This seminar explores the ways in which Technology and Society shape one another and provides the opportunity to write extensively about this mutual shaping. Topics vary by section.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

Full details for STS 1123 - FWS: Technology and Society Topics

This seminar explores the ways in which Science and Society shape one another and provides the opportunity to write extensively about this mutual shaping. Topics vary by section.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

Full details for STS 1126 - FWS: Science and Society Topics

This course introduces some central ideas in the field of S&TS. It is aimed at students from any background who are challenged to think more critically about what counts as scientific knowledge and why, and how science and technology intervene in the wider world. It also serves as an introduction to majors in Biology and Society or in Science and Technology Studies. The course mixes lectures, discussions, writing, and other activities. The discussion sections are an integral part of the course and attendance is required. A series of take-home written assignments and quizzes throughout the semester comprise the majority of the grade.

Catalog Distribution: (SSC-AS) (SBA-AG)

Full details for STS 2011 - What Is Science? An Introduction to the Social Studies of Science and Technology

Politicians, scientists, and citizens worldwide face many environmental issues today, but they are neither simple nor straightforward. Moreover, there are many ways to understand how we have, do, and could value the environment from animal rights and wise use to deep ecology and ecofeminism. This class acquaints students with some of the challenging moral issues that arise in the context of environmental management and policy-making, both in the past and the present. Environmental concerns also highlight important economic, epistemological, legal, political, and social issues in assessing our moral obligations to nature as well as other humans. This course examines various perspectives expressed in both contemporary and historical debates over environmental ethics by exploring four central questions: What is nature? Who counts in environmental ethics? How do we know nature? Whose nature?

Catalog Distribution: (ETM-AS, SSC-AS) (KCM-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for STS 2061 - Ethics and the Environment

Bioethics is the study of ethical questions raised by advances in the medical field. Questions we'll discuss will include: Is it morally permissible to advance a patient's death, at his or her request, to reduce suffering? Is there a moral difference between killing someone and letting someone die? What ethical issues are raised by advance care planning? What is it to die? What forms of cognitive decline or physical change could you survive (and still be you)? On the flip side, were you ever a fetus? How should the rights of pregnant women be balanced against those of the fetus? Should parents be given control over the genetic make-up of their children? Are some forms of human enhancement morally troubling? Should we aim to be better than well? What is it to be disabled?  How should scarce health care resources or costly therapies be allocated to those in need? Should organ sales be permitted? Should medical treatment (or health insurance!) ever be compulsory, or is mandating treatment unacceptably paternalistic? Should doctors or hospitals be permitted to refuse to provide certain medical services that violate their consciences?

Catalog Distribution: (ETM-AS) (KCM-AG)

Full details for STS 2451 - Introduction to Bioethics

Medicine has become the language and practice through which we address a broad range of both individual and societal complaints. Interest in this medicalization of life may be one of the reasons that medical anthropology is currently the fastest-growing subfield in anthropology. This course encourages students to examine concepts of disease, suffering, health, and well-being in their immediate experience and beyond. In the process, students will gain a working knowledge of ecological, critical, phenomenological, and applied approaches used by medical anthropologists. We will investigate what is involved in becoming a doctor, the sociality of medicines, controversies over new medical technologies, and the politics of medical knowledge. The universality of biomedicine, or hospital medicine, will not be taken for granted, but rather we will examine the plurality generated by the various political, economic, social, and ethical demands under which biomedicine has developed in different places and at different times. In addition, biomedical healing and expertise will be viewed in relation to other kinds of healing and expertise. Our readings will address medicine in North America as well as other parts of the world. In class, our discussions will return regularly to consider the broad diversity of kinds of medicine throughout the world, as well as the specific historical and local contexts of biomedicine.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG)

Full details for STS 2468 - Medicine, Culture, and Society

An introduction to the history and theory of writing systems from cuneiform to the alphabet, historical and new writing media, and the complex relationship of writing technologies to human language and culture. Through hands-on activities and collaborative work, students will explore the shifting definitions of "writing" and the diverse ways in which cultures through time have developed and used writing systems. We will also investigate the traditional divisions of "oral" vs. "written" and consider how digital technologies have affected how we use and think about writing in encoding systems from Morse code to emoji.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for STS 2812 - Hieroglyphs to HTML: History of Writing

Environmental problems, public health issues, scientific research-in each of these areas, communication plays a fundamental role. From the media to individual conversations, from technical journals to textbooks, from lab notes to the web, communication helps define scientifically based social issues and research findings. This course examines the institutional and intellectual contexts, processes, and practical constraints on communication in the sciences.

Catalog Distribution: (SSC-AS) (SBA-AG)

Full details for STS 2851 - Communication, Environment, Science, and Health

Biology and biotechnology are major influences on modern life. In addition, socio-political and historical conditions have shaped biological research and its applications in medicine, agriculture, environmental science, etc. Life science research is itself a social process involving complex human dynamics, different kinds of work and an array of social and natural systems. The course aims to introduce students to critical science and technology studies (S&TS) perspectives on the knowledge and practices of life sciences. The course is designed to prepare students for more advanced courses in the Biology & Society and S&TS majors, but students who do not plan to take further courses in those subjects can get critical insight into biology's profound role in both science and society.

Catalog Distribution: (SSC-AS) (D-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for STS 3011 - Life Sciences and Society

This course surveys a range of ethical issues that arise in professional engineering, and provides discussion-based practice in analyzing and addressing them. Using normative frameworks from professional codes, philosophical ethics, value-sensitive design, feminist theory, and science & technology studies, the course engages with a series of historical, current, and fictional case studies, across a wide variety of engineering disciplines. Specific topics to be discussed may include: privacy, consumer rights, smart cities, geoengineering, artificial intelligence, and cloning. Instruction is through a mix of lectures and discussions.

Catalog Distribution: (ETM-AS, SSC-AS) (KCM-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for STS 3601 - Ethical Issues in Engineering Practice

This course reviews the changing relations between science, technology, and the state in America, focusing on the period from 1960 to the present. We will explore science-intensive policy controversies. We will also look at how science and technology are used in different institutional settings, such as Congress, the court system, and regulatory agencies. Among other issues, we will examine the tension between the concept of science as an autonomous system for producing knowledge and the concept of science as entangled with interest groups.

Catalog Distribution: (SSC-AS) (SBA-AG)

Full details for STS 3911 - Science in American Politics

This course explores what artificial intelligence (AI) can teach us about human storytelling. We'll tackle this question through a two-pronged approach: story understanding and story generation. Students will explore how AI and machine learning technologies have revolutionized our approach to analyzing narratives as well as computational methods and concepts for modeling stories, moving towards a broader understanding of storytelling's societal effects.

Catalog Distribution: (SDS-AS)

Full details for STS 3940 - AI and Storytelling

Applications for research projects are accepted by individual STS faculty members. Students may enroll for 1–4 credits in STS 3991 with written permission of the faculty supervisor and may elect either the letter grade or the S–U option. Information on faculty research, scholarly activities, and undergraduate opportunities are available in the Science & Technology Studies office, 303 Morrill Hall. Independent study credits may not be used in completion of the major requirements.

Full details for STS 3991 - Undergraduate Independent Study

This seminar course introduces students to the studies of science, technology, and medicine in East Asia, aiming to cultivate a foundational understanding of the field while exploring key topics relevant to the region. Each year, the course themes vary; this year, the focus is on nature, knowledge, sensory media, and the construction of the human body. As a reading and writing intensive course, it challenges students to engage deeply with the material and articulate their insights through rigorous analysis. In doing so, students learn to appreciate the complex power dynamics at play as science and technology interact with a diverse range of actors, tracing intricate trajectories across national, transnational, and global networks.

Catalog Distribution: (SSC-AS)

Full details for STS 4020 - Science, Medicine, and Media Technologies in East Asia

This experimental, collaborative and seminar-based class will explore the material ethics of computing – the ways in which computing rests upon, emerges from, and ultimately returns to the earth, with deep and sometimes negative implications for sustainability, equity and justice in a rapidly changing world. Drawing on journalistic sources and academic fields ranging from anthropology, philosophy, public policy and environmental ethics to law, science and technology studies and human-computer interaction, the course will examine problems of computing-related sourcing and extraction, energy and consumption, and waste and repair, and how these are distributed and experienced in vastly different ways by different social groups and actors. Cases and examples will be drawn from near-to-hand and around the world.

Full details for STS 4260 - Computing On Earth: Planetary Dimensions and Consequence of Computing

The working of the human body is a universal phenomenon, yet different medical traditions have vastly different conceptions of what a body is. How can something so intimate and tangible like the body be understood so contrastingly in medicine across the world? With examples from classical Greek and ancient Chinese medicine to contemporary practices in biomedicine, Ayurveda, Unani and others, the course questions the everyday, taken for granted assumptions like the distinction between mind and the body, or what counts as a healthy body. It then explores how these multiple perceptions of the body in medicine are often culturally informed and are deeply linked with experiences of personhood and identity.

Catalog Distribution: (ETM-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, KCM-AG)

Full details for STS 4412 - Conceptions of the Body in Medicine and Healing

How does gender, sexuality, race, and class matter in natural, medical, and technical sciences? How might orangutans, surgery, and digital imaging all be feminist subjects of interest? This seminar will examine foundational ideas in feminist science and technology studies and engage its emerging scholarship.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS) (D-AG)

Full details for STS 4440 - Feminist Science Studies

Grounded in anthropological and interdisciplinary analyses of policing, prisons, and security, this course aims to account for how carcerality shapes our worlds. Attentive to specificity and variability across place and time, we will consider how carceral logics take hold and expand, and how they are contested and reimagined. We will pay particular attention to the interrelatedness of race and carcerality; lived experiences of carcerality, including those of people imprisoned in various contexts and those engaged in carceral work; the intersections between carcerality and science and technology; and abolitionist frameworks that address the limitations and constitutive oppressions of carcerality as they radically reimagine other possibilities.

Full details for STS 4476 - Carceral Worlds: Policing, Prisons, and Securitization

Explores the structure, meanings, and implications of "public communication of science and technology" (PCST). Examines the contexts in which PCST occurs, looks at motivations and constraints of those involved in producing information about science for nonprofessional audiences, and analyzes the functions of PCST. Ties existing ideas about PCST to general communication research and leads to developing new knowledge about PCST.

Catalog Distribution: (SSC-AS)

Full details for STS 4661 - Public Communication of Science and Technology

A "glitch" is when something goes "wrong" in digital media—sometimes, however, it is precisely when something "fails" that can tell us about the structures and forces that underlie that media. In this course we'll be exploring a wide variety of examples of how media creators, artists, hackers, game developers, Deaf and disability activists, and other marginalized groups from across the world (with a particular focus on Japan) have used "glitches" to tell us something new about the digital, looking at works ranging from electronic literature to online horror stories to experimental video games and installation art.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for STS 4703 - The Glitch: Errors, Disability, and the Edges of Digital Media

Students must register for the 4 credits each semester (BSOC 4991-BSOC 4992) for a total of 8 credits. After the first semester, students receive a letter grade of "R"; a letter grade for both semesters is submitted at the end of the second semester whether or not the student completes a thesis or is recommended for honors. Minimally, an honors thesis outline and bibliography should be completed during the first semester. In consultation with the advisors, the director of undergraduate studies will evaluate whether the student should continue working on an honors project. Students should note that these courses are to be taken in addition to those courses that meet the regular major requirements. If students do not complete the second semester of the honors project, they must change the first semester to independent  study to clear the "R" and receive a grade. Otherwise, the "R" will remain on their record and prevent them from graduating.

Full details for STS 4992 - Honors Project II

This seminar course introduces students to the studies of science, technology, and medicine in East Asia, aiming to cultivate a foundational understanding of the field while exploring key topics relevant to the region. Each year, the course themes vary; this year, the focus is on nature, knowledge, sensory media, and the construction of the human body. As a reading and writing intensive course, it challenges students to engage deeply with the material and articulate their insights through rigorous analysis. In doing so, students learn to appreciate the complex power dynamics at play as science and technology interact with a diverse range of actors, tracing intricate trajectories across national, transnational, and global networks.

Full details for STS 6020 - Science, Medicine, and Media Technologies in East Asia

In this Graduate seminar we will discuss the nature, politics and basic assumptions underlying qualitative research. We will examine a selection of qualitative methods ranging from interviewing, oral history, ethnography, participant observation, archival research and visual methods. We will also discuss the relationship between theory and method. All stages of a research project will be discussed - choice of research topic and appropriate methods; human subject concerns and permissions; issues regarding doing research; as well as the process of writing up and publishing research findings.

Full details for STS 6311 - Qualitative Research Methods for Studying Science, Technology, and Medicine

How does gender, sexuality, race, and class matter in natural, medical, and technical sciences? How might orangutans, surgery, and digital imaging all be feminist subjects of interest? This seminar will examine foundational ideas in feminist science and technology studies and engage its emerging scholarship.

Full details for STS 6440 - Feminist Science Studies

Valuation is a pervasive feature of contemporary life. Professors, start-ups, immigrants, intelligence, insurance premiums, and human lives: almost everything these days is subject to some form of more or less methodical assessment. This seminar examines valuation as a socio-technical phenomenon and asks how value and values are established, co-produced, maintained, subverted, institutionalized, and resisted. Through a mix of reading, writing, and activities, we shall engage with theoretical, historical, and contemporary studies of (e)valuation in science & technology studies (STS), but also draw on related areas like economic sociology, critical accounting studies, anthropology, and information science. Taken together, these ideas provide a powerful lens for analyzing what "counts" in cultures, organizations, and other forms of social life.

Full details for STS 6561 - Technologies of Valuation

A "glitch" is when something goes "wrong" in digital media—sometimes, however, it is precisely when something "fails" that can tell us about the structures and forces that underlie that media. In this course we'll be exploring a wide variety of examples of how media creators, artists, hackers, game developers, Deaf and disability activists, and other marginalized groups from across the world (with a particular focus on Japan) have used "glitches" to tell us something new about the digital, looking at works ranging from electronic literature to online horror stories to experimental video games and installation art.

Full details for STS 6703 - The Glitch: Errors, Disability, and the Edges of Digital Media

Applications and information are available in 303 Morrill Hall.

Full details for STS 6991 - Graduate Independent Study

The field of Science & Technology Studies (STS) has called attention to the contingent and socially embedded character of knowledge and technology. This seminar explores the consequences of these findings for the analysis of politics, considering such issues as trust and skepticism, political and legal agency, knowledge ordering the politics of democratic societies. What role does technical knowledge play in underwriting democracy? What problems of legitimacy arise from the interpretive flexibility of knowledge? How are stable settlements (sometimes) achieved in contexts of contingency? How are science and technology implicated in structuring power relations and shaping relationships between citizens and the state? This year the special focus of the seminar will focus on questions about the allocation of control over knowledge.

Full details for STS 7001 - Science Studies and the Politics of Science

The goal of this year-long course is to train students in the process of conducting research in STS, providing hands on experience and discussions of the research process. Students will plan and execute an appropriately scaled empirical research project in STS and complete a "second-year paper" by the end of the Spring semester. They will refine initial research concepts into more specific research questions; review literature relevant to their topic; identify data sources and collect data and materials; address research ethics and obtain IRB approval (if needed); manage the inevitable contingencies of research; and write and revise their second-year papers.

Full details for STS 7007 - STS Research II: A Course for Second-Year PhD Students in the Field

Grounded in anthropological and interdisciplinary analyses of policing, prisons, and security, this course aims to account for how carcerality shapes our worlds. Attentive to specificity and variability across place and time, we will consider how carceral logics take hold and expand, and how they are contested and reimagined. We will pay particular attention to the interrelatedness of race and carcerality; lived experiences of carcerality, including those of people imprisoned in various contexts and those engaged in carceral work; the intersections between carcerality and science and technology; and abolitionist frameworks that address the limitations and constitutive oppressions of carcerality as they radically reimagine other possibilities.

Full details for STS 7476 - Carceral Worlds: Policing, Prisons, and Securitization

The Proseminar in Peace Studies offers a multidisciplinary review of issues related to peace and conflict at the graduate level. The course is led by the director of the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies and is based on the Institute's weekly seminar series, featuring outside visitors and Cornell faculty. 

Full details for STS 7937 - Proseminar in Peace Studies

Politicians, scientists, and citizens worldwide face many environmental issues today, but they are neither simple nor straightforward. Moreover, there are many ways to understand how we have, do, and could value the environment from animal rights and wise use to deep ecology and ecofeminism. This class acquaints students with some of the challenging moral issues that arise in the context of environmental management and policy-making, both in the past and the present. Environmental concerns also highlight important economic, epistemological, legal, political, and social issues in assessing our moral obligations to nature as well as other humans. This course examines various perspectives expressed in both contemporary and historical debates over environmental ethics by exploring four central questions: What is nature? Who counts in environmental ethics? How do we know nature? Whose nature?

Catalog Distribution: (ETM-AS, SSC-AS) (KCM-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for BSOC 2061 - Ethics and the Environment

The actions of people are crucial to environmental well-being. This course addresses the interrelationships between social phenomena and the natural (i.e., biophysical) environment. It is intended to (1) increase student awareness of these interconnections in their everyday lives; (2) introduce students to a variety of social science perspectives, including sociology, economics, psychology, and political science, that help us make sense of these connections; (3) identify the contributions of each of these perspectives to our understanding of environmental problems; and (4) discuss how natural resource management and environmental policy reflect these perspectives.

Catalog Distribution: (SSC-AS) (SBA-AG)

Full details for BSOC 2201 - Society and Natural Resources

How does literary language depict the experience of physical suffering? Can a poem or a novel palliate pain, illness, even the possibility of death? From darkly comic narratives of black plague to the rise and fall of hysteria to depictions of the AIDS crisis, this course examines literature centered on medical practices from the early modern period through the twentieth century. Why have medical practices changed, and how do writers address their political, social, and ideological implications? Readings will include a broad range of genres, including poetry (Dickinson, Whitman, Keats), fiction (McEwan, Chekhov, Gilman, Kafka, Camus), theater (Kushner), nonfiction prose (Woolf, Freud), and critical theory (Foucault, Scarry, Canguilhem, Sontag).

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for BSOC 2350 - Literature and Medicine

Medicine has become the language and practice through which we address a broad range of both individual and societal complaints. Interest in this medicalization of life may be one of the reasons that medical anthropology is currently the fastest-growing subfield in anthropology. This course encourages students to examine concepts of disease, suffering, health, and well-being in their immediate experience and beyond. In the process, students will gain a working knowledge of ecological, critical, phenomenological, and applied approaches used by medical anthropologists. We will investigate what is involved in becoming a doctor, the sociality of medicines, controversies over new medical technologies, and the politics of medical knowledge. The universality of biomedicine, or hospital medicine, will not be taken for granted, but rather we will examine the plurality generated by the various political, economic, social, and ethical demands under which biomedicine has developed in different places and at different times. In addition, biomedical healing and expertise will be viewed in relation to other kinds of healing and expertise. Our readings will address medicine in North America as well as other parts of the world. In class, our discussions will return regularly to consider the broad diversity of kinds of medicine throughout the world, as well as the specific historical and local contexts of biomedicine.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG)

Full details for BSOC 2468 - Medicine, Culture, and Society

This lecture course serves as an introduction to the historical study of humanity's interrelationship with the natural world. Environmental history is a quickly evolving field, taking on increasing importance as the environment itself becomes increasingly important in world affairs. During this semester, we'll examine the sometimes unexpected ways in which "natural" forces have shaped human history (the role of germs, for instance, in the colonization of North America); the ways in which human beings have shaped the natural world (through agriculture, urbanization, and industrialization, as well as the formation of things like wildlife preserves); and the ways in which cultural, scientific, political, and philosophical attitudes toward the environment have changed over time. This is designed as an intensely interdisciplinary course: we'll view history through the lenses of ecology, literature, art, film, law, anthropology, and geography. Our focus will be on the United States, but, just as environmental pollutants cross borders, so too will this class, especially toward the end, when we attempt to put U.S. environmental history into a geopolitical context. This course is meant to be open to all, including non-majors and first-year students.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for BSOC 2581 - Environmental History

Biology and biotechnology are major influences on modern life. In addition, socio-political and historical conditions have shaped biological research and its applications in medicine, agriculture, environmental science, etc. Life science research is itself a social process involving complex human dynamics, different kinds of work and an array of social and natural systems. The course aims to introduce students to critical science and technology studies (S&TS) perspectives on the knowledge and practices of life sciences. The course is designed to prepare students for more advanced courses in the Biology & Society and S&TS majors, but students who do not plan to take further courses in those subjects can get critical insight into biology's profound role in both science and society.

Catalog Distribution: (SSC-AS) (D-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for BSOC 3011 - Life Sciences and Society

Bioarchaeology is the study of human remains from archaeological sites. Like forensic scientists at the scene of the crime, bioarchaeologists search for clues embedded in human bone and mummified tissues to reconstruct how ancient peoples lived and died. As a dynamic living system, the human skeleton responds not only to hormones that govern human development but also to physiological stress brought on by disease, malnutrition, and trauma. The human body is also an artifact molded by cultural understandings of gender, prestige, self-expression, and violence. In this course, students will learn the scientific techniques for estimating skeletal age and sex, diagnosing pathology, and reconstructing diet and migration patterns. This course emphasizes the critical integration of biological and cultural evidence for understanding past individuals and societies.  

Catalog Distribution: (BIO-AS, SSC-AS) (OPHLS-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for BSOC 3235 - Bioarchaeology

Projects under the direction of a Biology and Society faculty member are encouraged as part of the program of study within the student's concentration area. Applications for research projects are accepted by individual faculty members. Students may enroll for 1 to 4 credits in BSOC 3751 Independent Study with written permission of the faculty supervisor and may elect either the letter grade or the S-U option. Students may elect to do an independent study project as an alternative to, or in advance of, an honors project. Information on faculty research, scholarly activities, and undergraduate opportunities are available in the Biology and Society Office, 303 Morrill Hall. Independent study credits may not be used in completion of the major requirements.

Full details for BSOC 3751 - Independent Study

The working of the human body is a universal phenomenon, yet different medical traditions have vastly different conceptions of what a body is. How can something so intimate and tangible like the body be understood so contrastingly in medicine across the world? With examples from classical Greek and ancient Chinese medicine to contemporary practices in biomedicine, Ayurveda, Unani and others, the course questions the everyday, taken for granted assumptions like the distinction between mind and the body, or what counts as a healthy body. It then explores how these multiple perceptions of the body in medicine are often culturally informed and are deeply linked with experiences of personhood and identity.

Catalog Distribution: (ETM-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, KCM-AG)

Full details for BSOC 4412 - Conceptions of the Body in Medicine and Healing

Therapeutic knowledge and practice in Africa have changed dynamically over the past century. Yet, questions about healing continue to be questions about the intimate ways that power works on bodies. Accounts of healing and medicine on the continent describe ongoing struggles over what counts as knowledge and who has the authority to intervene in social and physical threats. This class will discuss the expansion of biomedicine in Africa, the continuities and changes embodied in traditional medicine, and the shifting relationship between medicine, science and law. Our readings with trace how colonialism, post-independence nationalism, international development, environmental change and globalization have shaped the experience of illness, debility and misfortune today, as well as the possibilities for life, the context of care, and the meaning of death.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SSC-AS) (CA-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for BSOC 4682 - Medicine and Healing in Africa

A "glitch" is when something goes "wrong" in digital media—sometimes, however, it is precisely when something "fails" that can tell us about the structures and forces that underlie that media. In this course we'll be exploring a wide variety of examples of how media creators, artists, hackers, game developers, Deaf and disability activists, and other marginalized groups from across the world (with a particular focus on Japan) have used "glitches" to tell us something new about the digital, looking at works ranging from electronic literature to online horror stories to experimental video games and installation art.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for BSOC 4703 - The Glitch: Errors, Disability, and the Edges of Digital Media

Students must register for the 4 credits each semester (BSOC 4991-BSOC 4992) for a total of 8 credits. After the first semester, students receive a letter grade of "R"; a letter grade for both semesters is submitted at the end of the second semester whether or not the student completes a thesis or is recommended for honors. Minimally, an honors thesis outline and bibliography should be completed during the first semester. In consultation with the advisors, the director of undergraduate studies will evaluate whether the student should continue working on an honors project. Students should note that these courses are to be taken in addition to those courses that meet the regular major requirements. If students do not complete the second semester of the honors project, they must change the first semester to independent  study to clear the "R" and receive a grade. Otherwise, the "R" will remain on their record and prevent them from graduating.

Full details for BSOC 4992 - Honors Project II

A "glitch" is when something goes "wrong" in digital media—sometimes, however, it is precisely when something "fails" that can tell us about the structures and forces that underlie that media. In this course we'll be exploring a wide variety of examples of how media creators, artists, hackers, game developers, Deaf and disability activists, and other marginalized groups from across the world (with a particular focus on Japan) have used "glitches" to tell us something new about the digital, looking at works ranging from electronic literature to online horror stories to experimental video games and installation art.

Full details for BSOC 6703 - The Glitch: Errors, Disability, and the Edges of Digital Media