ANTH 570E - Science, Technology&Knowledge

Credits: Variable

What do we know and why? What methods do we use to manipulate the world and test that knowledge and what difference do they make? In recent decades, the interdisciplinary endeavor of science and technology studies (or STS) has been at the forefront of challenging received knowledges and methods in the social sciences and humanities, questioning not only cultural relativism and social constructivism, but preconceived notions of the human. In this class we will explore diverging ways of accounting for the universal truth claims and technological wonders of modernity and its constitutive relations with various ‘non-modern’ or ‘irrational’ others. Focusing on techno-scientific debates surrounding illness and medicine, new digital media, economics and markets, climate change, and the biosciences, we will consider how technical innovations and scientific practices become entangled with forms of authority and social power, making up the world, rather than revealing its inner nature. In doing so, we will have occasion to reflect on our own responsibilities and challenges as human scientists.