Courses
STSC SCHEDULE CHANGES/ADDITIONS
Offered: Fall 2008
HSOC 002 has a new schedule and instructor (STSC 002)
HSOC 140 has a new schedule and instructor (STSC 148)
HSOC 321 WILL be offered in Fall 2008 (ANTH 312)
HSOC 421 is CANCELLED (HIST 471)
STSC Capstone Courses
Offered: Fall 2008
HSOC 404 Urban Environment
HSOC 408 Urban Asthma Epidemic
HSOC 410 Health Policy in South Asia (SAST 385)
STSC 422 Politics and U.S. Science Policy
STSC 425 Philosophy of Science
HSOC 430 Disease and Society
HSOC 438 Development and Global Health
STSC Freshman Seminars
Offered: Fall 2008
HSOC 039 The Healer's Tale
HSOC 042 Snip and Tuck
HSOC 050 Mad, Sad and Bad
STSC 052 Superman! A History of Eugenics
STSC 088 Who Owns the Past?
STSC Introductory Courses
Offered: Fall 2008
HSOC 001 Emergence of Modern Science
HSOC 002 Medicine in History
HSOC 100 Introduction to Sociological Research
HSOC 101 Bioethics
HSOC 135 Politics of Food
HSOC 140 History of Bioethics
HSOC 145 Comparative Medicine
STSC 160 The Information Age
STSC New Courses
Offered: Fall 2008
STSC 088 Who Owns the Past?
STSC 311 Science, Medicine and the Media (HSOC 311)
STSC 361 American Politics and Society, 1865-1930 (HIST 361)
STSC 419 Rethinking Science vs. Religion
STSC 001 Emergence of Modern Science
Cross-listed as HSOC 001
Offered: Fall 2008
Adams MW 11-12 + rec
Fulfills college requirement for Sector IV: Humanities and Social Science (class of 2010 and after)
During the last 500 years, science has emerged as a central and transformative force that continues to reshape everyday life in countless ways. This introductory course will survey the emergence of the scientific world view from the Renaissance through the end of the 20th century. By focusing on the life, work, and cultural contexts of those who created modern science, we will explore their core ideas and techniques, where they came from, what problems they solved, what made them controversial and exciting, and how they related to contemporary religious beliefs, politics, art, literature, and music. The course
is organized chronologically and thematically. In short, this is a “Western Civ” course with a difference, open to students at all levels.
STSC 003 Technology and Society
Cross-listed as HSOC 003, SOCI 033
Offered: Spring 2008
Ensmenger TR 12-1:30
Core Course (required of all STSC majors)
"We shape our technologies; thereafter they shape us."
This course surveys the ways in which technology has shaped our societies and our relations with the natural world. We will examine the origins and impact of technical developments throughout human history and across the globe--- from stone tools, agriculture, and cave painting to ancient cities, metallurgy, and aqueducts; from
windmills, cathedrals, steam engines and electricity to atom bombs, the internet, and genetic engineering. We will pay attention to the aesthetic, religious, and mythical dimensions of technological change, and consider the circumstances in which innovations emerge and their effects on social order, on the environment, and on the
ways humans understand themselves.
STSC 008 "According to the Kinsey Report...": The Politics of Sex and Science in Modern America
Cross-listed as HSOC 008
Offered: Spring 2008
Burnett M 3:30-6:30
Critical Speaking Seminar
Want to work on your public speaking skills? You will have a hard time keeping quiet in a critical speaking course about sex and science. We will examine how scientific research has influenced common conceptions of sex differences and sexual behavior during the last century, and how this knowledge in turn has shaped cultural conceptions of gender roles and “normal” behavior. Students will discuss, debate, and deliver formal presentations about these questions as we examine moments from the history of psychiatry, sexology, ethology, anthropology, endocrinology, genetics, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and neuro-endocrinology.
Syllabus
STSC 009 Healing Narratives
Offered: Spring 2008
Mackenzie TR 10:30-12
Critical Writing Seminar (fulfills College writing requirement)
This writing seminar will explore the role of the story in medicine and healing. We will learn about the field of narrative medicine, designed to help health professionals enhance their empathic skills, discover the connections between narrative and the healing arts, and become acquainted with the practice of expressive writing to promote immune system function.
Students will learn to read and analyze academic writing from a variety of disciplines (e.g., medical humanities, nursing, cultural anthropology, and psychology) and will write essays on topics related to these readings. These assignments will give students the opportunity to draw upon their subjective experiences of health, illness and healing. The content for this seminar is interdisciplinary, drawing from a wide range of sources in the humanities, social sciences, and health sciences.
The course has five sub-themes: the personal experience narrative; writing as health promotion; narrative, empathy and the art of healing; illness narratives; subject/object: statements of truth and authority. The writing assignments and readings will follow these general themes, although there will be overlap given the nature of the topic. This course is suitable for those students who intend to go into any of the health professions, plan to conduct fieldwork that entails collecting personal experience narratives, want to reflect more deeply on their relationship with their own body, or are interested in the subjective experience of illness and health.
HSOC 010 Health and Societies
Cross-listed as STSC 010
Offered: Spring 2008
Barnes TR 10:30-12 + recitation
Foundational Course (required for all HSOC majors)
This course is an introduction to the vocabulary, skills, and concepts basic to sociocultural studies of health and disease. While recognizing the importance of the biomedical model, particularly to Western civilization, the course asks students to explore other approaches and healing traditions. It does so by exploring how policy analysts, medical care providers, and scholars from a variety of disciplines including anthropology, history and sociology have crafted responses to such real world problems as malnutrition, epidemic disease, and the inequitable distribution of health resources.
STSC 025 The Evolution of Scientific Thought
Cross-listed as PHIL 025
Offered: Fall 2008
Weisberg TR 10:30-12 + recitation
NAT SCI & MATH SECTOR (NEW CURR ONLY)
This is an introductory course in the history and philosophy of science. Its central focus is the development of the modern, scientific view of the world. Upon completing this course, you will have a better sense of the origin of such central scientific concepts as force, atom, evolution, species, and law of nature. In addition, I hope that you will begin to appreciate the key issues in philosophy of science including the relationship between theory and evidence, the nature of scientific explanation, and the status of unobservable entities. The readings are drawn from Aristotle, Descartes, Newton, Darwin and a number of secondary sources. Although primarily a reading and writing oriented course, there will be several opportunities for you to engage first hand in the process of scientific discovery.
STSC 026 Philosophy of Space and Time
Cross-listed as PHIL 026
Offered: Fall 2008
Domotor MWF 11-12
Natural Science and Math Sector (Class of 2010 and after)
This course provides an introduction to the philosophy and intellectual history of space-time and cosmological models from ancient to modern times with special emphasis on paradigm shifts, leading to Einstein's theories of special and general relativity and cosmology. Other topics include Big Bang, black holes stellar structure, the metaphysics of substance, particles, fields, and superstrings, unification and grand unification of modern physical theories. No philosophy of physics background is presupposed.
STSC 052 Superman! A History of Eugenics in American Culture, 1900-Present
Cross-listed as HSOC 052
Offered: Fall 2008
Cogdell M 2-5
Freshman Seminar
Did you know that "To Breed a Race of Thoroughbreds" was an early motto of Planned Parenthood, an organization formed to promote birth control explicitly for the poor? Did you know that up until 1983, it was still legal to subject people in state mental institutions to involuntary reproductive sterilization, and that over 60,000 individuals in the U.S. have undergone this process? "Eugenics" means to be "well-born," and prior to the existence of genetics as we know it today, the eugenics movement aimed to "improve" the nation's population by limiting the reproduction of the "unfit" and encouraging that of the "fit." Its ideals infiltrated popular culture, literature, comics, and the arts, and formed the rationale for many state and federal laws. Yet, who decides who is "fit" or "unfit"? What are the traits of a Superman or a Wonder Woman? Are eugenic ideals a thing of the past, or does today's genetic engineering offer us the possibility of creating "designer children"? This course examine the history of attempts to direct the course of human evolution toward genetic "improvement," as manifested in American science, politics, and culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
STSC 088 Who Owns the Past?
Offered: Fall 2008
Kuklick, H W 2-5
Freshman Seminar
Stories told about the past have long been understood as moral lessons. And historical narratives have also inevitably been susceptible to partisan construction--to different readings by opposed parties. But the strength of appeals to the past is not a constant: historical experience has at some times and in some places been seen as irrelevant to selection of courses of practical action. Today, in the United States as well as in many other parts of the world, appeals to historical precedent carry considerable weight, and are made for all manner of purposes. Consider, for example, the dissolution of the nation of Yugoslavia, the most recent manifestation of which was the secession of Kosovo from Serbia; the breakup of Yugoslavia has been explained as the result of centuries-old ethnic tensions, yet when Yugoslavia was created during the Paris Peace Conference that ended World War I, objections to this action were countered with the anthropological judgment that the new nation’s ethnic divisions were not really significant. (One should note that ethnic loyalties are themselves historical products.) Or consider the debate over the ownership of the bones of so-called "Kennewick Man," which pitted Native Americans against scientists; their quarrel was virulent because the question of the identity of early inhabitants of North America has long been seen as having some bearing on the legitimacy of North American nations. To take an example of contested historical generalizations made in biology, consider recent debates over the value of Darwin’s theory, which have taken place in political venues ranging from local school board elections to presidential nomination contests. This course will discuss the uses of history in contemporary and past situations, drawing examples from the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
STSC 110 Science and Literature
Cross-listed as HSOC 110, ENGL 075, HIST 117
Offered: Spring 2008
Adams MW 11-12 + rec
This course will explore the emergence of modern science fiction as a genre, the ways it has reflected our evolving conceptions of ourselves and the universe, and its role as the mythology of modern technological civilization. We will discuss such characteristic themes as utopias, the exploration of space and time, biological engineering, superman, robots, aliens, and other worlds -- and the differences between European and American treatment of these themes. The course is structured chronologically and thematically around a series of classic SF novels. Monday and Wednesday lectures will set the novels in historical, scientific, and thematic context; Friday sections will provide the opportunity for in-depth comparative discussion of the week’s readings.
STSC 135 Biology and Society (Modern Biology and Its Social Implications)
Offered: Fall 2007
Adams MW 10-11 + rec
This course will explore the emergence of modern evolutionary biology, the ways it has reflected our concepts of life and nature, and the human and social implications of biological theories and ideas. We will focus on some of the central historical figures that have shaped our understanding-Linnaeus, Lamarck, Darwin, Mendel, Galton--and the implications of their ideas for who we are, where we com from, and where we are going.
STSC 160 The Information Age
Cross-listed as HSOC 011
Offered: Fall 2008
Prof. Ensmenger TR 12-1:30
Certain new technologies are greeted with claims that, for good or ill, they must transform our society. The two most recent: the computer and the Internet. But the series of social, economic, and technological developments that underlie what is often called the “Information Revolution” include much more than just the computer. In this course, we explore the history of information technology and its role in contemporary society. We will explore both the technologies themselves -- from telephones to computers to video games -- as well as their larger social, economic, and political context. To understand the roots of these ideas we look at the pre-history of the computer, at the idea of the "post industrial" or "information' society," at parallels with earlier technologies and at broad currents in the development of American society.
STSC 179 Down to Earth: An introduction to environmental history
Cross-listed as HSOC 179, HIST 320, ENVS 179
Offered: Spring 2008
Greene TR 3:00-4:30
Environmental history studies the interactions between humans and the natural world. In this kind of study, mosquitoes and rain are actors in history as well as humans and their impact. This course explores these interactions through case studies and topics nationally and globally, such as energy, disease, human migration and settlement, animals, technological changes, urban and suburban development, conservation and politics. This course is geared toward students who want to think about how history happens, in different places and over time.
STSC 182 Social Science and American Culture
Offered: Spring 2008
Kuklick, H TR 3:00-4:30
This course examines the role of social science in the United States during the 20th century. There have been popular social scientific theories since the early 19th century, when the craze spread for interpreting individuals’ character by feeling the bumps on their heads. But popular social science is really a 20th century phenomenon. And popular culture influenced academic research. Our coverage cannot be comprehensive. We have insufficient time to treat all human sciences equally. For example, there is enormous popular interest in paleoanthropology and archaeology, but we will not discuss these in class—although you might choose to write your research paper for the course on a specific aspect of one of these disciplines.
Syllabus
STSC 235.601 History of Biotechnology: Science, Industry and Society
Offered: Spring 2008
Ceccatti R 6:30-9:30
College of General Studies
In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the first patent of a living organism: a bacterium that had been genetically engineered to break down crude oil for use in cleaning up oil spills. However, the use of biological entities for industrial applications has its roots in the work that Louis Pasteur and others conducted for the wine and beer industries in the mid- to late-19th century. With rise of molecular biology in the 20th century, biotechnology has become a mainstay of science, business, and public policy. In this course, we will explore the scientific underpinnings of molecular biology, the relationship between biology and industry, and the role of government, non-governmental organizations, and the public in the application of biotechnology in agriculture, medicine, and the environment.
STSC 260 Cyberculture
Cross-listed as HSOC 213, SOCI 260
Offered: Spring 2008
Ensmenger T 1:30-4:30
Free speech, free software, MOOS, MUDs, anime and cyberpunk. All of these are elements of a broad set of social, technical and political phenomena generally associated with the emergence of a nascent "cyberculture.'' In this seminar we explore the ways in which
recent developments in information technology -- the computer and the Internet in particular -- relate to changing contemporary notions of community, identity, property, and gender. By looking at an eclectic collection of popular and scholarly resources, including film, fiction and the World Wide Web, we will situate the development of
"cyberculture'' into the larger history of the complex relationship between technology and Western society.
NOTE: DO NOT CONFUSE THIS COURSE WITH HSOC 260 SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF HEALTH
STSC 271 Law, Technology and Environment in 20th C. America
Cross-listed as ENVS 271
Offered: Spring 2008
Quivik MW 2:00-3:30
NEW!
Technology, according to one standard definition, is the means by which humans interact with their environment. Various groups of people value their environment differently, and they use and value different technologies for interacting with their environment. If more than one group occupies the same environmental space, conflict often ensues. Whether through legislation, regulation, or litigation, the law is a principal means of mediating such conflict in modern societies. This course will survey episodes in the history of the United States, especially in the twentieth century, that illustrate technology’s central role in shaping environments, that illustrate groups’ competing visions of what those environments were meant to be, and that illustrate the uses of the law in mediating social conflict concerning technologies and the environment. An important intent of the course will be to lead students to consider various environments along the spectrum of human manipulation, ranging from wilderness to agricultural landscapes and from designed gardens to urban and industrial environments. We will acknowledge physical violence as another method of conflict resolution, but the focus of the course will be on uses of the law by competing groups to mediate environmental conflicts through negotiation of treaties; lobbying legislative bodies to pass laws; influencing regulators to stiffen or weaken regulations; drawing police authorities into the fray; and seeking favorable rulings from the courts.
STSC 288 Knowledge and Social Structure
Offered: Fall 2008
H. Kuklick TR 3-4:30
Fulfills college requirement for Sector IV: Humanities and Social Science (Class of 2010 and after)
This course focuses on science in various institutional contexts and discusses situations ranging widely over time and place. We consider examples drawn from the seventeenth century to the present, the social settings in which science is found (e.g., the prince’s court, the society of amateurs, the university, the academic laboratory, industry, and in the field, outdoors), and the effects of changes in publishing and patronage. For comparative purposes, we also consider such phenomena as the symphony orchestra, the art market, motion pictures, and literature. Assigned authors range from time-honored authorities, such as Robert Merton, to science writers for The New Yorker.
STSC 301 Science and Religion
Offered: Spring 2008
Adams W 2-5
The relationship between science and religion is controversial, and is often treated simplistically, as if both “science” and “religion” were monolithic and discrete. In fact, both are richly diverse, they were deeply interconnected through much of their history, and each has been repeatedly transformed over the centuries. Although the complex relationship is often treated nowadays as though science and religion are opposed, modern science arose in religious cultures and was created and shaped by thinkers with strong religious views which interacted with, and helped to shape, their scientific work.
This undergraduate research seminar will explore the relationship between science and religion as manifested in the lives, ideas, and careers of some of the founders of modern science. Each week, we will examine one important figure. Although I can provide suggestions on where to begin, students are expected to research the figures, using whatever resources they can, to address a series of central questions: (1) What was their most important scientific work; (2) What role did religion play in their life; and (3) What was the relation between science and religion in their thinking and their scientific careers.
STSC 311 Science, Medicine and the Media
Cross-listed as HSOC 311
Offered: Fall 2008
Wolfe, Audra T 1:30-4:30
***NEW COURSE***
This course is an introduction to the history and the contemporary state of science journalism. Public understanding of science, medicine and technology is critical to a society that must make informed decisions about health, the environment, and economic growth, but the relationship between science and the public is complex. The course explores not only how books, newspapers, television, films, podcasts, and blogs have shaped our understanding of science and scientists, but also the contexts in which these media are created.
STSC 312 Weapons of Mass Destruction
Cross-listed as HSOC 312
Offered: Spring 2008
Lindee T 1:30-4:30
In this course we explore the history of the technical development, use, and political and cultural interpretation of those weapons conventionally identified as weapons of mass destruction, that is, nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. We explore why these particular forms of military destruction have been understood to raise novel problems of international law and ethics. We consider the weapons systems as a global phenomenon with global effects, and we interpret them as not only material and technical objects, but
also as symbolic systems that acquire meaning in a wide range of settings, from
government reports, to scientific papers, to the films and novels of popular culture.
WMD, as defined here, are entirely the result of scientific research in the industrialized world. Some forms of biological and chemical warfare are very old—bodies infected with plague and other diseases were catapulted into besieged cities from about 1300—but modern WMD are produced as a result of laboratory research, by persons with formal training in the scientific method, and with funding from national military establishments. They are profound intellectual achievements, reflecting the specialized techniques of modern science, an enterprise commonly understood to embody all that is most rational
and most beneficent in human intellectual life. They have also been interpreted, from many different perspectives, as unusually brutal. It is the fusion of reason and brutality, of rationality and violence, as it plays out in the history of weapons of mass destruction, that will interest us as we consider these weapons this semester.
Syllabus
STSC 313 Human Nature at the Origin
Cross-listed as ENVS 313
Offered: Spring 2008
Wells R 130-430
NEW!
The Galapagos Islands are famous due to their bizarre, “antediluvian” fauna and flora that in part inspired Darwin to propose his theory of evolution by natural selection. Since Darwin’s visit in 1835, however, many of these “original” plants and animals have gone extinct, often to the benefit of thousands of alien species introduced by human beings. In an attempt to protect the remaining “native” organisms, conservation biologists have pursued a violent policy of extermination. Human beings apparently thus serve both to corrupt and to restore “true” nature. For example, tens of thousands of human- introduced goats have been killed on several of the islands, to restore those islands to
their “original,” goat-less state. Is this the right thing to do? We will address the ecological, evolutionary and ethical assumptions underlying this and similar policies. What is the human role in nature? Does this role differ from that of other organisms? What do we mean when we identify specific organisms as native or original? In pursuit of these questions, we will use class discussions and selected readings of philosophical, literary and scientific texts to explore how similar questions have been posed and answered from the Enlightenment to the present-day. How natural is nature? Who decides?
Syllabus
STSC 361 American Politics and Society, 1865-1930
Cross-listed as HIST 361
Offered: Fall 2008
Greene TTh 12-1:30
American society as we know it today emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This course examines the profound transformations that occurred between the Civil War and the Great Depression as America became “modern” with the appearance of new political, economic, social, and cultural institutions. We will examine the social changes such as urbanization, institutional development, and consumer culture, the evolution of race ideology, the expansion of national power, changes in technology, science and the environment, the rise of industrial capitalism, political developments including Populism and Progressivism, and the growing importance of foreign policy. This will be a combination lecture and discussion class.
STSC 378 Going Digital
Offered: Fall 2008
Mills R 3-6
***NEW COURSE***
A “digital revolution” in the twentieth century is said to have ushered in an era of new media and rapid globalization, with changes in manufacture, communication, and subjectivity. How are changes at the level of signalsrelated to changes in politics and culture? This course surveys characterizations of “the analog” and “the digital” in the literatures of engineering, history of technology, and media studies. We will examine archival and published sources, as well as artifacts, to compare the analog and digital
forms of several technologies, including film, the telephone, sound recording and computing.
STSC 418 Instruments of Music and Science
Cross-listed as MUSC 750
Offered: Spring 2008
Tresch & Dolan F 2-5
Capstone Course
The late 18th and early 19th centuries saw the invention of many new instruments in both music and science. They were sometimes made by the same people, and they were often understood to have the same purpose: to attune individuals to the rhythms, proportions, and harmonies of nature. This seminar draws connections between music, science, politics, ethics and aesthetics between 1750 and 1850, a crucial point in European history. We’ll examine the role of instruments in conceptions of nature, society, and the individual, traversing the clockwork regularity of the Enlightenment, the turbulent longings of Romanticism, and the spooky delirium of the fantastic. The course begins with light refracting through prisms; it ends with the blaring trombones of Berlioz’s opium-induced Symphonie Fantastique; along the way we will visit ideas of mechanical
observation, mimesis, theories of the passions, global science, demonic virtuosity, phantasmagoria, the uncanny, and the paradoxes of bourgeois selfhood. Through working with actual instruments and reading primary texts, students will be invited to question basic assumptions of intellectual history. The class is open to creative undergraduates and graduates from any field who want to explore a range of ideas of what it means to be human in the modern world.
STSC 420 Research Seminar in STSC
Cross-listed as HSOC 420 Research Seminar
Offered: Spring 2008
Cowan W 5-8
Capstone Course
This research methods seminar helps students develop skills crucial to independent research and to senior thesis development. The course combines focused reading, critical analysis of key texts, small-group projects, and writing and research exercises. Students can use this course to develop a plan for a senior research project, and to produce a polished thesis prospectus and literature review that can guide their thesis work in fall of their senior year. They can also carry out a literature review and research plan for a topic of interest to them, even if they do not plan to write a senior thesis. This course fulfills the Capstone research requirement for students writing a senior thesis.
STSC 422 Politics and U.S. Science Policy
Offered: Fall 2008
Alpert TR 3-4:30
NEW!!
This course fulfills the Capstone Research Requirement for HSOC and STSC majors.
This capstone seminar provides an overview of the federal science policymaking process in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the basics of how the government works. Possible topics: science policy and the Presidency, science policy and Congress, the role of interest groups, conflicts of interest, specific case studies (including the Human Genome Project, the FDA and AIDS drugs, and the politics of organ transplants), the role of the press/media in public perceptions of science policy. Students will carry out an exercise in budget allocation (including conducting budget hearings) based on actual budget figures for various institutes within the National Institutes of Health, and an exercise in peer review, utilizing actual National Science Foundation projects. Each student will chose a relevant topic on which to write their research paper.
STSC 425 Philosophy of Science
Cross-listed as PHIL 425
Offered: Fall 2008
Domotor MW 3:30-5:00
This course fulfills the Capstone Research Requirement for STSC and HSOC majors.
This is an historically-oriented survey and contemporary analysis of the basic concepts and arguments in philosophy of science. An in-depth examination of the nature of scientific theories, their confirmation and theory-world relations, laws of nature and their role in unification and explanation, causation, and teleology, reductionism and supervenience, values and objectivity. Additional topics covered include arguments concerning scientific realism, the ontological status of theoretical entities, the Quine-Duhem thesis, Kuhn's paradigm shifts, Bayesianism, and the success of science.
Prerequisite: Background in elementary logic and some rudiments of science
HSOC 438 Development and Global Health
Offered: Fall 2008
Berson T 3-6
***NEW COURSE***
The course fulfills the Capstone Research Requirement for HSOC and STSC majors.
International development" encompasses everything from growing rice to delivering babies to running currency markets. High-level public policy, seemingly remote from the day-to-day stuff of life and death, has a profound impact on the basic living conditions of a majority of the world's people. The aim in this course is to understand how development policy--for example, the outcome of World Trade Organization negotiations--affects the health of poor people. We look at how the practice of international development has been shaped, over the past sixty years and more, by political interests with no straightforward bearing on the kinds of health outcomes we might assume to be the aims of development. We relate current and emerging trends in development--microfinance, climate justice--to the history of policy agendas at the national and international level. By the course's end, students will have a critical, historically informed perspective on the practice of international development.
Each student will develop an original research paper over the course of the term and have the chance to present research in progress to the group.
STSC 498 Senior Thesis
Offered: Spring 2008
Staff
STSC 499 Independent Study
Offered: Spring 2008
Staff
In order to receive permission to register for an independent study, a student must submit a form to the department that outlines the project and is signed by the supervisor.
