Cultures of Science and Technology

3 units

This seminar explores questions of theory, method, and ethics in the anthropology of science and technology. How is biomedicine changing what it is to be human? How can technologies and scientific practices be studied ethnographically? How are the politics of difference linked to the production of scientific knowledge? Through close reading of ethnographic texts and fieldwork experience both on-and off-line, we will investigate how scientific practice and technologcal innovation reorganize various aspects of human life on both global and local scales. Topics include the social construction of knowledge, the reproduction of racial categories in genomics, the cultures of cyberspace, the commidification of bodies in medical science, and the ways in which various technoscientific projects reshape natural and political orders in diverse locales.