Anthropology of Science, Technology and Data

4 credits · Undergraduate

This course provides an advanced introduction to key conceptual work in the anthropology of science, technology, and knowledge production. The course examines how truth-effects are produced in the world, and how people know what we know. It explores the social and political arrangements “built into” or materialized through the infrastructures and objects that help structure lives in the U.S. and globally. It asks how new information technology, media platforms, and data-rich practices change the questions of knowledge and truth. It examines such things as life by algorithm, data mining, the self-tracking movement (especially vis-à-vis health), and the infrastructures of “the cloud”.