Time Schedule:
Yu Huang
ANTH 473
Seattle Campus
Introduces the study of science and technology as social and cultural phenomena. Considers both theoretical and methodological questions. Readings include key texts from interdisciplinary field of science studies as well as selected ethnographic texts. Examples taken from U.S. society and other local contexts. Prerequisite: one 200-level ANTH course.
Class description
This course explores the political, social, and animal "turns" that undergird science studies in the recent decades. Situated in anthropology's emic and anti-essentialist standpoints, it seeks to interrogate how concepts of reason and modernity, value and abstraction, as well as virtuality and life have mediated and reconstructed societies and cultures that complicate the binary divides between nature and culture, intellectual and manual labor, as well as between human and post-humans. This is a difficult course which will require heavy reading and critical thinking, yet should produce considerable reward in terms of understanding historical and present relations between theory and ethnography.
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
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Class assignments and grading
