Course Description

This course examines relationships among technology, culture, and politics in a variety of social and historical settings ranging from 19th century factories to 21st century techno dance floors, from colonial Melanesia to capitalist Massachusetts. We organize our discussions around three broad questions, corresponding to three syllabus themes: What cultural effects and risks follow from treating biology as technology? How have computers and information technologies changed the ways we think about ourselves? How are politics built into the infrastructures within which we live? We will be interested in how technologies have been used both to facilitate and undermine relations of inequality, and in whether technology has produced a better world, and for whom.

Required Books

Martin, Emily. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001 (first edition 1987). ISBN: 0807046450.

Petryna, Adriana. Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. ISBN: 0691090181.

Helmreich, Stefan. Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World. Updated Edition with a New Preface. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. ISBN: 0520207998.

Latour, Bruno. Aramis, or The Love of Technology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. ISBN: 0674043235.

Stephenson, Neal. The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. New York: Bantam Books, 1995. ISBN: 0553096095.

Assignments

Students will write three 5-7 page papers. Each represents 30% of the subject grade. No emailed papers accepted. Papers correspond to three thematic sections of the syllabus and will integrate class readings with a topic of each student's choosing. Students will also be evaluated on class participation, including discussion and in-class writing exercises (10% of subject grade). Punctual attendance is obligatory. There is no final.