Syllabus

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Course Meeting Times

Lectures: 1 session / week, 3 hours / session

Course Description

This course examines relationships among technology, culture, and politics in a variety of social and historical settings ranging from 19th century factories to 21st century techno dance floors, from colonial Melanesia to capitalist Massachusetts. We organize our discussions around three questions: What cultural effects and risks follow from treating biology as technology? How have computers changed the way we think about ourselves? How are politics built into our infrastructures? We will be interested in whether technology has produced a better world, and for whom.

Requirements and Grading

Students will write three 5-7 page papers (see below). Each represents 30% of the subject grade. No emailed papers accepted. Papers correspond to three thematic sections of the syllabus and will integrate class readings with a topic of each student's choosing. Students will also be evaluated on class participation, including discussion and in-class writing exercises (10% of subject grade). Punctual attendance is obligatory. There is no final.

 

 

Required Texts

Rapp, Rayna. Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: A Social History of Amniocentesis in America. New York, NY: Routledge, 2000. ISBN: 0415916453.

Petryna, Adriana. Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. ISBN: 069109019X.

Latour, Bruno. Aramis, or The Love of Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. ISBN: 0674043235.

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