MDIA 590 Digital Lives
Amanda Ciafone
Tue, 3:30 - 6:20 PM
This seminar explores how digital media shape our experiences across the human lifespan—from childhood and adolescence to adulthood, aging, and death. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship in media studies, sociology, and critical aging/age studies, students will examine how platforms mediate identity, labor, intimacy, care, and memory at different life stages. Topics include youth popular media and technology use, mediated work, online dating, aging and digital exclusion, histories of technological change and birth cohorts, and the politics of digital legacy. Through readings, media analysis, digital ethnography, and creative assignments, students will critically engage with the cultural narratives and technological infrastructures that structure life in the digital age.
HIST 504 Problems in the History of Science and Medicine
David Sepkoski
Wed, 1:00 - 2:50 PM
This seminar is an introduction to the historiography of science and science and technology studies (STS). Students in any humanistic or social science discipline are welcome, as are those already engaged in history of science or STS or those simply curious about the field. Through a reading of central texts in the field, the course will introduce some of the classic problems and methodologies in history and STS, as well as current trends in the field now. Final paper topics can explore a particular approach to STS, consider a variety of perspectives on a single topic (e.g., race, gender, imperialism, etc.), or connect STS perspectives to the student's own research interests.
PHIL 414 Michel Foucault: Power
Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson
Thurs, 2:00 - 3:20 PM
In a 1974 interview, asked about the audience for whom he wrote, Foucault famously answered that he intended for his books to be “machines … instruments, utensils, weapons,” to be used as “a sort of tool-box through which others can rummage to find a tool with which they can do what seems good to them, in their domain.” And rummaged people have. A 2007 study lists Foucault as the most cited author in the humanities, and in 2016 Discipline and Punish ranked seventh among the 25 most cited books in the social sciences. A steady stream of posthumous publications has added new tools to the tool-box and ensures a continuously growing body of scholarship inspired by Foucault. This course will appraise Foucault’s massive appeal by introducing students to some of his major works, including The Order of Things (1966), Discipline and Punish (1975), and The Will to Know (1976, alongside a range of other texts, lectures, and interviews. A thematic focus on Foucault’s analytics of power—from sovereignty to discipline, biopolitics, and government—will allow us to chart the development of Foucault’s thought, identify its main characteristics, and reflect on its continued relevance in the present.
GGIS 594 New Urban Inequalities
David Wilson
Wed, 2:00 - 4:50 PM
This course examines the rise and persistence of new urban inequalities across the globe. We explore growing divides between urbanized people that permeate the domains of housing, waged work relations, city redevelopment, city economic restructuring, and city morphology. The city is excavated as a globally, nationally and regionally entangled terrain - the urban -- that suffers from growing socio-spatial polarization and demographic splintering. Cities as diverse as Chicago, Mexico City, Miami, Jakarta, Prague, Detroit, and will be critically explored as laboratories to understand emerging and persistent inequalities. Innovative theories of contemporary inequalities will be drawn from the work of such urbanists as David Harvey, Doreen Massey, Ananya Roy, Frantz Fanon, Neil Smith, Ruthie Gilmore, William Julius Wilson, and Henri Lefebvre.
CAS 587/ANTH 515 Living in Multi-Species Worlds
Jane Desmond
Fri, 1:00 - 3:50 PM
Structured as an exploratory laboratory, this seminar invites participants from across the university to think deeply about how humans live and have lived in multi-species worlds, in culturally and historically specific ways. A special focus will be on the theories and challenges of multi-species ethnography as a mode of research, on experimental mappings of relationships across species, and on imagined futures in the Anthroposcene. Drawing on key themes in human-animal studies, we will examine topics such as notions of multi-species justice, animals as agential subjects, living in shared environments, practices of extraction/extinction/de-extinction, art about and by animals, the scientific/cultural dimensions of "One Health" and social media storytelling. Readings and guest speakers will be drawn from across the humanities/social sciences/arts/law/and biological sciences. Limit of 18.