Technoscientific Futures
Eugene Lang College Lib Arts: Anthropology
CRN: 15730
Credits: 4
Today, science and technology are being drawn on to address planetary-wide concerns (climate/environment, socio-political issues, capitalism, etc.) that are becoming ever-more intimately entwined with our everyday lives. This course turns to ethnographic methods to critically engage with this current context and the potential futures being created. The class is centered around four themes: Body, Infrastructures, Speculations, and Design. Questions this course dives into are: How do we experience technoscientific phenomena, objects, and logics in our everyday lives? What relations do they reveal about our bodies, environments, and institutional systems? How can we cultivate skills to critically, creatively, and kindly engage with the futures emerging from the technoscientific? This class is designed to provide various avenues for critical and creative inquiry and analysis. It balances theory and method, while pushing us, as scholars and people of the world, to engage with it from our own situated experiences and positions. This course thinks with scholars such as Donna Haraway, Andrea Ballestero, and Ruha Benjamin, to navigate various technoscientific networks and configurations, as well as our responses to them. This course is grounded in the ethos that we all have our own understandings, approaches, and experiences of the world around us. Drawing on anthropological ethnographic methods—such as observation, conversation, and multimodal storytelling—will be amongst the primary tools we will turn to do this investigatory work and develop individual projects. Course materials will range from articles and book chapters, to podcasts, short videos, and images. They are also (as much as possible) transnational and intersectional. Students will be asked to do "deep reading." This means, reading the materials slowly and taking notes, or reading materials multiple times to truly absorb and form independent opinions of the piece. Whether the course material of the week is more "theoretical" or "methodological," both are intended to push us to question how we consume and integrate knowledge as well as how that affects our analyses and our corresponding articulations of it. Course assessments will build on each other and are deliberately intended to draw on different ways of representing our analyses and observations.
College: Eugene Lang College Lib Arts (LC)
Department: Anthropology (ANT)
Campus: New York City (GV)
Course Format: Seminar (R)
Modality: In-Person
Max Enrollment: 18
Add/Drop Deadline: February 3, 2025 (Monday)
Online Withdrawal Deadline: April 15, 2025 (Tuesday)
Seats Available: Yes
Status: Open*
* Status information is updated every few minutes. The status of this course may have changed since the last update. Open seats may have restrictions that will prevent some students from registering. Updated: 6:06am EST 12/13/2024