When Facts are Stranger than Fiction: Power, Knowledge, and the Social Construction of Reality

How do we know what we know—and how do we know what we don’t know? Why do some forms of knowledge carry authority while others are ignored, silenced, challenged, or dismissed? How and why can information that seems like common sense to one person end up sounding like a myth to another? From surveys to ethnography, interviews to experiments, this class will consider how knowledge is historically situated and socially produced. Students will gain new tools to understand, critically evaluate, and produce more rigorous data, methods, and theories about the world around us.