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.

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

This course offers a multidisciplinary introductory survey of the constructions and uses of ideas and practices of race from the 15th century to the present. The first third explores the question of when a history of race might properly begin. Were ancient peoples racist? What of the Middle Ages? What were the relationships between religion and race; race and slavery; and race and color symbolism? The second third explores the question of whether there is a modern concept of race that is different from earlier race concepts. How do we account for races versus racialized people? How do signifiers like gender, sexuality, disability and nation impact the process of racialization? What are the means and methods through which racial ideas circulated? …. The final part of the course… considers the ways that contemporary processes of racialization operate through political and economic institutions to structure everyday life and politics. We will examine modes of power and agency among peoples who have experienced racialized oppression, even while assessing the ways powerful institutions have shaped their lives.

Full details for STS 1140 - What's the Big Idea? Race

Evolution is the central unifying concept in biology. This course examines evolution as a science and places it in an historical context. Classes focus on descent with modification, natural selection, evolutionary genetics, the history of the earth, the information content of the fossil record, and diversification processes. The science of evolutionary biology is presented in the context of a broader history of ideas in science. The course also explores the importance of evolutionary thinking in the 21st century, including antibiotic and pesticide resistance, personalized genomics, human evolution, and evolutionary ecology. Courses of Study: Intended for students with no background in college biology.

Full details for STS 1180 - Evolution

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.

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?

Full details for STS 2061 - Ethics and the Environment

Science fiction is not merely a literary genre but a whole way of being, thinking, and acting in the modern world. This course explores classic and contemporary science fiction from Frankenstein to The Hunger Games alongside a rich array of fiction and films from Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America. Our discussions will position these works vis-?is seminal thinkers, ranging from Plato to Descartes and Donna Haraway to Paul Crutzen, who ask the same questions as science fiction does about our selves, our world, and our future.

Full details for STS 2131 - Science Fiction

The course aims to put the current AI “revolution” in historical context by examining in depth the so-called first industrial revolution, which began in Britain and spread around the world from c. 1780-1880. Covers major debates over the causes and consequences of this global economic and social transformation. Special attention will be paid to key topics within current debates about AI and society. Example topics include: the idea of "progress," cultures and ethics of innovation, the politics and economics of new technology, the meaning and social value of work, technological determinism, the state-corporate relationship, ideologies and practices of resistance movements. Note: Tuesday class sessions are 2.5hr collective study halls and Thursday class sessions are 50-minute lectures.

Full details for STS 2316 - Debating Technological Revolutions: The Steam Engine vs. AI

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?

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.

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. (ARKEO-COS)

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.

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

Humans have fraught relationships with the animals, plants, land, water-even geological processes-around us. In this course, we will examine how people make and respond to environmental change and how groups of people form, express, struggle over, and work out environmental concerns. We will probe how environmental injustices, demographic change, economic activity, government action, social movements, and varied ways of thinking shape human-environmental relationships. Through our conversations, we will explore possibilities for durable ways of living together in our social and material world. Our goal in this course is to give you knowledge, analytical tools, and expressive skills that help you feel confident to address environmental concerns as a social scientist and a citizen.

Full details for STS 3241 - Environmental Sociology

This class considers the relationship between the body, knowledge and experience. We investigate the production and reproduction of the body across different times and spaces. Students examine specific histories through which the physical body came to be the purview of science, and its meaning the purview of social science and the humanities. In addition, students study other ways of knowing and being that capture the relations though which bodies emerge as simultaneously material and social. Ethnographies concerning healing and medicine, discipline and labor, governance and religion, aesthetics and desire offer alternative ways of approaching the body as both subject and object. Together, we will consider the historicity of the body, and in so doing explore questions of gender, race, class, sexuality, and coloniality.

Full details for STS 3460 - Anthropology of the Body

Computers are powerful tools for working, playing, thinking, and living. Laptops, PDAs, webcams, cell phones, and iPods are not just devices, they also provide narratives, metaphors, and ways of seeing the world. This course critically examines how computing technology and society shape each other and how this plays out in our everyday lives. Identifies how computers, networks, and information technologies reproduce, reinforce, and rework existing cultural trends, norms, and values. We will look at the values embodied in the cultures of computing and consider alternative ways to imagine, build, and work with information technologies.

Full details for STS 3561 - Computing Cultures

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.

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.

Full details for STS 3911 - Science in American Politics

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

Automated scoring systems play an increasingly important role in ordering our lives. Whether we want to obtain a loan, rent an apartment, be found in search results, qualify for government assistance, or make the shortlist for a job - all of these decisions involve a range of computational techniques, including large-scale data analytics and predictive algorithms. So what to do when things go wrong and individuals feel mistreated by these systems? The Due Process Clinic focuses on the capacities of ordinary people to cope with, understand, and challenge automated scoring systems. It involves a mixture of hands-on fieldwork and seminar discussions, ranging from social and technical analyses of scoring practices to the ethical challenges of representing data subjects.

Full details for STS 4040 - Digital Due Process Clinic

This seminar investigates the period of the so-called “scientific revolution.” As a foundational narrative of modernity, the scientific revolution posits a radical break from a medieval past, best exemplified through the emergence of the heliocentric system of astronomy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. In this course, students will critically explore how the notion of a “scientific revolution” emerged; why many historians today question it; and what alternatives may be put in its place. The bulk of this course will involve reading scientific texts from the period, including astronomy, medicine, natural history, alchemy, and magic. No science background is required. (HIST-HEU, HIST-HPE)

Full details for STS 4116 - The Scientific Revolution

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.

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

This course examines the profound and far-reaching politics and dynamics generated by ocean technologies and infrastructures in this age of globalization and Anthropocene. It adopts an empirical and ethnographic approach and draws upon disciplines across natural and social sciences. Through multimodal course materials, scaffolding exercises, and reflective class activities, we will be looking into the bio-, geo-, and socio-environmental politics and dynamics of contemporary and emergent ocean technologies and infrastructures. The scope of the course is global with a significant coverage of Asia due to its role being a maritime epicenter. Through this course, students will gain critical knowledge and perspective to understand and navigate exigent oceanic issues, sociotechnical systems of power, and the planetary future. (ASIAN-SC)

Full details for STS 4506 - Ocean Technopolitics and Global Futures

DNA has become a pervasive feature of our lives, and a critical object through which race and justice are imagined and contested. DNA shapes how we think about ancestral pasts, medical futures, identity, citizenship and belonging, and standards of evidence. This course considers how each of these concepts articulates with DNA, investigating each in turn as a form of genetic afterlives that reconfigures race, justice, and the relationship between them.

Full details for STS 4670 - Race and Justice After DNA

This course focuses on one of early modern Europe’s most influential and contentious institutions: the university. Universities were central pillars of premodern European society and played host to some of the period’s most consequential debates about politics, religion, and science. Universities were also the subject of controversy in their own right. By 1450, new technology, scientific and geographical discoveries, and religious upheavals prompted heated debates about the content and purpose of university education. Through close examination of texts and images, we will explore how professors, students, civic authorities, and religious leaders grappled to decide major questions about the universities’ future: who should control universities? Who should teach there? Should education be censored? Should new technologies – like printed books and telescopes – be integrated into teaching? (HIST-HEU, HIST-HPE)

Full details for STS 4685 - Early Modern Universities

The title of this course uses the single word “crisis” to pose two overlapping questions: First, how do scientists cope with the threats to their credibility posed by the surge of populism and other expert-critical movements? And second, how do scientists respond to political, epidemiological, or other seemingly external crises that demand the production of timely knowledge? This course will begin to answer these entangled questions by unpacking the tools that scientists and other experts use to assert their credibility and tame crises. Then, we will consider the way that social movements—including “citizen scientists,” HIV/AIDS activists, and “biohackers”—use crises as opportunities to contest, mistrust, or reaffirm experts’ authority. Finally, we will study how these disputes are shaped by regulatory bureaucracies and the legal system. Throughout the course, students will apply concepts from the interdisciplinary field of science & technology studies (STS) to ongoing “crises” including climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the rise of artificial intelligence.

Full details for STS 4753 - Science in Crisis?

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 graduate seminar offers an introduction to environmental history: the study of human interactions with nonhuman nature in the past. It is a subfield within the historical discipline that has complex roots, an interdisciplinary orientation, and synergies with fields across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. This seminar explores environmental history on three levels: historically, historiographically, and theoretically. What are some of the key historical processes that have shaped humans’ historical relationships with the environment at various scales? How have environmental historians (re)conceptualized the field as it has developed over the past half-century? What analytic concepts have environmental historians used to understand human-natural relations? Select themes include ecological imperialism, labor and work, body/environment, global environmental history, “mainstreaming” environmental history, and the Anthropocene.

Full details for STS 6121 - Graduate Seminar in Environmental History

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

In this graduate level course, we will take the body and bodiliness as spaces of ethnographic engagement and questioning. Discussion, text and other materials in this class will invite students to consider the ways that the body (as an epistemological and ontological object) is transformed through a variety of scientific, economic and political projects. Because meditations on the body have rested -- implicitly or explicitly -- on theoretical and methodological approaches to experience, students will find themselves exploring histories of bodily senses, appetites, and capacities. Ultimately, our inquiry into contests over and reflections on the body and bodiliness aim to open up broader anthropological questions about knowledge, authority, agency, sovereignties, and material life.

Full details for STS 6460 - Bodies and Bodiliness

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

This graduate seminar invites students to critically engage with sound not merely as an object of analysis but as a material practice embedded in labor, technology, and creative experimentation. Drawing on classical and cutting-edge scholarship from STS, media studies, engineering, medicine, and game studies, the course explores how sound is produced, mediated, and experienced across diverse contexts.

Full details for STS 7319 - Reassembling Sound: Material, Labor, and Play

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. (GOVT-IR)

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?

Full details for BSOC 2061 - Ethics and the Environment

Science fiction is not merely a literary genre but a whole way of being, thinking, and acting in the modern world. This course explores classic and contemporary science fiction from Frankenstein to The Hunger Games alongside a rich array of fiction and films from Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America. Our discussions will position these works vis-?is seminal thinkers, ranging from Plato to Descartes and Donna Haraway to Paul Crutzen, who ask the same questions as science fiction does about our selves, our world, and our future.

Full details for BSOC 2131 - Science Fiction

Throughout most of the human career, people survived by hunting and gathering wild foods. The advent of food production is one of the most profound changes in history and prehistory. This course examines the current evidence for the appearance and spread of agriculture - plant and animal domestication - around the world. We will consider definitions of agriculture and domestication, the conditions under which it arises, the consequences for those who adopt it, and why it has spread over most of the world. (ARKEO-COS)

Full details for BSOC 2211 - Early Agriculture

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.

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. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for BSOC 2581 - Environmental History

These seminars offer an introduction to the humanities by exploring historical, cultural, social, and political themes. Students will explore themes in critical dialogue with a range of texts and media drawn from the arts, humanities, and/or humanistic social sciences. Guest speakers, including Cornell faculty and Society for the Humanities Fellows, will present from different disciplines and points of view. Students will make field trips to relevant local sites and visit Cornell special collections and archives. Students enrolled in these seminars will have the opportunity to participate in additional programming related to the annual focus theme of Cornell's Society for the Humanities and the Humanities Scholars Program for undergraduate humanities research. (ARKEO-COS)

Full details for BSOC 2750 - Introduction to Humanities

The course will investigate all aspects of non-human primate life. Based on the fundamentals of evolutionary theory, group and inter-individual behaviors will be presented. In addition, an understanding of group structure and breeding systems will be reached through an evaluation of ecological constraints imposed on primates in different habitats. Subjects include: primate taxonomy, diet and foraging, predation, cooperation and competition, social ontogeny, kinship, and mating strategies.

Full details for BSOC 3390 - Primate Behavior and Ecology with Emphasis on African Apes

This class considers the relationship between the body, knowledge and experience. We investigate the production and reproduction of the body across different times and spaces. Students examine specific histories through which the physical body came to be the purview of science, and its meaning the purview of social science and the humanities. In addition, students study other ways of knowing and being that capture the relations though which bodies emerge as simultaneously material and social. Ethnographies concerning healing and medicine, discipline and labor, governance and religion, aesthetics and desire offer alternative ways of approaching the body as both subject and object. Together, we will consider the historicity of the body, and in so doing explore questions of gender, race, class, sexuality, and coloniality.

Full details for BSOC 3460 - Anthropology of the Body

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

This seminar investigates the period of the so-called “scientific revolution.” As a foundational narrative of modernity, the scientific revolution posits a radical break from a medieval past, best exemplified through the emergence of the heliocentric system of astronomy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. In this course, students will critically explore how the notion of a “scientific revolution” emerged; why many historians today question it; and what alternatives may be put in its place. The bulk of this course will involve reading scientific texts from the period, including astronomy, medicine, natural history, alchemy, and magic. No science background is required. (HIST-HEU, HIST-HPE)

Full details for BSOC 4116 - The Scientific Revolution

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.

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

This course examines the profound and far-reaching politics and dynamics generated by ocean technologies and infrastructures in this age of globalization and Anthropocene. It adopts an empirical and ethnographic approach and draws upon disciplines across natural and social sciences. Through multimodal course materials, scaffolding exercises, and reflective class activities, we will be looking into the bio-, geo-, and socio-environmental politics and dynamics of contemporary and emergent ocean technologies and infrastructures. The scope of the course is global with a significant coverage of Asia due to its role being a maritime epicenter. Through this course, students will gain critical knowledge and perspective to understand and navigate exigent oceanic issues, sociotechnical systems of power, and the planetary future. (ASIAN-SC)

Full details for BSOC 4506 - Ocean Technopolitics and Global Futures

DNA has become a pervasive feature of our lives, and a critical object through which race and justice are imagined and contested. DNA shapes how we think about ancestral pasts, medical futures, identity, citizenship and belonging, and standards of evidence. This course considers how each of these concepts articulates with DNA, investigating each in turn as a form of genetic afterlives that reconfigures race, justice, and the relationship between them.

Full details for BSOC 4670 - Race and Justice After DNA

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