Courses

CHSS 30506 - Cities, Space, Power: Introduction to urban social science
Instructor: Neil Brenner
Description: This lecture course provides a broad, multidisciplinary introduction to the study of urbanization in the social sciences. The course surveys a broad range of research traditions from across the social sciences, as well as the work of urban planners, architects, and environmental scientists. Topics include: theoretical conceptualizations of the city and urbanization; methods of urban studies; the politics of urban knowledges; the historical geographies of capitalist urbanization; political strategies to shape and reshape the built and unbuilt environment; cities and planetary ecological transformation; post-1970s patterns and pathways of urban restructuring; and struggles for the right to the city.

CHSS 33501 - Historical Highlights in Astronomy from Hipparcos to Hubble
Instructor: Edward Kolb
Description: This course will focus on important developments in our understanding of the universe from ancient Greeks to modern Geeks, taught from the perspective of a scientist. Even more interesting than the advances were the missteps and false assumptions that impeded progress. The course grade will be based on a 45-minute presentation about a relevant person or historical discovery.

CHSS 35270 - Infrastructure Histories
Instructor: Elizabeth Chatterjee
Description: Dams, sewers, container ships, water pipes, power lines, air conditioning, and garbage dumps: the critical infrastructures that enable modern life are so often invisible, except when they fail. This course explores the historical role of infrastructure as a set of planet-spanning systems of resource extraction and crucial conduits of social and political power. Looking at cases from apartheid South Africa and the Suez Canal to Mumbai and Chicago itself, we will consider the relationship of infrastructure with capitalism, settler colonialism, and postcolonial development. We will see how forms of citizenship and exclusion have been shaped and negotiated via wires, leaky pipes, and improvised repairs, and we will consider perhaps the biggest question of all: In this age of ecological crisis, do energy-guzzling infrastructural systems have a strange form of more-than-human agency all of their own?

CHSS 43006 - The Nervous System
Instructor: Joseph Masco
Description: How do states of emergency come to be shared and felt? What are the circuits of perception, attention, and sensory experience that produce a collective anxiety and fear? How is the biological nervous system in part a psychosocial mechanism, linking the individual to the collective via feelings, affects, anticipations? This seminar explores writers (across critical theory, ethnography, and history) that directly engage public agitation about collective conditions. It will explore how mass mediation and the ongoing revolution in information technologies extend and amplify older systems of psychosocial mobilization and recruitment, creating new circuits of attentional capture.

CHSS 47015 - Scientific and Humanistic Contributions to Knowledge Formation
Instructor: Dario Maestripieri
Description: In this course, we will explore whether the sciences and the humanities can make complementary contributions to the formation of knowledge, thus leading to the integration and unification of human knowledge. In the first part of the course we will take a historical approach to the issue; we will discuss how art and science were considered complementary for much of the 18th and 19th century (for example, in the views and work of Wolfgang Goethe), how they became separate (‘the two cultures’) in the middle of the 20th century with the compartmentalization of academic disciplines, and how some attempts have recently been made at a reunification under the concept of ‘consilience’.

In the second part of the course, we will focus on conceptual issues such as the cognitive value of literature, the role of ideas in knowledge formation in science and literature, the role of creativity in scientific and literary production, and how scientific and philosophical ideas have been incorporated into literary fiction in the genre known as ‘the novel of ideas’. As an example of the latter, we will read the novel ‘One, No One, and 100,000’ (1926) by Luigi Pirandello and discuss how this author elaborated and articulated a view of the human persona (including issues of identity and personality) from French philosophers and psychologists such as Henri Bergson and Alfred Binet.

CHSS 57300 - Colloquium: Environmental History
Instructor: Elizabeth Chatterjee
Description: This graduate colloquium provides an advanced introduction to the vibrant field of environmental history, and is particularly designed for PhD students seeking training in the field’s increasingly diverse approaches. Alongside classic texts, we will discuss recent examples of methodologically innovative research. Some of these works contribute to emerging subfields like animal history, evolutionary history, climate history, ocean history, and Anthropocene history; others find novel uses for more established historical approaches, like commodity history, labor history, and urban history. Some rely on traditional archival sources, while others draw on oral history, archaeological and linguistic evidence, and insights borrowed from the natural sciences. Through close reading, we will examine how environmental historians have addressed new analytical and aesthetic challenges: negotiating relationships with science and scientists, incorporating non-human agency, and writing history at the unfamiliar scales of deep time, the pathogen, and the planetary. A happy side effect is that we will be reading some of the most vivid and eloquent historical work being penned today. Many (though far from all) environmental historians aim to reach broader audiences by experimenting with style and narrative. While encountering the conceptual and empirical range of environmental history as a discipline, we will also pay attention to the craft of writing history.

CHSS 30576 - Social Theory for the Digital Age
Instructor - Karin Knorr Cetina
Description: Society rearranges itself, though we don’t always know where it is heading. When the postmodern moment had arrived in the 1980s it perplexed social theorists, hence its characterization as simply a “post”-stage of modernity. Digitization is one answer to the question of direction of change in the last decades.  In this class, we take the ongoing transformations that we attribute to digital media as a starting point to ask what challenges they provide to social theory that may force us to reconsider some of our most basic concepts and premises. We will understand the term digital age broadly to refer to the rise of algorithms, sensors, (big) data, machine learning, and computational methods, all developments that swirl in and around the Artificial Intelligence scene and intersect with and replace purely human relations. The class gives particular attention to concepts such as action and interaction, embodiment, social situations, subjectivity and autonomy, as wells as society as communication. 

CHSS 31406 - Britain 1760-1880: The Origins of Fossil Capitalism
Instructor: Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
Description: Britain rose to global dominance after 1760 by pioneering the first fossil-fuel economy. This course explores the profound impact of coal and steam on every aspect of British society, from politics and religion to industrial capitalism and the pursuit of empire. Such historical investigation also serves a second purpose by helping us see our own fossil-fuel economy with fresh eyes through direct comparison with Victorian energy use. How much does the modern world owe to the fossil capitalism of the Victorians? Assignments include short essays that introduces students to primary sources (texts, artifacts, and images) and a longer paper that examines in greater depth a specific aspect of the age of steam.

CHSS 32707 - The Industrial Revolution
Instructor: Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
Description: Britain’s Industrial Revolution is the most important event in human history after the invention of agriculture. It is also one of the most contested topics in history. Why was Britain the first country to industrialize? How did new industries like cotton textiles become so innovative? What role did empire and slavery play in shaping industrialization? Without assuming any prior knowledge of history, this lecture course introduces students to the debates about the Industrial Revolution from a global and comparative perspective. Major topics will include technology, energy, infrastructure, agriculture, labor, gender, consumption, finance, trade, empire and the state.

CHSS 32804 - Chance
Instructor: Lorraine Daston
Description: Chance is philosophical puzzle in the form of undeserved good and bad luck, a mathematical challenge in the form of probability and risk, a motor of history in the form of contingency, and an economic necessity in the form of the stock market and insurance. This seminar will examine the many ways in which past and present thinkers have grappled with meaning of chance in all of these realms, including ideas about social justice, determinism and randomness, historical causation, risk, speculation, and opportunity. Instructor consent is required for all students to register.

CHSS 33404 - Science and Values
Instructor: Duygu Uygun-Tunc
Description: Ever since the establishment of modern science, a central topic of discussion is whether and how scientific reasoning differs from political, moral, or philosophical reasoning. One of the traditionally identified unique features of science is its ‘ideal’ of being ‘value-free’. The value-free ideal of science states that scientific reasoning from evidence to theory should not be influenced by social, political, or moral values. In recent decades numerous philosophers of science have concerted that the value-free ideal of science is neither attainable nor desirable. Some of the motivations for this criticism are to promote traditionally underrepresented perspectives such as feminism in science and to rethink the social and moral responsibilities of scientists beyond those understood under scientific integrity. The main upshot of this critique is that scientific objectivity must be redefined in a way that does not imply value-freedom. This course will give an outlook on the central ideas and concepts in the science and values debate and beyond it. The core philosophical discussion will focus on the main arguments for the untenability or undesirability of the value-free ideal and their criticisms. The broader context of discussion will include topics such as the science-society relationship, how scientific expertise and scientifically informed policy relates to democratic governance, public trust in science, and misinformation.

CHSS 33500 - Introduction to Logic
Instructor: Anubav Vasudevan
Description: An introduction to the concepts and principles of symbolic logic. We learn the syntax and semantics of truth-functional and first-order quantificational logic, and apply the resultant conceptual framework to the analysis of valid and invalid arguments, the structure of formal languages, and logical relations among sentences of ordinary discourse. Occasionally we will venture into topics in philosophy of language and philosophical logic, but our primary focus is on acquiring a facility with symbolic logic as such.

CHSS 33830 - Power and Medicine
Instructor: Caine Jordan
Description: The marvel of modern medicine has been lauded as a great leveler of the human condition. From sanitary regimes, to the discovery of antibiotics, to anaesthesia and the development of successful surgery and lifestyle intervention, medicine has improved the lives of all humankind. However, research shows that this improvement is not uniform - that some benefit more from medicine than others. This disparity, which public health scientists and medical researchers have followed for decades, is borne of a complex set of societal factors - including socioeconomic status, race, genetic background, environment, and lifestyle. These studies show us a key feature of medicine: it does not exist in a vacuum, and one’s lifespan and quality of life are as tethered to social factors as they are to scientific innovation.

This class will explore the effects of uneven power systems on health and human medicine in modern history. We will explore how different peoples – of diverse racial, socioeconomic and historical backgrounds - experienced medical and sanitary regimes, and how they navigated disparities in access. Every week we will examine a particular theme in the history of medicine and explore its effects first on a regional scale in the U.S., and the following meeting in the global context. The goal in this structure is to demonstrate the diversity of experience and the complex systems that influence medical regimes.

CHSS 35205 - The Scientific Image
Instructor: Michael Rossi
Description: This course explores the broad field of scientific image-making, focusing in particular on problems of formalism, abstraction, and realism. What makes a “good” scientific image? What kind of work do scientific images do? What philosophical, ideological, and political constraints underwrite attempts to render the complexity of events and entities in the world in stylized visual vocabularies? And how might we approach the work of aesthetics and style in image-making? We will examine these questions through a survey of several contemporary scholarly frameworks used for thinking about problems of representation in scientific practice, and will attend to such image-making practices as graphing, diagramming, modeling, doodling, illustrating, sculpting, and photographing, among other methods.

CHSS 35605 - Life, A Life
Instructor: Arnold Brooks
Description: This course is about the aims of human life. We address the question through two contrasting conceptions of life: 1) life in the sense of an ongoing activity—and its associated values of pleasure, enlightenment, and happiness, and 2) life in the sense of a biographical story—and its associated values of achievement, glory, meaning, and purpose. We will attempt to understand how these two conceptions of life are compatible, and if one or the other is prior. Readings include: Aristotle, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, William James, Bernard Williams, Iris Murdoch, and Jonathan Lear.

CHSS 36907 - Into the Unquiet Woods: The Environmental History of South Asia
Instructor: Elizabeth Chatterjee
Description: Today South Asia is the world region perhaps most acutely threatened by climate change, air pollution, water scarcity, and extreme weather. At the same time, the Indian subcontinent has long been the source of the most vibrant and innovative research in environmental history beyond the West. Drawing on this rich body of scholarship, this course explores the deep historical roots of South Asia’s contemporary environmental crises. How have the Asian monsoon, the Indian Ocean, and the Himalayas shaped human history? What were the environmental consequences of British colonial rule? How have South Asian intellectuals and protesters pushed forward the boundaries of green thought and political action, from M. K. Gandhi to the “tree hugging” Chipko movement and anti-dam activists of the 1970s and 1980s? We will investigate both the South Asian avatars of classic topics in environmental history (like the plantation, mineral extraction, industrialized agriculture, and chemical toxicity) as well as place-specific issues like the environmental history of caste and Hindu nationalism. On the way, we will pay particular attention to how historians have wrestled with the conceptual and aesthetic challenges of incorporating non-human agency at diverse scales, from El Niño and unruly rivers to opium poppies and mollusks.

CHSS 51802 - Climate Ethics
Instructor: Sarah E. Fredericks
Description: Anthropogenic climate change is the largest challenge facing human civilization. Its physical and temporal scale and unprecedented complexity at minimum require extensions of existing ethical systems, if not new ethical tools. This course includes studies of natural and social-scientific studies of climate change and its current and predicted effects. Most of the course will examine how religious and philosophical ethical systems respond to the vast temporal and spatial scales of climate change. For instance, common principles of environmental ethics such as justice and responsibility are often reimagined in climate ethics even as they are central to the ethical analysis of its effects. In the course, we will take a comparative approach to environmental ethics, examining perspectives from secular Western philosophy, Christianity (Catholic and Protestant), Buddhist, and Indigenous thought. We will also look at a variety of ethical methods. Throughout the course we will focus on communication about climate change as well as articulating rigorous ethical arguments about its causes and implications.

CHSS 55979 - AdvRdgs in Technoscience
Instructor: Joseph Masco
Description: This seminar explores recent work in science and technology studies and interrogates the complex modes of writing (ethnographic, historical, analytic) that are productive for engaging complex technoscientific objects today. Participants will interrogate not only the formal terms of knowledge production but also the world-making (and often, world-breaking) aspects of technoscientific revolution. This year's seminar will focus on the theme of "metabolism and milieu."

CHSS 57201 - Introduction to the Historiography of Global Science
Instructor: Emily Kern
Description: Is all science global, and if so, how did it get that way? Are some sciences more global than others? What has been at stake historically in describing scientific activity as variously local, transnational, international, or global, and how have these constructions influenced the historiography of the field? In this seminar, we will explore different approaches to writing and examining scientific knowledge production as a global phenomenon, as well as considering different historiographic attempts at grappling with science's simultaneously local and global qualities, poly-vocal nature, and historical coproduction with global political and economic power.

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CHSS 32000 - Colloquium: Introduction to Science Studies
Instructor: Adrian Johns
Description: This course explores the interdisciplinary study of science as an enterprise. During the twentieth century, sociologists, historians, philosophers, and anthropologists all raised interesting and consequential questions about the sciences. Taken together their various approaches came to constitute a field, "science studies." The course provides an introduction to this field. Students will not only investigate how the field coalesced and why, but will also apply science-studies perspectives in a fieldwork project focused on a science or science-policy setting. Among the topics we may examine are the sociology of scientific knowledge and its applications, actor-network theories of science, constructivism and the history of science, images of normal and revolutionary science, accounts of research in the commercial university, and the examined links between science and policy.