelian tradition. Especially with the development of new mathematical methods--notably, advances in algebra, analytical geometry, and the development of infinitesimal calculus--the scope and explanatory power of natural philosophy was considerably extended. At the same time, however, new puzzles arose about how the pristine models of abstract mathematics could apply to the messy reality of concrete nature. This question was especially pressing in connection with new mathematics' exploitation the notion of infinity: infinite series, infinite extensions, infinitesimally small quantities, and even infinities greater than other infinities. Should we take the successful application of such infinitary mathematics to natural phenomena to imply that nature itself harbors an infinity of infinities? And how must we reconceive the cognitive powers of the human mind to make room for the fact that infinity has ceased to signify the unknowable as such and has instead become a primary tool for producing scientific knowledge?



In this seminar, we will examine some of the most prominent Early Modern applications of infinitary mathematical methods in the study of natural phenomena as well as central debates about what sense, if any, can be made of these procedures and their apparent success.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL300, PHIL304
Prereq: None

SISP305 Pantheologies: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, World

Pantheism teaches that the world itself is divine. The idea seems simple enough, yet it has suffered extraordinary ridicule at the hands of western philosophers and theologians, who have considered "matter" to be lifeless, dark, and feminine (which is to say, as different as possible from "God.") This course will explore this generalized panic over pantheism--in particular, the anxieties it encodes over gender, race, nationality, and class, and the contribution such anxieties have made to an unequally distributed attack on the "environment."



Seeking an alternative to our raced and gendered ecocidal metaphysic, the course then turns to contemporary pantheologies. To what extent are recent theories of cosmology, complexity, and materiality setting forth subtle pantheisms? What are the feminist, anti-racist, and ecological stakes of these theories? Properly conceived, what is pantheism; is it ultimately distinguishable from atheism; and what use are any of these platforms in developing an ethic and politic of environmental justice?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI305, FGSS304
Prereq: None

SISP307 The Economy of Nature and Nations

On many of the key environmental problems of the 21st century, from climate change to biodiversity conservation, the perspectives of ecology and economics often seem poles apart. Ecology is typically associated with a skeptical stance toward economic growth and human intervention in the environment, while economics focuses on understanding (and often, celebrating) human activities of production, consumption, and growth. At the same time, ecology and economics share a common etymology: both words spring from the Greek oikos, or household. They also share much common history. This course thus explores the parallel histories of economics and ecology from the 18th century to the present, focusing on changing conceptions of the oikos over this period, from cameralism's vision of the household as a princely estate or kingdom, continuing through the emergence of ideas about national or imperial economic development, and culminating in the dominant 20th-century recasting of economics as being centrally concerned with problems of resource allocation. Simultaneously, the course explores connections between changes in economics and the emergence of ecological science over this period, from Enlightenment natural history and early musings on the "economy of nature," to the design of markets for carbon credits today.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST307, ENVS307
Prereq: None

SISP309 Multispecies Worldbuilding: The Chestnut Project

How do forests think (Kohn)? Do rocks listen (Povinelli)? Can insects speak (Mitchell)? How do fungi make history (Tsing)? Should trees have rights (Stone)? These are some of the most exciting questions percolating in the humanities, arts, and social/natural sciences today. They disrupt Western colonial notions of what it means to be human, while also calling for methods, theories, and apparatuses that might imagine and build more livable multispecies worlds.



This course has two goals: (1) introduce students to key texts on more-than-human, more-than-Western ontologies, particularly from the fields of multispecies/cyborg anthropology, science and technology studies, biology, and environmental humanities; (2) engage students in transdisciplinary research on the American chestnut (Castanea dentata), a tree species once known as the "queen of forests" from the Appalachian mountains to the Mississippi river until fungi wiped them out in the early twentieth century. This course will lay the groundwork for students to participate in current debates and projects to restore a transgenic version of the American chestnut in the eastern United States within the next five years.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM309
Prereq: None

SISP312 Technologies of Care

In this seminar students will explore how Feminist STS has conceived of caring technologies and relations. Starting with Maria Puig de la Bellacasa's (2011) call for STS scholars to consider ethical and political obligations to care along more-than-human networks, students will read recent work on compulsions to express care and solidarity with humans and nonhumans. How does thinking about sociotechnical assemblages ask us to consider how we are already entangled in webs of care with material and immaterial forms? What does it mean in practice to work toward good relations as humans with technologies, within environments, and with nonhumans? Students will also consider the centrality of labor to how we understand caring relations. How do transnational circuits of care become encoded into the daily functions of global capitalism? How might demands for care enact their own forms of violence, hindering continuing struggles against personal and structural oppression? This seminar will be set up as a research incubator, and students will have the opportunity to produce and share original research projects on care labor and technology, from topics including computer therapists, feminist health technologies, nursing robots, the global commercial surrogacy industry, sex companion robots, eldercare digital pets, and other contemporary expressions of care labor mediated through technology.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Prereq: None

SISP313 Extinction/Rebellion: Christianity and the Climate Crisis

Although this course is not devoted specifically to the subject of "XR"--the decentralized environmental activist organization and global campaign of civil disobedience--it borrows the movement's self-designation as a point of departure for an exploration of the historical, conceptual, and geopolitical significance of Christianity to the "Anthropocene." How is Christianity entangled among the "historical roots of our ecologic crisis"? What is "eco-theology"? How do ancient narratives of creation and traditional Christian teachings regarding the origin of humankind continue to shape modern, scientific, and popular assumptions about the natural world and our place in it? What does the book of Genesis have to say about commercial agriculture, ethical veganism, and the relation of divinity with the more-than-human, animal-vegetal-mineral web of life? Whence this "planet of slums" and whither Paradise or the Promised Land? Which elements of the Christian imagination enabled colonization of the New World, indigenous displacement and genocide, the transatlantic slave trade, and capitalist globalization? Is another world still possible, and could Christian thought and practice play a pivotal part in actualizing an alternative planetarity today? We will pursue these questions together by way of readings in theology, philosophy, critical science studies, ecology, geography, political economy, Black feminism, queer theory, and Indigenous studies. Ultimately, the course analyzes aspects of Christianity's intimate involvement in the history of climate change and considers how critical attention to this history may contribute to collective acts of rebellion against mass extinction.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI303, ENVS302
Prereq: None

SISP314 History of Science, Medicine, and Technology in the Islamicate World

A survey of major turning points, debates, and socio-political context of the history of science, medicine, and technology in the Islamicate World. The course will provide samples from the contributions of the Islamicate world to the following scientific fields: astronomy, mathematics, geography, cartography, medicine, optics, and mechanics. In addition, the course will probe into the relationship between scientific production and other fields of knowledge such as religion, occult sciences, art, and Sufism.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST316
Prereq: None

SISP315 The Health of Communities

Our focus will be on understanding the role of social factors (e.g., income, work environment, social cohesion, food, transportation systems) in determining the health risks of individuals; considering the efficacy, appropriateness, and ethical ramifications of various public health interventions; and learning about the contemporary community health center model of care in response to the needs of vulnerable populations. In this overview, we explore the history of social medicine, the importance of language in public health efforts to conceptualize and frame health concerns, the complexity of any categorization of persons in discussions of health and illness, ethical issues related to the generation and utilization of community-based research, the role of place and the importance of administrative and cultural boundaries in the variability of health risk, and the idea of just health care. Enrolled students serve as research assistants to preceptors at Middletown's Community Health Center (CHC) & Moses Weitzman Institute.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.25
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SOC
Identical With: CSPL314, SOC315
Prereq: None

SISP317 Sexuality, Gender, and Science

This course will consider how the concepts of gender and sexuality have been treated in scientific fields, focusing primarily on the 19th and 20th centuries. We will examine the history of ideas about gender and sexuality as reflected in the development of sexology, theories of homosexuality, psychology, and endocrinology. We will also discuss contraceptive and reproductive technologies, the inclusion of women in clinical trials, women in scientific professions, and recent studies that use algorithmic predictions of sex or sexual orientation. Readings may include selections from Sigmund Freud, Siobhan Somerville, Emily Martin, Sarah Igo, Laura Briggs, Ronald Bayer, Sandra Morgen, David Serlin, Allan Bérubé, Dorothy Roberts, Johanna Schoen, Jennifer Terry, Carolyn Herbst Lewis, Steven Epstein, Riley Snorton, Rebecca Jordan-Young, Mar Hicks, and Safiya Noble.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Identical With: FGSS317
Prereq: None

SISP318 Critical Global Health

What does it mean to approach global health as not an applied science but an ethnographic object? This course will explore this question by bringing critical, social science perspectives to bear on global health issues and interventions. This course covers three areas of scholarship. First, we will examine the processes by which social inequalities produce patterns of health and disease in globalizing contexts. This will be followed by an interrogation of the term "global health," in which we will trace its emergence as a discourse and enterprise and unpack its contested meanings. While some view global health as a clinical practice, others conceptualize it as a business, security concern, charitable duty, or human right; yet another camp probes the term's ideological construction. We will consider how such vantage points are underpinned by cultural assumptions and ethical agendas that, in turn, can determine how, and to whom, care is delivered. As a third area of inquiry, we will investigate the implications and unintended effects of doing global health by probing such questions as, When are good intentions not good enough? How useful is biomedicine for alleviating locally defined problems? Under what conditions does global health exacerbate the social inequalities it seeks to overcome?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: ANTH316
Prereq: None

SISP319 Toxic Sovereignties: Life after Environmental Collapse

What politics emerge at the borders of life and nonlife? Representations of the human species as being on the brink of environmental collapse have become increasingly common, as the specters of climate change and cataclysmic environmental disaster seem to bear down ever more heavily upon us. At the same time, the increasing entanglement of human bodies with various forms of chemical and otherwise man-made pollutants presage a slightly different future, one in which, if the human species does not outright disappear, it will be fundamentally transformed. This course explores different forms of political and social action that have emerged in response to these seemingly epochal shifts with a particular emphasis on the ever-mutating concept of sovereignty. Our goal is to explore the ways in which the shifting borders between human life and its artificially produced absence can serve as productive sites of new political forms and transformations of older ones, even as they also generate tremendous social and cultural anxiety.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: ANTH319
Prereq: None

SISP321 BioFeminisms: Science, Matter, and Agency

This course rethinks feminism's relationship to nature, the body, and biological matter in light of new considerations of ontology in science studies, cultural studies, and feminist thought. We will read contemporary treatments of science, of Darwin and evolutionary theory, of neurobiology and epigenetics, and other fields and disciplines that consider biological matter, and think about them in feminist and queer frameworks. Readings will include "new materialists" alongside other works on the "new biology" and the "new sciences," and we will also revisit some second- and third-wave feminism. The course raises issues that challenge traditional boundaries of the body and self, conventional ideas of agency, and dualisms of mind/body. Readings include works by Donna Haraway, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Elizabeth Grosz, Karen Barad, Vicki Kirby, and Elizabeth Wilson, among others.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-FGSS
Identical With: FGSS321
Prereq: None

SISP322 Methods and Frameworks for Understanding and Overcoming Health Disparities

In recent years especially, the need for both interdisciplinary and mixed approaches to inquiries in public health research has become apparent in health promotion, policy formation and evaluation, service needs assessment, the social determinants of health, and program evaluation and outcomes measurement more generally. This course is intended to provide an overview of methodologies and frameworks used to examine and overcome disparities in health through research. A range of quantitative and qualitative research designs and methods will be introduced, and strategies to address challenges in real world program settings will be emphasized. This course will discuss approaches commonly used in public health and health services research, such as mixed methods, implementation science, community-based participatory research, and their strengths and limitations. Additionally, this course will examine how critical race theory and intersectionality, and additional theories and frameworks from ethnic studies, psychology, and sociology, can further advance public health's capacity and effectiveness in promoting health equity. The course will incorporate examples of applied research and opportunities to learn from the direct experiences of the instructor. There will be a mixture of discussion and lecture depending on the topic, with student participation and questions strongly encouraged. Preference will be given to students who have taken SOC/SISP 315 Health of Communities or SISP 262/SOC 259 Cultural Studies of Health.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ALLB
Identical With: CSPL322
Prereq: None

SISP324 Politics of Reproduction

This course will examine the landscape of fertility through the lenses of pregnancy, fetal and embryonic personhood, genetic testing, surrogacy, adoption, abortion, assisted reproductive technology, and reproductive justice. We will consider how the pregnant and in/fertile body is politicized and enmeshed in transnational circuits of labor and capital. We will consider these themes by bringing together perspectives in medical anthropology, science and technology studies, sociology of medicine, disability studies, gender studies, Black studies, Latinx studies, Indigenous studies, and environmental studies.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-ANTH
Identical With: ANTH324
Prereq: None

SISP325 TechnoPrisons: Corrections, Technology, and Society

The United States currently incarcerates more of its citizens than any other nation, and most of them are members of disadvantaged social groups. How does our government practically accomplish mass incarceration? This first-year seminar (FYS) examines prisons as technologies and the role that specific technologies play in the U.S. prison system. To say that prisons are technologies means that prisons operate as an architectural system that is designed to hold people captive within enclosed social spaces. At the same time, prisons are the location for multiple kinds of technological systems including surveillance systems, biomedical technologies, classification and administrative technologies, and military technologies. This seminar introduces basic concepts within science and technology studies (STS), criminology, and sociology to investigate how prison happens.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Prereq: None

SISP327 Colonizing Space: Exploration, Extraction, and Inhabitation

Under its "Artemis Mission," NASA plans to put "the first woman and first person of color" on the Moon to build a permanent outpost. This lunar base will allow NASA to mine the Moon, extract precious metals from asteroids, and eventually colonize Mars--hopefully before China and Russia do the same. Thanks to recent legislation, NASA will rely throughout this mission on the rocket and extractive technologies of private corporations like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Moon Express, and Deep Space Industries, whose CEOs proclaim they are saving the human race by expanding it into space. It will also rely on the backing of the newly-created sixth branch of the U.S. military: the Space Force.



This course will track the ideological and colonial history of the Apollo era before approaching the scientific, corporate, and legislative landscape of "NewSpace." It will explore the mythological underpinnings, narrative imaginings, and theological justifications for the unfettered exploitation and inhabitation of the Earth and its cosmic neighbors. Finally, it will ask whether an ethically and ecologically sustainable space program is possible.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI317, ENVS317
Prereq: None

SISP327F Colonizing Space: Exploration, Extraction, and Inhabitation (FYS)

Under its "Artemis Mission," NASA plans to put "the first woman and first person of color" on the Moon to build a permanent outpost. This lunar base will allow NASA to mine the Moon, extract precious metals from asteroids, and eventually colonize Mars--hopefully before China and Russia do the same. Thanks to recent legislation, NASA will rely throughout this mission on the rocket and extractive technologies of private corporations like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Moon Express, and Deep Space Industries, whose CEOs proclaim they are saving the human race by expanding it into space. It will also rely on the backing of the newly-created sixth branch of the U.S. military: the Space Force.



This course will track the ideological and colonial history of the Apollo era before approaching the scientific, corporate, and legislative landscape of "NewSpace." It will explore the mythological underpinnings, narrative imaginings, and theological justifications for the unfettered exploitation and inhabitation of the Earth and its cosmic neighbors. Finally, it will ask whether an ethically and ecologically sustainable space program is possible.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI317F, ENVS317F
Prereq: None

SISP329 Waiting: Bodies, Time, Necropolitics

This interdisciplinary course draws from social theory, gender studies, medical anthropology, disability studies and science studies to address the social stratification of time in corporeal terms. Many theorists have described the 21st century as marked by acceleration; this course addresses its counterpoint: the slow, interminable wait, the being made-to-wait, and the socially structured scenes and experiences of waiting. How can we understanding waiting in the city emergency room for the mentally ill immigrant? What is it in the gender transition clinic? The polluted, toxic neighborhood? The refugee camp? We will begin by surveying multiple frameworks through which we can theorize time and its suspension. We will then focus on experiences of waiting in intersectional terms, that is, in relation to gender and sexuality, race, class, and dis/ability. We will explore how practices that produce life, health, and well-being (biopolitics) can also be necropolitical, when attention, care, or action is given to some, but prolonged or suspended for others. Readings will include works on necropolitical theory (Georigo Agamben, Achille Mbembe), medical and state subordination and abandonment (Javier Auyero, Joao Biehl), and queer and crip time (Lee Edleman, Elizabeth Freeman, Alison Kafer). We will explore a wide range of experiences of waiting, from those related to cancer diagnosis (Sarah Jain), gender assignment surgery (Alexandre Baril), to environmental toxicity (Michelle Murphy) and asylum seeking (Jennifer Bagelman).
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-FGSS
Identical With: FGSS329
Prereq: None

SISP331 Decolonizing Ecocinema: Aesthetics and Politics of Disaster

This seminar will focus on twelve experimental documentary films as critical texts that situate, theorize, and decolonize representations of disaster. What the films share is an insistence that struggles for social and environmental justice are deeply entangled and thus require "new figures and tactics" (Povinelli). We will consider how representation is composed from choices made at two levels: aesthetic forms and specialized languages articulated through the camera and editing software; and political calls for accountability and embodied, embedded, inherited praxis. We will unpack how the medium of film alters and stylizes engagements between subjects positioned behind, in front of, prior to, and after the camera frames, records, and plays back images and sounds.



The films will take us to more-than-human worlds, questioning how we engage with species and landscapes, history and technology, power and language. A partial list of characters includes wild bees in Hawaii (Swarm Season, Christman 2019); steel mines in Mongolia (Behemoth, Liang 2015); colonial waters in Tierra del Fuego (Pearl Button, Guzman 2015); shepherds in Montana (Sweetgrass, Barbash and Castaing-Taylor 2010); farmers in Thailand (Agrarian Utopia, Raksasad 2009); and stray cats in Istanbul (Kedi, Torun 2016). As companions to the films, we will read essays from post/decolonial media/science studies, visual anthropology, and environmental humanities.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Prereq: None

SISP337 Advanced Research Methods in Science Studies

This course exposes students to qualitative research methods in science and technology studies. Methodology describes a process for conceptualizing, collecting, and organizing evidence. Part of this new course will be a survey of methodological traditions in science and technology studies and associated fields (sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, feminist and critical race studies, performance and design studies, philosophy and history of science) that guide the collection and interpretation of evidence about scientific knowledge and practices, the relationships between users and technologies, and broader scientific institutions and technical infrastructures. Specific methodologies include ethnography, archival and discourse analysis, social worlds analysis, comparative historical and genealogical analysis, abductive analysis, and visual culture and media analysis. The other main part of the course will culminate in presentation-ready small-scale individual and group research projects utilizing qualitative research methods.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Prereq: None

SISP339 Catching Glimpses: Perceiving Infinitesimals in the Scientific Revolution

The rise of mathematical natural science in the early modern period marked the dissolution of objective reality as it had previously been known. Since Aristotle, perceptible objects had been understood to be enduring substances whose identities were inscribed in their very being and which retained these identities through change. The mechanistic worldview of the 17th and 18th centuries exploded this stable order into a telescoping multiplicity of material systems, from the infinitesimally small to the infinitely large. Rather than encountering a world of enduring and identifiable substances--animals, vegetables, and minerals; people and artifacts--the perceiver was instead confronted with fleeting constellations of homogeneous matter in a perpetual flux, no sooner glimpsed than gone. This metaphysical picture of infinitary flux was complemented by a new branch of mathematics, the infinitesimal calculus, which proved immensely successful both in uncovering new theorems and in modeling empirical phenomena.



Both the metaphysics and the mathematics of the new science were, however, rife with paradox. If material objects not only harbor a microscopic substructure but are, in fact, divisible without end, then we are faced with pluralities of pluralities without any underlying unities--parts of parts of parts...and not a whole among them. Conceptual instability afflicted the infinitesimals used in calculus, as well. In some contexts they were treated as very small but non-zero quantities, in others as strictly zero--provoking one critic to call them "ghosts of departed quantities."



In conjunction with the CHUM theme "Ephemera," this class will study the philosophical turbulence induced by the new science--in particular, by the mechanical philosophy and infinitesimal calculus. We will pay special attention to its consequences for the philosophy of perception. Aristotle compared perceptible objects to signet rings impressing their distinctive forms on the receptive wax of the human sensorium. But if there are no enduring substances or determinate forms, how are we to understand our perceptual relation to the world? How must perceptual experience be reconceived so as to accommodate the fleetingness and flux of material phenomena? And how is it that, though we are awash in ephemera, we nevertheless enjoy an (illusory?) impression of endurance and stability?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM339, COL351, GRST249, PHIL302
Prereq: None

SISP340 Human Nature

The idea of "human nature" plays an important role in all sorts of explanations, but what does it mean? What is it to be a human? Are we just rational animals? Do some humans have different natures than others? Is it possible for us to change our nature or is it innate? Are we products of nature, nurture, or some combination? Are humans fundamentally evil or good? By examining philosophical, historical, religious, theoretical, and scientific literatures, this course will examine various answers to these questions.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-PHIL
Identical With: PHIL340
Prereq: None

SISP342 Queer Robotics: Cyborgs in Science Fiction & Anthropology

What do representations of robots and cyborgs in popular film, sci-fi literature, and cultural anthropology tell us about gender, sexuality, race, and what it means to be "human"? In this class we will use critical race studies, queer and feminist theory, disability studies, and science and technology studies (STS) to analyze representations of "cyborg" bodies in speculative fiction and ethnography. Our case examples explore the politics of the body through narratives of military research, artificial intelligence, sex work, urbanism and segregation, biotech research, prosthetics and athleticism, new reproductive technologies, and more. We will engage with poetry, film, visual art, and speculative fiction to explore how bodies are dreamed, crafted, and represented.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Identical With: FGSS342
Prereq: None

SISP343 Imitations of Life: Experimental Bodies at the Interface of Science and Culture

This seminar will examine scientific and cultural practices of corporeal simulation, or, practices of bodily substitution, imitation, and re/modeling. Topics examined will include: reproductive surrogacy; gender reassignment surgeries; experimental subject protocols; prosthetic enhancements; xenotransplantation; biometrics and alternative forms of bodily imaging; the use of nonhuman animals as human proxies; the rise of personalized medicine, and more. Students will engage with a wide range of case studies and theoretical materials from interdisciplinary perspectives. Special attention will be paid to the relationship between scientific discourses of "universality" and "particularity," where socio-cultural forms of difference (e.g., race, gender, disability, etc.) are at once ignored and exacerbated. While most of the material addressed in the class will relate to recent phenomena, we will also be attentive to relevant histories of corporeal differentiation and reimaging.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM, SBS-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM343, FGSS343
Prereq: None

SISP349 Environmental Justice and Sustainability

The US Environmental Protection Agency defines environmental justice as "the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies." Although we still have a long way to go in achieving this goal, over the last fifty years a vibrant environmental justice movement of racially-diverse activists and international coalitions has struggled to create a more equitable and sustainable world. Specifically, they have worked to expose and end the vastly disproportionate impacts of environmental degradation, climate change, air and water pollution, waste disposal, draught, wild fires, and famine on Black communities, Indigenous communities, and other communities of color around the globe. In this course, students will examine the environmental justice movement, its historical development, its strategies and tactics, and the many contemporary environmental harms it strives to eliminate. Discussions, films, readings, and an independent research project will introduce students to topics including environmental racism, environmental health, (un)natural disasters, climate refugees, agricultural and industrial pollution, international waste export, seed imperialism, food sovereignty, water contamination, reproductive justice, environmental reparations, the extinction crisis, and just forms of sustainability.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: NSM-ENVS
Identical With: ENVS350
Prereq: ENVS197 OR EES199

SISP349Z Environmental Justice and Sustainability

The United States Environmental Protection Agency defines environmental justice as "the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies." Although we still have a long way to go in achieving this goal, over the last fifty years a vibrant environmental justice movement of racially diverse activists and international coalitions has struggled to create a more equitable and sustainable world. Specifically, they have worked to expose and end the vastly disproportionate impacts of environmental degradation, climate change, air and water pollution, waste disposal, drought, wildfires, and famine on Black communities, Indigenous communities, and other communities of color around the globe.



In this course, students will examine the environmental justice movement, its historical development, its strategies and tactics, and the many contemporary environmental harms it strives to eliminate. Following a four-day-per-week Summer Session immersion schedule, daily readings and discussions, weekly films, and an independent research project will introduce students to topics including environmental racism, environmental health, (un)natural disasters, climate refugees, agricultural and industrial pollution, international waste export, seed imperialism, food sovereignty, water contamination, reproductive justice, environmental reparations, the extinction crisis, and just forms of sustainability.



Note: This course is being offered as a blend of synchronous class meetings and asynchronous work involving small group discussions.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: NSM-ENVS
Identical With: ENVS350Z
Prereq: None

SISP350 Sociology of Knowledge

This course provides an in-depth exploration of the sociology of knowledge, a specialized field of sociology that investigates how social structures shape the production of knowledge and how knowledge, in turn, shapes society. The term knowledge must be understood broadly, encompassing multiple forms of human knowledge production, including but not limited to scientific knowledge, cultural products, and capitalistic ideologies. Knowledge is a shapeshifting social thing that takes on heterogenous forms, guises, and tongues. Sometimes knowledge wears the face of truth; other times, it dawns the cloak of lies. Knowledge has both ethereal and material forms and yet always wears the mark of its producers. Every piece of knowledge carries the imprint of the creatures and social forces that produced it--each is a tiny node in the transmission of culture and the reproduction of power. To map power-knowledge relationships, the sociology of knowledge grounds an analysis of knowledge in terms of social structures, the sets of patterned practices that define and give meaning to social life at individual, communal, and institutional levels. In the broadest sense, the sociology of knowledge is concerned with the relationship between the (epistemic) content and the social context of knowledge. How was knowledge produced and with what institutional resources? Who produced knowledge and why did they produce it? Who benefits from the circulation of knowledge? What effects in the world does knowledge engender? Our basic course objectives are to a) introduce sociology of knowledge as a form of critical inquiry, b) describe and distinguish the approaches and research methods associated with the sociology of knowledge, and c) learn how to analyze knowledge and knowledge-making practices in their social context using these methods.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Identical With: SOC350, EDST350
Prereq: None

SISP352 Media Revolutions: Color Television and the Humanities in the 1960s and 1970s

This course visits some of the groundbreaking TV series that presented humanities and sciences to global mass audiences in the 1960s and 1970s. Television emerged as a powerful cultural presence and with remarkable speed. From the late 1960s, the British Broadcasting Company, in partnership with PBS in America, created a series of television programs (partly to widen the audience market for new color television programming). This course focuses on the role of television as a still new, and potentially disruptive, medium. We will look at and discuss a range of British TV series from Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation" and "Monty Python's Flying Circus" (both 1969) to Jacob Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man" (1973) and Alistair Cooke's "America" (1972), John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Age of Uncertainty" (1977), and David Attenborough's "Life on Earth" (first aired in 1979). We will read and discuss works of art and media criticism around this time that laid the groundwork for major conceptual and theoretical remappings of the fields of cultural and visual studies. We also will explore the impact of television on art worlds and museums, looking at how 1960s' color television documentaries influenced the way that humanities are presented televisually up to today. This course satisfies requirements for the "Visual and Material Culture" module in history and major requirements for the Science in Society Program.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM353, HIST345
Prereq: None

SISP353 Health, Illness, and Power in America

In this class, we will explore the interlocking histories of health, illness, and power in America. Special attention will be paid to the ways in which discourses of the healthy body have undergirded notions of citizenship and belonging in the nation. We will consider how processes of disease, disability, and contagion have been imagined through the lenses of social difference, including race, gender, sexuality, and class. We will address civil institutions designed to manage individual and population health, and we will consider theories of political power in the making of the "modern" body.



Sample topics covered will include immigration policies and contagious disease scares; STDs and the politics of public health campaigns; physical fitness and the value of bodily labor under capitalism; the management of diseases that are symptomatic and those that are not; race- and gender-based approaches to medicine and medical difference; clinical trials and the ethics of human experimentation; regulations surrounding blood and organ donation; changing rituals of bodily hygiene; preventative medicine and the call to personal responsibility; mental health policies and institutions; and pride movements surrounding the "unhealthy" body.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST353
Prereq: None

SISP353Z Health, Illness, and Power in America

In this class, we will explore the interlocking histories of health, illness, and power in America. Special attention will be paid to the ways in which discourses of the healthy body have undergirded notions of citizenship and belonging in the nation. We will consider how processes of disease, disability, and contagion have been imagined through the lenses of social difference, including race, gender, sexuality, and class. We will address civil institutions designed to manage individual and population health, and we will consider theories of political power in the making of the "modern" body. Sample topics covered will include immigration policies and contagious disease scares; STDs and the politics of public health campaigns; physical fitness and the value of bodily labor under capitalism; the management of diseases that are symptomatic and those that are not; race- and gender-based approaches to medicine and medical difference; clinical trials and the ethics of human experimentation; regulations surrounding blood and organ donation; changing rituals of bodily hygiene; preventative medicine and the call to personal responsibility; mental health policies and institutions; and pride movements surrounding the "unhealthy" body.



In its iteration as a Summer Session course, class instruction will be provided as a combination of interactive lecture, discussion, and small group work. On a daily basis, students will be asked to complete and discuss reading assignments, short research activities, and written responses.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-AMST
Identical With: AMST353Z
Prereq: None

SISP355 The 1918 Influenza Pandemic: A Research Seminar

This fall is the centennial of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which swept around the globe that year and caused an estimated 40 million deaths worldwide. It caused more deaths in the 20th century than any other event except World War II. In this seminar we will examine this pandemic from multiple perspectives with the goal of defining how understanding it changed from the time it occurred to the present. In class, we will examine contemporary journalistic and scientific accounts and various secondary sources, with the goal of establishing a starting point for student research projects that will be completed over the second half of the semester. We will explore sources in Olin Special Collections, various digital archives, Middletown and Connecticut State archives, and other collections as available. Possible outcomes for the class can be a paper, documentary, exhibition, or web resource.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST355
Prereq: None

SISP356 Afro-Caribbean Philosophy

This seminar focuses on the philosophical production of Afro-Caribbean thinkers since the middle of the twentieth-century. We focus on close readings of Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, and Sylvia Wynter alongside others to consider a Caribbean approach to questions and problems of modernity, relationality, space, race, belonging, the human, creolization, language, anti-colonialism, and liberation. We consider the roots of some of these questions in the work of earlier thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, as well as contemporary influences of their work across and beyond the Caribbean. We will work beyond the linguistic divisions of the Francophone, Hispanophone, or Anglophone Caribbean to consider conversations in common across the archipelago, in a multiplicity of languages.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-PHIL
Prereq: None

SISP357 AI, Algorithms, & Power

This course explores artificial intelligence (AI) as a cultural, sociopolitical, and literary object. Course readings will begin with the observations of anthropologists at the post-WWII Macy Conferences on cybernetics. Students will put algorithmic data mining and machine learning in historical context, exploring classification systems and intelligence testing. Students will also examine the reanimation of the artificial human in newer discourses of AI, such as big data and predictive policing, virtual reality and drone strikes in commercial and military operations, health and assistive technology, and play and labor on platforms like Mechanical Turk. Course texts will include speculative fiction on artificial life, social theories of simulation and virtuality, and new work from queer studies and critical race studies interrogating algorithmic bias and the testing and classification of humanity.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Prereq: None

SISP360 Making the Psychological: Discovering, Manufacturing, Circulating

Psychology aims to explain human experiences and thoughts, including unconscious ones. Using scientific methods, psychology produces valid representations of human nature, names them, and circulates that knowledge for both its truth value and usefulness to society and individuals. Despite much success in these aims, the validity of much of psychology's knowledge is in being challenged - as evidenced in recent concerns about the reproducibility of experiments. We will examine the epistemic grounds of psychology's truth claims and consider alternative models that understand the truth claims to be enactments, constructions, or ideologies that rehearse cultural beliefs. Case studies of science-based knowledge eventually found to be inaccurate or exaggerated (priming research; the power pose) are used to examine how some truth claims are generated and challenged, and cases of robust research are used to explore how some truth claims acquire credibility inside and outside the laboratory. We ask, too, how these claims travel to be taken up as new ways for individuals to experience the self and social world, and examine the public's and our own aspirations to expand consciousness and act otherwise. Students will develop case studies of psychological knowledge, its validation, circulation, and effects in the world.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM359, PSYC359
Prereq: PSYC105

SISP365 Nature Description: Literature and Theory

What happens to the world when we describe it using language? What happens to language? How much can we really know about nature as it is, in itself, outside of our representational strategies? In what ways do different kinds of description--and the often unexamined assumptions that structure them--limit what we can see? Do different modes of description and figurative language do different things to the world? And what do they do *in* the world--what ideological or political work? How, in short, does language reflect, touch, and transform the material world?



This course will grapple with big questions about nature, language, race, class, history, science, literary form, and human minds, as well as the complex interactions between and among these. We will seek answers by attending closely to literary, scientific, and theoretical texts.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL367
Prereq: None

SISP366 Bodies, Machines, and Meaning: Cultural Studies of the Sciences

Cultural studies of the sciences shift the focus of interdisciplinary science studies from understanding the sciences as producing and justifying knowledge to understanding them as meaning-making and world-transforming practices. Cultural studies attend to scientific meaning-making at multiple levels, and to the interactions among them: concrete material relations among bodies, technologies, and their settings or situations; verbal, visual, corporeal, mathematical, and other expressive performances; and social, cultural, or political institutions, practices, boundaries, and movements across and within them. Cultural studies of science also emphasizes political engagement with scientific practices and their broader cultural entanglements. This course explores what it means to do cultural studies of science, with a focus on three interrelated themes: alternative conceptions of what it means to make claims and reason about what happens in "nature"; case studies in how scientific meaning and understanding are embodied and prosthetically extended technologically; and some specific conceptual and material relations among scientific understandings of life, bodies, sex, reproduction, and being human.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-PHIL
Identical With: PHIL366
Prereq: None

SISP367 Life of Modern Fact

Facts aren't born; they are made. The challenge is to understand how people have come to think of facts as existing in the world independent of human intervention. This seminar explores the tools and techniques that people have used to craft facts. We consider examples from the 18th century through the present day, such as training manuals, films, and instruments. We also examine how broader structures such as social networks and the law help produce facts as people share, defend, and use them. Finally, this course encourages skepticism and creativity in the use of primary sources and the formulation of original research, questioning the givens of human knowledge.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST367
Prereq: None

SISP370 Disease and Health in Modern Asia

While this course might seem highly focused and specialized at first glance, it is intended for students of all majors and backgrounds. It has two main goals. The first is to explore the influence of epidemics and diseases more broadly over the course of East Asian history while keeping a global context in mind. The focus is on China and Japan, but Korea will be included when possible. The second is to consider how historically, diseases and epidemics are best understood through multiple disciplinary approaches, including biology, epidemiology, anthropology, sociology, and iconcology. Colonialism and empire--both Western and Japanese--are, of course, underlying themes throughout. We will examine several important historiographical and methodological approaches as well as some basic issues in the history of science and some important examples of specific diseases such as cholera, tuberculosis, and plague from different approaches using both secondary and primary sources.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST370, CEAS272
Prereq: None

SISP373 Religion, Science, and Empire: Crucible of a Globalized World

The development of modern science--and of modernity itself--not only coincided with the rise of European imperialism, it was abetted by it. Meanwhile, religion was integral to both the roots of European science and Western encounters with others. This class will explore how the intersections of religion, science, and empire have formed a globalized world with examples of European engagement with the Americas, Middle East, and, particularly, India from the age of Columbus through to the space race. We will examine how the disciplines we know today as biology, anthropology, archaeology, folklore, and the history of religions all crystallized in the crucible of imperial encounter and how non-Westerners have embraced, engaged, and resisted these epistemes.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI373, EDST373, GSAS373
Prereq: None

SISP374 Food Security: History of an Idea

The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations has held that "food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life." This course is a history of food insecurity as a material condition and a geopolitical concept for explaining uneven access to provisions. Although we begin with the emergence of food security as a concept during World War II, we will spend the majority of the course studying other ways of organizing access to the means of subsistence. Topics discussed will include why human beings share food, the invention of agriculture, transportation infrastructure, international trade, food aid, agricultural research and development, poverty, conflict, and famine.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST374, ENVS374
Prereq: None

SISP375 Science and the State

Over the past two centuries, states have been among the most prodigious producers and consumers of scientific information. Broad areas of scientific inquiry--such as demography, economics, geography, and ecology--substantially developed in response to the need of states to manage their populations, their economies, and their natural resources. State-directed scientific and technological innovation has also played a critical role in the pursuit of national security and infrastructural development, most notably through the development of nuclear weapons, missiles, and an array of military technologies. Finally, states have turned to scientific experts to enhance the credibility and legitimacy of policy decisions. This course introduces students to literature in the history of science that explores the connections between systems of knowledge and state power. Themes developed include the tensions between expertise and democracy, secrecy and scientific openness; the relationship between political culture and scientific and technological development; and the role of quantification, standardization, and classification in producing political order.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST385
Prereq: None

SISP377 Worlding the World: Creation Myths from Ancient Greece to the Multiverse

This course will focus on two questions that have thwarted and enthralled scientists, philosophers, and theologians for millennia: Where have we come from? and Where are we going? By reading ancient Greek and early Christian sources alongside contemporary astrophysicists, we will witness the reconfigured resurrection of some very old debates about the creation and unmaking of the world. Is the universe eternal, or was it created? Is it finite or infinite? Destructible or indestructible? Linear or cyclical? And is ours the only universe, or are there others?



The semester will be divided into four sections. The first will explore the dominant, or "inflationary," version of the big bang hypothesis in relation to Christian and indigenous myths of creation. The second will consider the possibility that the whole universe might be a negligible part of a vast "multiverse" in conversation with the early Greek atomists, who posited an extra-cosmic space teeming with other worlds. The third will explore contemporary cyclical cosmologies--that is, theories that posit a rebirth of the cosmos out of its fiery destruction--in relation to early Stoic philosophy and cross-cultural cyclic mythologies. The fourth will explore quantum cosmologies, in which the universe fragments into parallel branches each time a particle "decides" upon a position. We will examine these varied cosmologies of multiplicity, not with a view toward adjudicating among them, but toward pointing out their mythic and ontological genealogies and consequences.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI377
Prereq: None

SISP381 Japan's Nuclear Disasters

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 are central to the history of the 20th century. This course examines the scientific, cultural, and political origins of the bombs; their use in the context of aerial bombings and related issues in military history; the decisions to use them; the human cost to those on whom they were dropped; and their place in history, culture, and identity politics to the present. Sources will include works on the history of science; military, political, and cultural history; literary and other artistic interpretations; and a large number of primary source documents, mostly regarding U.S. policy questions. In addition, we will be examining the development of the civilian nuclear industry in Japan with a focus on the nuclear meltdowns in Fukushima and other accidents. This is an extremely demanding course.



This interdisciplinary, experiential, and experimental course combines studio learning (movement studies and interdisciplinary, creative exploration) and seminars (presentations and discussions). No previous dance or movement study is required, and the course is not particularly geared toward dancers or performers. However, your willingness to experiment on and share movement is important. We encourage you to think about movement as a method of accessing human experiences and making distance malleable, a way to explore your own sensations, thoughts, and reactions in learning history.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.50
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST381, CEAS384, DANC381, ENVS381
Prereq: None

SISP382 Anthropocene as Modern Grand Narrative

The Anthropocene refers to the new age in which humankind started to have a significant impact in altering or rupturing the Earth's systems, where the Earth is now moving out of its current geological epoch (the Holocene) and into "a less biologically diverse, less forested, much warmer, and probably wetter and stormier state." (Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007, Sciences Module, 614). This course begins by examining the debates on the definition and periodization. It then explores precursors to the concept of the Anthropocene, such as Confucian and Daoist writings on the taming of the natural environment for human needs, the catastrophism versus uniformitarianism debate, and contesting definitions of sustainability. Finally, it looks at how recent works of environmental history engaged with the concept of the Anthropocene and brought our attention to the impact of the transition from organic economy to carbon economy. Is the Anthropocene a new meta-narrative that professes to be the theory that explains all human activity? Is the Anthropocene a call to arms for environmental justice? Is the Anthropocene just a declensionist fairy tale--one that leads us down a dead end, throwing up our arms in resignation over the irreversible destruction of the natural environment?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST382, ENVS383
Prereq: None

SISP383 Mind, Body, and World

This seminar in the metaphysics of mind and meaning begins with the philosophical and scientific background to cognitivist conceptions of mind and artificial intelligence. Both classic and recent criticisms of cognitivism and early AI emphasize the role of bodily movement and skill, language, social normativity, and engagement with and within the world as integral to conceptualization and understanding. These themes will then be explored constructively in some recent reconceptions of cognition as embodied and social-pragmatic, and of language and other conceptual repertoires as integral to bodily involvement in the world and with one another.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-PHIL
Identical With: PHIL383
Prereq: None

SISP384 Critical Approaches to the History of Disease and Epidemics

Epidemic disease is as much a part of the human condition as earthquakes, droughts, floods, heat waves and other natural hazards that can result in disaster. This course will examine four cases of epidemic disease: (tentatively) cholera, tuberculosis, and AIDS. While we will definitely be asking the classic historical question "what happened and how?" we also will be considering how different epistemological frameworks, metaphorical strategies, and historiographical assumptions have shaped past historians' understandings of these events, while exploring alternative approaches. Students will write a research paper as a final project on an epidemic disease of their choice using an approach that helps explore some little-examined dimension of that disease. Choices will not be limited to diseases caused by microorganisms, but also can include cancer, diabetes, and other diseases that arguably have reached epidemic proportions, whether past or present.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST384
Prereq: None

SISP385 Understanding Life and Mind

Philosophical conceptions of mind and language are now typically "naturalistic" in the sense that they take these phenomena to be part of the natural world and understandable scientifically. Naturalistic conceptions of mindedness (and many of the sciences of mindedness) still mostly take their lead from a Cartesian tradition of understanding mindedness as an "internal" representation of an "external" world, now located in the brain or central nervous system rather than an immaterial soul. This advanced seminar instead explores the possible philosophical significance of recent developments in evolutionary and developmental biology for understanding mindedness. The course takes up four primary themes: organism/environment entanglement; relevant background from the recent emergence of an "extended evolutionary synthesis;" reconceptions of mindedness as ways organisms inhabit and respond to environments rather than as internal representations; and the evolution and development of language as a form of evolutionary niche construction that coevolves with human organisms and ways of life.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-SISP
Identical With: PHIL385
Prereq: None

SISP387 History of the End

How will it end? Scientific hubris, a nuclear event, an asteroid, environmental disaster, overpollution, resource scarcity, commodity price spikes, riots, social chaos, social control? This seminar investigates how people have imagined apocalypse and post-apocalypse over time, on the premise that fantasies of the end provide a window into the anxieties of the societies that produce them.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST387, ENVS387
Prereq: None

SISP393 Materia Medica: Drugs and Medicines in America

This course investigates the identification, preparation, and application of drugs and medicines in the United States, emphasizing the period before the 20th-century institutionalization of corporate research and development. Topics include early modern European prospecting for medicinal plants, the development of an international drug trade, and the formation of national pharmaceutical markets in the Untied States in the 19th century. Participants will explore the production, circulation, and restriction of medical knowledge through local practice, public and private institutions, trade and commerce, and regulation. In addition to knowledge of the social history of drugs and medicines in the United States, students are expected to develop competencies in historical research using primary and secondary sources. The final weeks of the course are devoted to applying historical knowledge to contemporary debates in global public health, including international pharmaceutical research, drug development, and epidemic disease.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST393
Prereq: None

SISP399 History and Geography

Maps are part of a broader family of value-laden images. This is a research seminar about the global history of cartography from 1490s to the recent past. We will study maps from the early modern and modern world and examine how maps were used as instruments of political power, shaped the imagination of peoples around the world, and inspired new ways to imagine our self-identity.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST399, CEAS214, ENVS399
Prereq: None

SISP399Z History and Geography: Global Cartography and Visual Studies of Science

Maps are part of a broader family of value-laden images. This is a research seminar about the global history of cartography from the 1490s to the recent past. You will study maps from the early modern and modern world, and examine how maps were used as instruments of political power, shaped the imagination of peoples around the world, and inspired new ways to imagine our self-identity.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST399Z, ENVS399Z, CEAS214Z
Prereq: None

SISP401 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SISP402 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SISP403 Department/Program Project or Essay

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SISP404 Department/Program Project or Essay

Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SISP407 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

SISP408 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

SISP409 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SISP410 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SISP411 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SISP412 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SISP419 Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

SISP420 Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

SISP420A Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

SISP465 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SISP466 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SISP469 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Prereq: None

SISP491 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

SISP492 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT