Spring 2005 Advance Course Information

This information effective for Spring 2005. Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.

History of Consciousness

[HISC-080G] [HISC-080P] [HISC-080Q] [HISC-251]

80G. Trauma: 1866 to 9/11

Note: Draft Syllabus

Instructor: Laura Christian
E-mail: lchristi@ucsc.edu

Course Description:

This course traces the invention and intermittent reinvention of trauma as a psychological category, from the first application of the term to the phenomenon of "railway shock" in the mid-19th century to the inclusion of "post-traumatic stress disorder" in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic Statistic Manual-III after the Vietnam War. It examines the implications of clinical understandings of trauma for theories of modernity, memory, history, and representation. Specific case studies span a range of topics—from Freud's postulation of the "death drive" in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, to ethical debates surrounding the representation of the Holocaust or Shoa, to the so-called "memory wars" arising from allegations of incest in the 1990s, to the moment of historical rupture signaled by the intensely mass-mediated 9/11 attacks.

Required Texts:

Course Reader
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions

Course Requirements:

Regular attendance in class and participation in discussions (20%)
Mid-term paper (3-5 pages) (25%)
Final take-home exam (25%)
Final paper (6-8 pages) (30%)

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80P. Ideology and Popular Culture in the U.S.

Instructor: Justin Paulson

To view the course web site, go to

http://people.ucsc.edu/~jpaulson/hisc80p/

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80Q. Science as Culture and Practice

TTh 2-3:45, Oakes 105
Instructor: Donna Haraway

Course Description:

In the last 25 years, interdisciplinary studies of science, technology, and medicine have been revolutionized. Sociology, anthropology, gender and race studies, environmental studies, history, philosophy, cultural studies, literary studies, visual cultural theory, the study of material cultures in and out of the laboratory, and many other fields have contributed to modern science, technology, and medicine studies. Studies of knowledge practices around the world generate important new insights into comparing and evaluating ways of knowing. These analyses provoke controversies about the nature of knowledge; relations among science, technology, and other domains of culture; historical narratives; situated connections among humans and nonhumans, including both machines and organisms; and the possibilities of democracy, justice, and community in technoscientific, translocal worlds. This course stresses three fundamental concepts: science, culture, and practice.

Ordinary expressions like "science and society" or "science and politics" pepper our language, but these phrases imply a basic mistake. They imply that "society" and "science" are separate and somehow have to be brought into relationship. But science is one kind of cultural and social practice, among others; and understanding what kind of cultural practices the natural sciences are is important. Similarly, "society" or "culture" are made up of scientific practices, among other things. This class investigates what kind of practices these are, what their histories are, how they are entangled with others sorts of practices, and what differences that makes.

One way to think about these things is to take something concrete—say, mosquitoes and malaria in Egypt, or genes in critters at deep sea vents, or PET scans of brains in a U.S. courtroom, or mushrooms on a walk in the Pogonip at UCSC, or agility sports dogs in training, or monkeys and apes in films—and unwind them as if they were a tangled ball of yarn into all the actors, places, ways of knowing, personal and public stakes, and much else that make something "concrete." All of these examples, and more, will organize this class. We will look at parasitology, hydrodynamics, epidemiology, cotton plantations, economics, war, postcolonial nationalism, nitrogen shortages, and social unrest crucial to the Aswan Dam project. We will find out why it makes sense in science and technology studies to call dams and mosquitoes, and not just people, actors. We will look in detail at how PET scans work in the world, and how such visual objects come into being—in collaborations between cognitive scientists and computer engineers, in disputes among lawyers, in institutional ecologies that bind large research institutes and commercial ventures, in changing popular views of what makes a person who he or she is. We will ask how "matters of fact" and "matters of concern" relate to each other, and at how technical, social, and linguistic technologies are all necessary to produce either. Fundamentally, we will unravel things into worlds.

Reading, writing, discussing, and lecturing are the basic activities of this class. Students and faculty must collaborate to make all of them work. Students will span the range from first-year folks through seniors, and just about every major (and no major) will be represented. Texts will include essays from several disciplines, fiction, and visual material. There will be no common language at the beginning. Language for thinking together will build throughout the quarter. Attending carefully to how different people in the class think, read, and express themselves will be absolutely crucial.

Three times in the class, a 5-page paper will be due. The papers will be organized around course readings, student research conducted mainly online, and a "keyword" selected from a list that attempts to collect the crucial analytical concepts of the class. We will use midterm exam and other class time to explore these papers. Section discussions will be a very important component of the class. Grades will depend on lecture attendance, discussion participation, evidence of close reading, and written papers. As much as possible, students will not be graded "against" each other, but in relation to the progress they make from where they started and in relation to the seriousness of their contribution to the class.

Likely Texts:

Essays:

• Barad, Karen, "Agential Realism," in The Science Studies Reader, ed. Mario Biagioli (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp 1-11
• Cussins, Charis Thompson, "Confessions of a Bioterrorist: Subjective Position and Reproductive Technologies," in E. Ann Kaplan and Susan Squier, eds., Playing Dolly: Technocultural Formations, Fantasies, and Fictions of Assisted Reproduction (Rutgers University Press, 1999), pp. 189-219.
• Haraway, Donna, "Chicken," in Shock and Awe: War on Words (Santa Cruz: New Pacific Press, 2004)
• Latour, Bruno, essay on matters of fact, matters of concern, and making things public
• Helmreich, Stefan, "Trees and Seas of Information: Alien Kinship and the Biopolitics of Gene Transfer in Marine Biology and Biotechnology," American Ethnologist 30, no 3 (2003): 341-59.
• Mitchell, Timothy, "Can the Mosquito Speak?" in Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (Berkeley and LA: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 1-53.
• Rabinow, Paul, "Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality," in The Science Studies Reader, ed. Mario Biagioli (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp 407-16.
• TallBear, Kimberly,
• Tsing, Anna, "Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species," UCSC, in ms, 2004

Books:

• Burt, Jonathan, Animals in Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2002)
• Joseph Dumit, Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity (Princeton University Press, 2004)
• Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003)
• John Law and Annemarie Mol, eds., Complexities (Duke University Press, 2002)

Websites, Videos, Films:

• "Donna Haraway Reads the National Geographics of Primates," Paper Tiger Television
• Winged Migrations
  

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251. Readings in Science Studies. Ancients and Moderns: How to Think Relationality

Wednesdays, 9 a.m.-12 noon
Instructor: Donna Haraway

Course Description:

This seminar will concentrate on several important books that help me think about three things: 1) a constructivist approach to the natural sciences that takes both humans and nonhumans seriously in constitutive, knowledge-producing relationships; 2) critical paradigms for understanding "complexity" and "relationality"; and 3) responsibility, ethics, and politics inside knowledge-making in the sciences. The readings fall roughly into two scholarly clumps that I am calling "ancients" (Whitehead, Fleck, and Bateson) and "moderns" (Stengers, Rouse, Latour, Ihde, Barad, and Mol).

Likely pairings of readings: Fleck and Mol, Ihde and Haraway, Barad and Stengers, Stengers and Whitehead, Bateson and Serres, Mol and Barad, Rouse and Barad.

A. "Ancients"

• Bateson, Gregory, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology (Chicago University Press, 2000, c1972).
• Fleck, Ludwik. 1979 (1935). Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Whitehead, Alfred North. 1925. Science and the Modern World. New York: Free Press.

B. "Moderns"

• Barad, Karen, chpt 8, Meeting the Universe Halfway, in ms
• Haraway, Donna, "Crittercam: Compounding Eyes in NatureCulture," for Expanding Phenomenology: Companion to Ihde, ed. Evan Selinger (SUNY Press, forthcoming)
• Ihde, Don, Bodies in Technology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001)
• Latour, Bruno, Politics of Nature: How to Bring Science into Democracy (Harvard UP, 2004)
• Latour, B. and Serres, M, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: Michel Serres with Bruno Latour (Studies in Literature and Science) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995)
• Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (Science and Cultural Theory) (Duke University Press, 2003)
• Rouse, Joseph, How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism (University of Chicago Press, 2003), if available in paperback, otherwise chpt from book.
• Stengers, Isabelle, The Invention of Modern Science, translated by Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000)
• Stengers, Isabelle, “A constructivist reading of Process and Reality,” in ms, Université Libre de Bruxelles
  

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