Science, Technology & Society (STSC)
STSC 0013 A History of the University of Pennsylvania from the American Revolution to the Present
This course provides a well-contextualized journey through primary sources relating to the University of Pennsylvania from its inception as an idea to the present. Penn was both the first university and the first institution to combine the liberal arts and professional training in medicine. While the history of the university reflects broader patterns in American higher education, Penn nevertheless had its own unique trajectory in its relationship to the city of Philadelphia and to power in the United States. During our meetings, we will discuss the relationship between theoretical and practical sides of learning at the university, the nature of research, the changing structures of governance and its place in politics from the American Revolution to the Present.
Fall
1 Course Unit
STSC 0100 Emergence of Modern Science
During the last 500 years, science has emerged as a central and transformative force that continues to reshape everyday life in countless ways. This introductory course will survey the emergence of the scientific world view from the Renaissance through the end of the 20th century. By focusing on the life, work, and cultural contexts of those who created modern science, we will explore their core ideas and techniques, where they came from, what problems they solved, what made them controversial and exciting and how they relate to contemporary religious beliefs, politics, art, literature, and music. The course is organized chronologically and thematically. In short, this is a "Western Civ" course with a difference, open to students at all levels.
Fall
Also Offered As: HSOC 0100
1 Course Unit
STSC 0228 Studying Sex
The concept of “sex” has meant multiple things to science and medicine over the last few hundred years: a way of sorting bodies, a behavior to observe, a driving force behind reproduction and evolution, and a yardstick by which to measure normality. It has been both a binary of male and female, and a spectrum; both separate from gender, and inseparably entwined with it. It has been defined at different moments by anatomy, hormones, chromosomes, and even metabolism. In this course, we will explore how scientists have studied—and perhaps produced—the many-faceted thing called sex, and how historians have come to understand that past. This first-year seminar introduces students to primary source research; historical writing; and methods from both Science and Technology Studies (STS), and queer, trans, and feminist studies. Course materials will focus mainly on the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Fall
Also Offered As: GSWS 0228, HSOC 0228
1 Course Unit
STSC 0283 Medicine, Magic and Miracles
This course explores the nature of disease and the history of medical practice and healing in the medieval period, using methods from intellectual, cultural, and social history, as well as the life sciences, and incorporating material from Indonesia to England. The themes of this course include: 1) the diversity of healing practices and beliefs in this period; 2) specific rationalities of different methods of healing; 3) views of the human body and disease; 4) the wide array of practitioners that people turned to for medical care, including physicians, midwives, family members, herbalists, snake handlers, saints, and surgeons; 5) institutions of medicine, such as the hospital. Students will have their minds blown as they learn to question everything they thought they knew about how science and medicine work.
Fall
Also Offered As: HSOC 0283
1 Course Unit
STSC 0313 Cane and Able: Disability in America
Disability is a near universal experience, and yet it remains on the margins of most discussions concerning identity, politics, and popular culture. Using the latest works in historical scholarship, this seminar focuses on how disability has been experienced and defined in the past. We will explore various disabilities including those acquired at birth and those sustained by war, those visible to others and those that are invisible. For our purposes, disability will be treated as a cultural and historical phenomenon that has shaped American constructions of race, class, and gender, attitudes toward reproduction and immigration, ideals of technological progress, and notions of the natural and the normal.
Fall
Also Offered As: HSOC 0313
1 Course Unit
STSC 0343 Why Medical Interventions Work or Fail: A Search for Answers
The past is littered with interventions that worked or were thought to work that we hold in little regard today – from frontal lobotomies to bone marrow transplants for metastatic breast cancer. Since 1962 the FDA requires proof of efficacy for new drugs. Yet uncertainty surrounds the efficacy and safety of many drugs, technologies, and practices in use today. Will some future observer of today’s practices wonder, as we do about the bleeding and purging of traditional medicine, why we do the things we do? This course will go deep into the social history of modern Western biomedicine to make sense of the ideological, economic, technical, scientific, and social forces shaping the modern medical interventions and the work they do. Students will be introduced to the rewards and challenges of studying medicine as a social and historical process. Case studies of the efficacy of contemporary biomedical interventions will be enriched by in-class meetings with prominent social scientists, biomedical researchers, and clinicians, as well as some potential visits to clinics and historical sites. Each student will develop a research project or essay review related to the efficacy of medical interventions. Most students will likely explore a current or historical controversy over the efficacy and safety of a particular intervention. In addition, there will be two shorter writing assignments.
Fall
Also Offered As: HSOC 0343
1 Course Unit
STSC 0387 Epidemics in History
The twenty-first century has seen a proliferation of new pandemic threats, including SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika, and most recently the novel coronavirus called COVID-19. Our responses to these diseases are conditioned by historical experience. From the Black Death to cholera to AIDS, epidemics have wrought profound demographic, social, political, and cultural change all over the world. Through a detailed analysis of selected historical outbreaks, this seminar examines the ways in which different societies in different eras have responded in times of crisis. The class also analyzes present-day pandemic preparedness policy and responses to health threats ranging from influenza to bioterrorism.
Fall
Also Offered As: HSOC 0387
1 Course Unit
STSC 0400 Medicine in History
This course surveys the history of medical knowledge and practice from antiquity to the present. No prior background in the history of science or medicine is required. The course has two principal goals: (1)to give students a practical introduction to the fundamental questions and methods of the history of medicine, and (2)to foster a nuanced, critical understanding of medicine's complex role in contemporary society. The couse takes a broadly chronological approach, blending the perspectives of the patient,the physician,and society as a whole--recognizing that medicine has always aspired to "treat" healthy people as well as the sick and infirm. Rather than history "from the top down"or "from the bottom up,"this course sets its sights on history from the inside out. This means, first, that medical knowledge and practice is understood through the personal experiences of patients and caregivers. It also means that lectures and discussions will take the long-discredited knowledge and treatments of the past seriously,on their own terms, rather than judging them by todays's standards. Required readings consist largely of primary sources, from elite medical texts to patient diaries. Short research assignments will encourge students to adopt the perspectives of a range of actors in various historical eras.
Fall
Also Offered As: HIST 0876, HSOC 0400
1 Course Unit
STSC 0490 Comparative Medicine
This course explores the medical consequences of the interaction between Europe and the "non- West." It focuses on three parts of the world Europeans colonized: Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. Today's healing practices in these regions grew out of the interaction between the medical traditions of the colonized and those of the European colonizers. We therefore explore the nature of the interactions. What was the history of therapeutic practices that originated in Africa or South Asia? How did European medical practices change in the colonies? What were the effects of colonial racial and gender hierarchies on medical practice? How did practitioners of "non-Western" medicine carve out places for themselves? How did they redefine ancient traditions? How did patients find their way among multiple therapeutic traditions? How does biomedicine take a different shape when it is practiced under conditions of poverty, or of inequalities in power? How do today's medical problems grow out of this history? This is a fascinating history of race and gender, of pathogens and conquerors, of science and the body. It tells about the historical and regional roots of today's problems in international medicine.
Fall
Also Offered As: HSOC 0490
1 Course Unit
STSC 0600 Technology & Society
This class examines the relationship between technology and the societies in which different technologies emerge and are adopted (and adapted), with a focus on information and communication technologies from the invention of writing to LLMs. Topics include different definitions of information, different types of information storage and retrieval technologies (books, clocks), institutions associated with information and communication technology (archives, libraries), and the invention of computing and machine learning.
Spring
Also Offered As: HSOC 0600, SOCI 0600
1 Course Unit
STSC 0613 How Is AI Changing Higher Education?
This course will explore how generative AI and other forms of artificial intelligence are changing higher education. Topics include ethical questions about AI, how academic writing and publishing are changing in response to AI, and the historical and social contexts for adopting new educational technology. Students will use large language models (LLMs) and other AI tools to prepare for class, assess the educational value of AI tools for higher education, and discuss questions raised when individuals and institutions use AI. The class meetings will be organized using a structured, active, in-class learning or SAIL framework, so students will organize and lead many class activities. Sharing experiences and ideas about using AI will be foundational to the course. Students will use JeepyTA, an LLM-based teaching tool created by the Penn Center for Learning Analytics, to aid their learning and to gain practical experience using a generative AI model. We will approach AI as a technology that has the potential to improve learning, not to replace educational effort or to be used simply to complete assignments. We will consider the ethical problems and social risks, especially in the context of student use. Norms and expectations for using generative AI tools will be determined collaboratively by the students and instructor during the first week of class and subject to discussion and revision throughout the semester
Fall
1 Course Unit
STSC 0668 Rivers, Culture, Power
Rivers provide and divide, they constrict and connect. Although a fundamental source of prosperity and transit for human societies, they resist even the most sophisticated attempts at human control. This class examines rivers as movers of history—as sites of contestation and transformation around the globe—with a focus on how diverse societies have understood and used them. Topics include: irrigation and political power, flooding and course changes, scientific measurement of river systems, the twentieth-century rise of the concrete dam, subsequent movements towards undamming, and recent efforts to grapple with climate change. For first-year students only.
1 Course Unit
STSC 0823 Sport Science in the World
This seminar is designed for first-year students who are interested in some big questions related to the topic of "sport science." Sport science may seem to be just a niche field where teams of physiologists, psychologists, geneticists, engineers and others work to make already very athletic people go "faster, higher, stronger." On the other hand, the work of sport scientists intersects everyday with far-reaching questions about how categories of sex, age, race, disability, and nationality are defined, measured, challenged, or maintained. Sport scientists weigh in on debates over what kinds of physical activity or bodies are "clean," what kinds of performance are "natural" or even human, and what kinds of sporting spaces or equipment are fair. In this class we'll read and discuss historical and contemporary accounts of sport science in the world. My hope is that students will enter the class interested in sports and leave interested in sports and in gendered science, objectivity and standardization, the politics of big data and more.
Fall
Also Offered As: HSOC 0823
1 Course Unit
STSC 0883 Climate and Change
What is climate? This course examines this question by exploring the diverse perspectives of various peoples at different times and in diverse locations. We will then investigate how the myriad of conceptualizations of climate influenced a wide array of topics, including health, race, historical change, human destiny, and responses to environmental challenges. We will investigate the changing ideas surrounding climate by examining historical texts, scientific literature, and cultural artifacts. By the end of the course, students will have developed a nuanced understanding of the complex relationship between climate and human society. Students will also be able to reflect on how the historical and cultural contexts that inform interpretations of climate impact contemporary discussion surrounding climate change and solutions for addressing climate-related challenges.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: HSOC 0883
1 Course Unit
STSC 1101 Science and Literature
Science fiction has become the mythology of modern technological civilization, providing vivid means for imagining (and proclaiming) the shape of things to come. This interdisciplinary seminar will consider SF in multiple manifestations -- literature, film and TV shows, visual art and architecture. We will debate how the genre has shaped ideas about scientific knowledge, the position of humans in the universe, and our possible futures by examining themes including time travel, robots and androids, alien encounters, extraterrestrial journeys, and the nature of intelligent life. This seminar will consider SF from the perspective of the history of science and technology: critically and comparatively, with a primary focus on social and cultural contexts in addition to literary aspects.
Spring
Also Offered As: ENGL 1509
1 Course Unit
STSC 1120 Science Technology and War
In this survey we explore the relationships between technical knowledge and warin the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We attend particularly to the centrality of bodily injury in the history of war. Topics include changing interpretations of the machine gun as inhumane or acceptable; the cult of the battleship; banned weaponry; submarines and masculinity; industrialized war and total war; trench warfare and mental breakdown; the atomic bomb and Cold War; chemical warfare in Viet Nam; and "television war" in the 1990s.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: HSOC 1120
1 Course Unit
STSC 1151 Modern Biology and Social Implications
This course covers the history of biology in the 19th and 20th centuries, giving equal consideration to three dominant themes: evolutionary biology, classical genetics, and molecular biology. The course is intended for students with some background in the history of science as well as in biology, although no specific knowledge of either subject in required. We will have three main goals: first, to delineate the content of the leading biological theories and experimental practices of the past two centuries; second, to situate these theories and practices in their historical context, noting the complex interplay between them and the dominant social, political, and economic trends; and, third, to critically evaluate various methodological approaches to the history of science.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: HIST 0877
1 Course Unit
STSC 1160 Sustainability & Utopianism
This seminar explores how the humanities can contribute to discussions of sustainability. We begin by investigating the contested term itself, paying close attention to critics and activists who deplore the very idea that we should try to sustain our, in their eyes, dystopian present, one marked by environmental catastrophe as well as by an assault on the educational ideals long embodied in the humanities. We then turn to classic humanist texts on utopia, beginning with More's fictive island of 1517. The "origins of environmentalism" lie in such depictions of island edens (Richard Grove), and our course proceeds to analyze classic utopian tests from American, English, and German literatures. Readings extend to utopian visions from Europe and America of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as literary and visual texts that deal with contemporary nuclear and flood catastrophes. Authors include: Bill McKibben, Jill Kerr Conway, Christopher Newfield, Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Karl Marx, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Owens, William Morris, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ayn Rand, Christa Wolf, and others.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: COML 1160, ENGL 1579, ENVS 1050, GRMN 1160
1 Course Unit
STSC 1201 Darwin's Legacy: The Evolution of Evolution
How has one of the most foundational ideas in modern biology shaped life far beyond the life sciences? This course offers a history of evolution with an emphasis on the concept's social and cultural impacts. It begins with an overview of nineteenth-century articulations of the change of species over time, then traces through the present the role that evolution has played in racialization and colonialism, the development of eugenics and related social policy, the production of binary sex and gender, and the naturalization of reproductive heteronormativity, among other topics. Students will learn principles of history of science and Science and Technology Studies (STS) as they engage closely with primary sources and critical readings of scientific texts.
Spring
1 Course Unit
STSC 1600 The Information Age
We are said to live in an “information age.” Information technologies have been credited with ushering in an era of unprecedented information creation, collection, storage, and communication. We experience the impact of this firsthand: these technologies increasingly pervade our homes, our workplaces, our schools, our most private spaces. But what exactly do we mean when we speak of the information age? When and how did it come into being? What developments—social, economic, political, or technological—made the digital world possible? How do these fit in the longer history of technology and society? And how is all this different from earlier eras? In this course, we explore these questions by looking to the history of information, information technologies, and information sciences, a history that long predates the digital computer. Although, at the center of our story will be the development of new information technologies—from the printing press and the telegraph to the computer and of course the Internet—our focus will not primarily be on machines, but on people and how individuals conceptualized, contributed to, made sense of, and dealt with the many transformational changes that have shaped the contours of our modern digital world. We will explore forms of identity, knowledge, and community that have emerged within this information age. Our goal will be to deepen historical perspectives and build analytical tools to critically evaluate the role of information in our increasingly digital world today.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: SOCI 2951
1 Course Unit
STSC 1880 Environment and Society
This course examines contemporary environmental issues such as energy, waste, pollution, health, population, biodiversity and climate through a historical and critical lens. All of these issues have important material, natural and technical aspects; they are also inextricably entangled with human history and culture. To understand the nature of this entanglement, the course will introduce key concepts and theoretical frameworks from science and technology studies and the environmental humanities and social sciences.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: HSOC 1880
1 Course Unit
STSC 2012 Introduction to Data Analytics
In a time of abundant fake news and mis-information, it becomes ever important for students (for all, really!) to learn how to critically assess (and produce) robust empirical evidence to uncover patterns and trends about social life. The goal of this course is to do just that through the use of census microdata, video and photographs, with a focus on social inequality! Or, in other words…a first goal of this course is to introduce students to empirical work that will let them identify robust evidence on social inequality across a diverse set of topics and countries. A second goal of the course is to provide students with key analytical skills through working with microdata to uncover social inequality globally. Having exposure and hands-on experience with the correct tools to read (and produce) evidence on patterns and trends on social research is an important skill for students in any major. We will use publicly available census microdata on more than 100 countries from IPUMS and photographs from the Dollar Street Project. Students will work with a country, produce their own analysis and combine it with photographs and videos. As a Signature Course, a third key goal of the course is to teach students skills that will enable them to more easily read empirical work and write results more clearly and concisely. Students will practice reading academic research, do class exercises, write case studies, and complete a research paper/video/photo essay that will aid them in these goals.
Also Offered As: HSOC 2012, LALS 2012, SOCI 2020
1 Course Unit
STSC 2080 Science and Religion: Global Perspectives
This survey course provides a thematic overview of science and religion from antiquity to the present. We will treat well-known historical episodes, such as the emergence of Muslim theology, the Galileo Affair and Darwinism, but also look beyond them. This course is designed to cover all major faith traditions across the globe as well as non-traditional belief systems such as the New Age movement and modern Atheism
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
STSC 2146 Science and Technology in Modern East Asia
Technology from East Asia is ubiquitous in everyday life in the 21st century. You may be reading these very words on a device designed or assembled in Japan, China, South Korea, or Taiwan. The region, now a global center of research and innovation, contains some of the modern world’s most impressive technological and scientific achievements. It also exhibits some of the most distressing—from mass facial recognition surveillance in China to nuclear disaster in Japan. This course explores how this state of affairs has taken shape from the 19th century through the present. Topics include industrialization, military technology, science and the rise of nationalism, the proliferation of consumer electronics, and environmental engineering in a warming world.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: EALC 2502
1 Course Unit
STSC 2202 Journalistic Writing in Science, Technology, Society
This workshop is intended for students interested in using popular science writing to broaden public understanding of science, technology, and society. Good science writing helps the public understand how to judge scientific claims; students will hone journalistic skills such as how to research a topic; how to identify interviewees and conduct interviews; and how to redraft and edit. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: ENGL 3414
1 Course Unit
STSC 2227 Trauma and Healing in Historical Perspective
This course considers the diverse range of theories and topics related to trauma in the 20th and 21st centuries, looking to understand how trauma has been mobilized at different moments in history for political, social, and personal ends. The point of the course is not to simply support or deny trauma as an interpretive framework for human pain and suffering, but instead to look critically at how it emerged as an object of study for medical and scientific circles and the benefits and ramifications of those biomedical frameworks that were felt at the time and stay with us into the present. We also consider how trauma has been taken up by actors outside of medicine and science, including popular media, fiction and activist communities. Using frameworks from feminist science studies, disability studies, black studies and queer studies, alongside more traditional histories of psychiatry, medicine and technology, students think about such diverse topics as sexual violence, racial violence, domestic and familial abuse, theories of psychological development, memory and trust, citizenship, the criminal justice system, the effects of our environments, intergenerational effects of violence, embodiment, biomedical models of risk and disease and narratives of the self. At the heart of this course is an interest in how we should understand humans’ capacity to harm and be harmed by one another, and how we can attend to the enduring effects of inequality and structural violence while remaining firmly grounded in the day-to-day lived, felt realities of violence and interpersonal harm.
Fall
Also Offered As: HSOC 2227
1 Course Unit
STSC 2296 Technologies of Self and Society
As European empires expanded in the late eighteenth century, "social science" began to emerge in the lexicons of Western societies. Since these early beginnings in European imperialism, the social sciences have sought to represent, alter, and govern human existence while struggling to define "society" as something separate from "nature". This class examines how questions concerning the proper management of self and society are central to the ambitions and dilemmas of modern social sciences. We begin by tracing the origins of social science in late-eighteenth century thought and their professionalization in the nineteenth century. Continuing through to the twentieth century, we will observe how core social science disciplines like sociology, anthropology, and psychology attempted - in the name of anti-racism - to carve out distinct niches in opposition to biology and genetics. The course also examines the dramatic growth of the social sciences during the cold war period thanks to military funds. Our examination of cold war social science will focus on how social scientists began carving up the world into different "areas" of study and how they became increasingly oriented towards re-making individual psyches and societies in the "third world" to fit the image of an industrialized "West". The course will conclude by examining calls from indigenous scholars and scholars in the global South to decolonize social science.
Spring
1 Course Unit
STSC 2304 Insect Epidemiology Pests, Pollinators and Disease Vectors
Malaria, Dengue, Chagas disease, the Plague- some of the most deadly and widespread infectious diseases are carried by insects. The insects are also pernicious pests; bed bugs have returned from obscurity to wreak havoc on communities, invasive species decimate agricultural production, and wood borers are threatening forests across the United States. At the same time declines among the insects on which we depend- the honeybees and other pollinators--threaten our food security and ultimately the political stability of the US and other nations. We will study the areas where the insects and humans cross paths, and explore how our interactions with insects can be cause, consequence or symptom of much broader issues. This is not an entomology course but will cover a lot about bugs. It's not a traditional epidemiology course but will cover some fascinating epidemiological theory originally developed for the control of disease vectors. It will cover past epidemics and infestations that have changed the course of the history of cities and reversed advancing armies. HSOC 241. Stem Cells, Science and Society. Gearhart/Zaret.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: HSOC 2304
1 Course Unit
STSC 2317 Slavery and Disease: Medical Knowledge in the Atlantic World
How did the development of Atlantic World slave societies give rise to new knowledge about bodies, health and disease, race, and medical therapeutics? In this course we explore the relationship between slavery and disease and its impact upon European, Native American, and African descended populations in the Americas during the era of early contact to the early nineteenth century. We pay special attention to slavery’s economic, environmental, and human costs, as we investigate the development of the medical profession and the acquisition of formal and informal medical knowledge in this epoch. Beyond that, we will investigate how perceptions of disease susceptibility and overall experiences with specific illnesses proceeded along raced and gendered lines. Topics we cover include the exchange of ideas about health and healing, responses to epidemics, the racialization of disease, slavery and commerce as conduits of disease.
Fall
Also Offered As: HSOC 2317
1 Course Unit
STSC 2418 Engineering Cultures
Modern engineering, technology, science, and medicine converge with each other in countless places, landscapes, institutions, and households. The profession of the engineer has been distinct from that of the scientist, and the “doctor,” since its inception in the 1880s, however. In our class we trace overlaps and boundaries among engineers and other key experts of modern society, government, and public health, covering spaces in the Americas, Asia, and Europe. We explore rivalries, the roles of management and the state, class status and prestige, and we listen to engineers themselves and their understandings of their roles, functions, and purpose in modern societies. We cover fields such as civil engineering, mining, chemical-industrial engineering (including pharmaceutics and oil refinery), mechanical engineering and machine design/maintenance, computer science, and the engineering of information technologies. No pre-requisites, no prior knowledge required.
Also Offered As: HSOC 2418
1 Course Unit
STSC 2607 Cyberculture
Computers and the internet have beome critical parts of our lives and culture. In this course, we will explore how people use these new technologies to develop new conceptions of identify, build virtual communities and affect political change. Each week we'll see what we can learn by thinking about the internet in a different way, focusing successively on hackers, virtuality, community, sovreignty, interfaces, algorithms and infrastructure. We'll read books, articles, and blogs about historical and contemporary cultures of computing, from Spacewar players and phone phreaks in the 1970s to Google, Facebook, World of Warcraft, WikiLeaks, and Anonymous today. In addition, we'll explore some of these online communities and projects ourselves and develop our own analyses of them.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
STSC 2644 Artificial Subjects: Golems, Homunculi, Robots, and Cyborgs
What is the difference between a cyborg and an automaton? How are golems and homunculi similar? Are the droids in "Star Wars" slaves? For at least three millennia, humans have been grappling with the idea of creating artificial people and animals. Exactly how life-like these creations are has never been constant, but neither have definitions and ideas about mimesis and life. How do artificial subjects enforce and expose the boundary between made and born? How are they used to configure or complicate notions of human subjectivity and autonomy? This course focuses on the relationship between the artificial and the natural, the representation of that relationship, and the various cultural meanings inscribed in the bodies of robots. Course materials will be drawn from literature, myth, religious texts, critical theory/STS, historiography, scientific treatises, images, and film/tv.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
STSC 2692 Digital Infrastructures & Platforms
Platforms ranging from ride-hailing and food delivery apps (Uber and Swiggy) to subscription based audiovisual content providers (Netflix and SonyLIV) mediate multisided transactions (markets) and operate based on algorithmic collection, circulation, and monetization of user data. In this course, we will engage with a variety of readings about multi-situated study of apps, paying attention to both app interfaces as well as their connection to backend systems and infrastructures like content delivery networks and software development kits. In what ways do processes of data storage/distribution, content encryption/decryption and encoding/decoding make “seamless” streaming on Hulu/Prime Video and instantaneous digital payments on Venmo and PayTM possible? We will begin with how infrastructures have been studied in the past, and then in particular focus on media infrastructures such as satellite systems, optical fiber cables, cell antennas, and data centers. The course readings will consider the varied definitions of platforms and examine the socio-political effects of the proliferation of platforms in different regions of the world. In studying superapps and platforms like WeChat (China), LINE (Japan), and Jio (India), we will try to comprehend in what ways have discourses of platformization been shaped by governmental regulation, cultural practices, and socio-politics of regions. We will explore questions like: in what ways are infrastructures and apps related? How do content creators and SVoD audiences navigate algorithmic opacity? Why do BigTech companies float competing discourses about platforms? What are the connections between infrastructural investments and platform capitalism? What does it mean to have digital lives in a platform society? In what ways do digital infrastructures and platforms create the foundations for smart cities and Internet of Things?
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: CIMS 2953, ENGL 2953
1 Course Unit
STSC 2867 Nature and Disaster in East Asia
This course explores how societies across East Asia have contended with earthquakes, flooding, pollution, typhoons, and tsunamis from pre-modern times through the present. Did people understand these events as part of nature—“natural disasters”—or as unnatural aberrations? What might responses to destruction teach us about scientific and political authority? How did communities protect themselves, and how did people re-make their lives in post-disaster wreckage? Through textual, visual, and audio sources, we will examine case studies drawn from across China, Korea, and Japan. Students will learn to apply critical perspectives drawn from disaster studies, environmental history, and the history of science and technology.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
STSC 2999 Independent Study
Approved independent study under faculty supervision.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
STSC 3017 Biology and Society
From environmental crises to medical advancements and global food shortages, biology and the life sciences are implicated in some of our most pressing social issues. By looking at these issues, this course scrutinizes how developments in biology have shaped, and are shaped by, society. In the first unit, we’ll look at how institutions and technologies influence the modern life sciences, including the role of universities, public health departments, and museums in the development of biology. In the second unit, we’ll explore areas of biology that have raised controversies about regulation and access, including issues ranging from health to the environment. In the third unit, we’ll examine how scientists and the public invoke biological facts when addressing what it means to be human (or of a particular race, gender, ability, etc.).
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: HSOC 3017
1 Course Unit
STSC 3028 Normal People
For most of us, what’s normal feels downright natural. The normal is our baseline, invisible and unconsidered until something abnormal draws our attention to it. But a little prodding shows the contradictions within bland, boring normality: it’s defined by our internal feelings as much as by quantified standards, it describes individuals as well as populations, and it is intensely difficult to describe on its own merits without comparison. So what does it mean to be normal, anyway? This seminar examines “the normal” as a medical and scientific concept from the Renaissance until today. Has the concept of normal always existed? What makes a person or body normal? How has such a thing been assessed? Can the normal exist without deviance – and is this relationship inherently one about power? We will examine how scientific ideas of “the normal” – and its conflation with “the natural” – shaped medical knowledge and ideologies about racial difference, sex and gender, socioeconomic class, anatomical difference and disability, and human behavior. How have the “normals” of the past shaped our current scientific understandings of ourselves and the people around us? Our goal will be to make visible the ways that “normal” gets normalized in order to deepen our critical engagement with modern medicine, wellness culture, and racial and gender politics.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: HSOC 3028
1 Course Unit
STSC 3087 Science and Spectacle: Seeing is Believing
In the 10th century, the Byzantine emperor received visitors on a levitating throne, surrounded by robotic animals. In the 17th century, Galileo gave public demonstrations to prove the existence of the moons of Jupiter (and the power of the telescope). In the 20th century, an estimated 650 million people watched the Apollo 11 moon landing. These are only a few examples of the ways that scientific and technological knowledge have been displayed for large numbers of people who are not themselves also involved in making scientific or technological knowledge. If seeing is believing, what do performances of scientific or technological virtuosity or discovery depict, and to what ends? This course explores the relationship between scientific and technological knowledge and public display, using examples taken from the medieval period to the 20th century.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
STSC 3088 Science, Labor and Capital
This course looks at the intertwined history of science, labor and capital since the fifteenth century. Starting with the surge of patents for labor-saving devices in fifteenth century Italy and coming all the way down to the contemporary neoliberal university, the culture of science and the cultures of labor and capital have always remained in intense conversation. The first half of the course will focus on the early relations between science, labor and capital. We will discuss patterns of employment for scientists, the relationship between manual work and intellectual work, the scientific aspects of commercial capitalism as well as the debates on the transition to capitalism. The second half of the course will focus on the period from the nineteenth century to the present. We will talk about colonialism and science, the social ascendance of the scientist in relation to the technician, as well as the political economy of contemporary science and of the contemporary university. This is a seminar course and will require regular participation. Some knowledge of the existing literature on capitalism, especially the writings of Ellen Wood and E.P Thompson, are recommended but not required.
Also Offered As: HIST 0878
1 Course Unit
STSC 3097 Indigeneity in Health, Science, and Technology
In recent decades, Indigenous Studies has emerged as a trans-national and interdisciplinary academic discipline that seeks to understand the historical experience, social reality, and political aspirations of Indigenous peoples. This course examines how theories and methods from Indigenous Studies offer new perspectives on core issues in the social study of science and technology and of health and society. Through films, podcasts, literature, and academic articles we will examine the historical role that science, technology, and medicine have played in the colonization of Indigenous people in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. We will also examine how Indigenous groups have resisted scientific and technological projects and participated in their development in ways that foster self-governance and territorial sovereignty.
Spring, even numbered years only
Also Offered As: HSOC 3097
1 Course Unit
STSC 3136 Queer Science
This course gives students a background in the development of sex science, from evolutionary arguments that racialized sexual dimorphism to the contemporary technologies that claim to be able to get at bodily truths that are supposedly more real than identity. Then, it introduces several scholarly and political interventions that have attempted to short-circuit the idea that sex is stable and knowable by science, highlighting ways that queer and queering thinkers have challenged the stability of sexual categories. It concludes by asking how to put those interventions into practice when so much of the fight for queer rights, autonomy, and survival has been rooted in categorical recognition by the state, and by considering whether science can be made queer. Along the way, students will engage with the tools, methods, and theories of both STS and queer studies that emphasize the constructed and political underpinnings of scientific thought and practice.
Spring
Also Offered As: GSWS 3136
1 Course Unit
STSC 3185 Global Radiation History: Living in the Atomic Age 1945-Present
In this seminar, students will engage with broad experiences of radiation risk since 1945, of Navajo uranium miners, scientists producing and testing nuclear weapons, physicians studying those exposed to radiation, Japanese survivors of the atomic bombings, and of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and others. We will read novels and poetry relating to the atomic bombings and other radiation incidents, consider the protracted and complex ethical debate about nuclear risk, meet with artists who have contributed to the public debate, participate in meetings with survivors and scientists, museum professionals, activists, and others, and work together to come to understand the impact of the atomic bombs, the rise of nuclear energy, and the continuing legacies of radiation exposure and risk today. This is a Penn Global Seminar that involves travel.
Spring, even numbered years only
Also Offered As: HSOC 3185
1 Course Unit
STSC 3217 Weird Science
What do we mean by "science"? How did we come to agree on a common definition? Do we agree on a common definition? What about when we don't? This course explores histories of heterodox science and the construction of sciences and pseudosciences. In doing so, we will focus on expertise, authority, and legitimacy in science, as well as public consumption of science. This course will also introduce students to fundamental questions in the philosophy of science, as well as offering instruction in reading and methods of historiography. Topics include: phrenology, parapsychology, cryptozoology, UFOs, climate change denial.
Also Offered As: HSOC 3217
1 Course Unit
STSC 3279 Nutritional Modernities: Food, Science, and Health in Global Context
How has food shaped the global transition to modernity? Columbus’ 1492 voyage to the Americas sparked a global process that transformed the eating habits and environments of humans throughout the world. Using approaches from food studies, STS, environmental history and global history, this class examines how the production, consumption, and study of food has been central to the emergence of the modern capitalist system and its discontents. Topics include the role of diet and food in European colonial conquest, the links between racial anxieties and the creation of modern nutritional standards, the rise of dietary ‘technologies of the self’ such as calorie-counting and the BMI index, and the emergence of microbial regimes of health.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: HSOC 3279
1 Course Unit
STSC 3283 Sciences of Kinship
What does it mean to say that someone is family? How have humans made sense of our relations to others, both human and animal, past and present? Why have these ties so often been articulated in the idiom of blood? This course will explore the varied contested meanings of “kinship,” specifically through the lens of anthropological theory, the history of science and emergent technologies that all seek to understand the connections between “us” and “others.” We will explore topics such as assisted reproductive technologies, the history of genetics, and the role of kinship theory in shaping understandings of racial and cultural difference.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
STSC 3343 Race Science/Race Medicine
This course will explore how race has been defined through medical and scientific thought from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century. It examines race as it has emerged as a medical construct and a “valid” topic of scientific inquiry in Western biomedicine. Students will consider the various origins stories of race and will critically assess its utility and deployment in biomedical settings. In this seminar, students will consider the history behind the creation of racial typologies, views around racial mixing, racial assimilation, and racial essentialism, the birth and resurgence of eugenics, the emergence of race-based pharmaceuticals, and the refashioning of race in the era of genomics. Finally, we will examine the ways in which science and medicine and is allied fields have been complicit in reenforcing beliefs in embodied innate racial differences, as well as the harms that those beliefs engender.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: HSOC 3343
1 Course Unit
STSC 3644 Minds, Bodies, and Machines
This course interrogates the historical connections between minds, bodies and machines in science and technology by taking a critical look at the history of Artificial Intelligence and cognitive science in the 20th century. We will consider how AI has shaped our understanding of what it means to be human, just as ideas of the "human" have shaped our hopes, fears and plans for AI over time. Students will be reading primary sources alongside historical and theoretical interventions from the history of science, science studies and affiiated fields to interrogate and better understand our current moment and reimagine the future of AI.
Fall
Also Offered As: HSOC 3644
1 Course Unit
STSC 3657 Technology & Democracy
What is the relationship between technology and politics in global democracies? This course explores various forms of technology, its artifacts and experts in relation to government and political decision-making. Does technology "rule' or "run" society, or should it? How do democratic societies balance the need for specialized technological expertise with rule by elected representatives? Topics will include: industrial revolutions, factory production and consumer society, technological utopias, the Cold War, state policy, colonial and post-colonial rule, and engineers' political visions.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
STSC 3766 Cultures of Surveillance
Developments in digital technology have generated urgent political discussions about the pervasive role of surveillance in our everyday life, from the mundane to the exceptional. But surveillance has a much longer history. In this course, students will learn to think and write critically about the historical, socio-cultural, and political dynamics that define surveillance today. This course asks: how can we historicize what we call surveillance to understand its political and social implications beyond what appears in the document caches of the NSA or on a Black Mirror episode? What role does identity and identification play in surveillance? How do surveillance and computational technologies produce racializing effects? Students will apply course concepts to technologies of daily use, such as self-tracking devices like fit bits or identity documents, and reflect on debates surrounding race, policing, imperialism, and privacy. Through primary source materials, films, podcasts, and key texts, we will engage in a cross-cultural exploration of the multi-faceted phenomena of surveillance technology. Through regular writing assignments, such as surveillancediaries, students will analyze and articulate how they understand surveillance to operate in various domains of everyday life. In this course, students will: (1) Apply course concepts to their lived experience, from securitized architecture to search engines, in order to understand how surveillance operates in everyday life; (2) Analyze how historical context has shaped the current configuration of securitization and surveillance on a global scale; (3) Use ethnographic approaches to study the interaction between individuals, their social relations, and technologies of surveillance.
Fall
Also Offered As: ANTH 3766
1 Course Unit
STSC 3889 Trans Method
What are the subjects of trans studies? What does “trans” as a category afford us in looking at texts, people, systems, and objects? To what extent is trans an identity? What might it mean to think of it as a methodology? How might the tools of trans studies intervene in conversations and practices beyond the field itself? What are the stakes of such an expansive approach? This course introduces students to “trans” as a still-forming analytic that has emerged out of academic spaces, activist movements, and trans cultural production. We will engage with texts and questions that build on trans studies’ connections to (and divergences from) queer and feminist studies, history, critical race studies, disability studies, and science studies, among other fields, and we will also consider how trans knowledge can act beyond the theoretical.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: GSWS 3500, HSOC 3889
Prerequisite: GSWS 0002 OR GSWS 0003 OR ENGL 1300
1 Course Unit
STSC 4000 Capstone Research Seminar in Science, Technology and Society
This is the capstone research seminar for STSC majors. It is designed to provide the scholarly tools necessary to undertake original research in the field of Science and Technology Studies. All students in the course will produce a research paper by the end of the term; those intending to write an honors thesis (who must take the course in the spring of their junior year) will also complete a proposal for further research. Each student will work on a specific topic of their own choosing, while also learning about general methods of historical and social scientific research and reading key texts in Science and Technology Studies.
Spring
1 Course Unit
STSC 4114 Sports Science Medicine Technology
Why did Lance Armstrong get caught? Why do Kenyans win marathons? Does Gatorade really work? In this course, we won't answer these questions ourselves but will rely upon the methods of history, sociology, and anthropology to explore the world of the sport scientists who do. Sport scientists produce knowledge about how human bodies work and the intricacies of human performance. They bring elite (world-class) athletes to their laboratories-or their labs to the athletes. Through readings, discussions, and original research, we will find out how these scientists determine the boundary between "natural" and "performance-enhanced," work to conquer the problem of fatigue, and establish the limits and potential of human beings. Course themes include: technology in science and sport, the lab vs. the field, genetics and race, the politics of the body, and doping. Course goals include: 1) reading scientific and medical texts critically, and assessing their social, cultural, and political origins and ramifications; 2) pursuing an in-depth semester-long research project that will focus on "un-black-boxing" the metrics sport scientists and physicians use to categorize athletes' bodies as "normal" or "abnormal." For example, you may investigate the test(s) used to define whether an athlete is male or female, establish whether an athlete's blood is "too" oxygenated, or assess whether an athlete is "too" fast (false start). Requirements therefore include: weekly readings and participation in online and in-class discussions; sequenced research assignments; peer review; and a final 20+page original research paper and presentation.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: HSOC 4114
1 Course Unit
STSC 4317 Slavery and Disease: Medical Knowledge in the Atlantic World
This capstone course examines the various methods historians use to understand the economic, medical, environmental, and human costs associated with the Atlantic slave system from roughly the 1600s to the 1850s. Students will learn how slavery, settlement, and disease contributed to the development of Atlantic World societies in North America and the West Indies and reinforced the enduring concept of embodied racial differences. This latter concept in particular fueled Enlightenment Era knowledge production and the development of the medical profession in the Americas. In this course we focus on the close and often coerced contact between disparate groups of people—Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans. We will examine how interactions between these groups contributed to the development racialized disease, the social construction of disease, and the ways in which race became (erroneously) theorized as an aspect of biology). We will consider how perceptions of health and sickness in the disease environment of the Americas gave rise to enduring racial and gendered identities.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: HSOC 4317
1 Course Unit
STSC 4326 Medicine and the Criminal Justice System
This course interrogates the connections, collaborations and conflicts between medicine and the criminal justice system throughout the 20th and 21st century United States. We will look at the historical feedback loops between these two institutions, giving attention to how medical experts have become involved in, suggested reforms and bolstered punitive and carceral practices as well as instances when incarcerated people, bodies and minds were used and abused for medical research. We will consider the role of medicine in different parts of the carceral system, including expert witnesses in courtrooms and access to medical care in jails and prisons, and look at moments in history when carceral institutions and spaces became clinical laboratories aiding in critical moments of medical “progress." The course gives special attention to the role of sex, gender, race and disability in these interactions, both intimate and institutional, and students will engage with frameworks from black studies, disability studies, queer studies, science studies as well as histories of psychiatry, medicine and technology.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: HSOC 4326
1 Course Unit
STSC 4427 Technology and Medicine
Medicine as it exists in the United States today is profoundly technological. Many folks residing in the U.S. regard it as perfectly normal for clinicians to examine patients with instruments, for specialists to expose people’s bodies to many different machines, and for those machines to produce data that is mechanically/electronically processed, interpreted and stored. People are billed technologically, prompted to attend appointments technologically, and buy everyday consumer technologies to protect, diagnose, or improve our health. (Consider, for example, air-purifiers, heart rate monitors, pregnancy testing kits, blood-sugar monitoring tests, and thermometers.) Yet even at the beginning of the twentieth century, devices such as these were scarce and infrequently used by American physicians and medical consumers alike. Over the course of this semester, we examine how “technology” came to medicine’s center-stage in the U.S., and what impact this change has had on medical practice, institutions, and consumers alike. Technology & Medicine in Modern America fulfills the Capstone research requirement for the HSOC major. By the end of the course, students will have honed their skills in primary and secondary source research and in constructing an academic argument and paper.
Not Offered Every Year
Also Offered As: HSOC 4427
1 Course Unit
STSC 4980 Honors Thesis
Research and writing of a senior honors thesis under faculty supervision.
Fall
1 Course Unit
STSC 4999 Undergraduate Independent Study
Independent primary research under faculty supervision to fulfill the capstone research requirement.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit