Cultural Study of Science and Technology

Anthropology 6391: Social Study of Science and Technology

Hortense Amsterdam 202

Tuesdays 6:10-8:00

Prof. Hugh Gusterson

Office: Hortense Amsterdam 101Phone: 4-6832

Office Hours:Tue 2-3

Wed 3-4

This class introduces and surveys the literature on the sociology and cultural study of science and technology. The syllabus emphasizes the reading of a broad range of intellectual and disciplinary perspectives, with a focus on the latest literature. The course is structured around small, in-depth class discussions of selected works throughout the semester. Because this is a discussion seminar, doing the reading and showing up each week (on time) is essential. Students are graded on class participation and on the following writing assignments:

1)Write 1 book review. It should be 3-4 double-spaced pages. You can choose any of the books on the syllabus. The review should be handed in at the beginning of the class in which the book is discussed. Book reviews turned in after class discussion will not be accepted.

2)Write one paper at least 15 pages long on any technological artifact or scientific controversy of your choice. Why was the artifact in question taken up in the form it was? What personal relationships do people have with the artifact? How is it represented in the media (if it is)? If writing about a scientific controversy: who were the main parties? How did they seek to construct their authority? How was evidence shaped and deployed in the controversy?

Learning Goals

By the end of this class, students will be able to:

• Show familiarity with the main figures and schools of thought in the social study of science
• Think knowledgeably and critically about the literature in this field
• Have improved research and writing skills
• Read social science accounts with an eye to how they were constructed

This course will also contribute to student’s development of:

• Critical thinking skills, where critical thinking is defined as analyzing and engaging with the concepts that underlie an argument
• The ability to demonstrate critical thinking through oral and written communication skills, which will be evaluated in the short and long paper, and in ‘class participation.’

Grading

First written assignment: 15%

Final paper 50%

Participation 35%

Class Policies

Attendance: attending all classes is a key to success in this course. The participation component of the final grade registers both attendance at class and participation in class discussion.

Extensions: No extensions will be given for assignments without a valid excuse such as a documented personal medical or family emergency.

Religious Holidays: please contact me two weeks in advance if you are going to miss class due to religious holidays not recognized by GWU’s academic calendar.

Time requirement

The provost now requires that faculty tell students how much of their time a class will take. This class meets for 110 minutes a week, and each week students are responsible for reading 6 articles or a book. The amount of time this takes may vary by student.

Good advice for managing your professor

Academic Integrity

All students must practice academic integrity. This means doing your own work, and when you use the words and ideas of others in any written work, you must: 1) identify direct quotations with quotation marks; and 2) indicate the source of ideas that are not your own by using social sciences notation form. If you have any questions at all about what this means, you should speak to your TAs or the instructor. Plagiarism, and all breaches of academic integrity (for example, the sale of lecture-notes from this class, or the use of content from the internet as though it was your own), will be severely dealt with in accordance with the University’s policies and procedures. For more information on The George Washington University’s policies on academic integrity, consult:

SUPPORT FOR STUDENTS OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM

DISABILITY SUPPORT SERVICES (DSS)

Any student who may need an accommodation based on the potential impact of a disability should contact the Disability Support Services office at 202-994-8250 in the Marvin Center, Suite 242, to establish eligibility and to coordinate reasonable accommodations. For additional information please refer to:

UNIVERSITY COUNSELING CENTER (UCC)202-994-5300

The University Counseling Center (UCC) offers 24/7 assistance and referral to addressstudents'personal, social, career, and study skillsproblems. Services for students include:

-crisis and emergency mental health consultations

-confidential assessment, counseling services (individual and small group), and referrals

http://gwired.gwu.edu/counsel/CounselingServices/AcademicSupportServices

Readings

Articles on the syllabus not marked with a URL will be available through Blackboard.

Students are responsible for acquiring, one way or another, the following books:

Sarah Lochlann Jain, Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us. (University of California Press, 2013).

Adriana Petryna, When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects (Princeton University Press, 2009)

Gabriella Coleman,Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso, 2014)

Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press, 2012)

Natasha Dow Schull, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton University Press, 2012).

Sheila Jasanoff, Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States (Princeton University Press, 2007)

Jan 17Introduction

Jan 24Social Constructionism: An Introduction

Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Harvard UP, 1987), chapter 1 (“Literature”) and chapter 2 (“Laboratories”).

Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, “ACTing UP: AIDS Cures and Lay Expertise.” In Collins & Pinch, The Golem at Large: What You Should Know About Technology. (Cambridge UP, 1998, pp.126-150).

Ruth Cowan, “How the Refrigerator Got Its hum” in Donald Mackenzie and Judy Wajcman (eds.) The Social Shaping of Technology (Open University Press, second edition 1999), p.202-18.

David Freedman, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science,” The Atlantic November 2010,

Peter Dreier, “Academic Drivel Report,” American Prospect, February 22, 2016.

George Will, “The hilarious hoax that should have taught the academy a lesson,” Washington Post, January 12, 2017

Jan 31Cultures of Objectivity

Ted Porter, “U.S. Army engineers and the rise of cost-benefit analysis” and “objectivity and the politics of disciplines,” pp.148-216 of Ted Porter, Trust in Numbers (Princeton University Press, 1996).

Geoffrey Bowker and Leigh Star, “What a Difference a Name Makes – the Classification of Nursing Work,” pp.229-54 of Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out (MIT Press, 1999).

Sheldon Krimsky, “Do Financial Conflicts of Interest Bias Research? An Inquiry into the ‘Funding Effect’ hypothesis.” Science, Technology and Human Values, 2013, 38(4):566-87

Samuel Randalls, “Weather Profits: Weather Derivatives and the Commercialization of Metereology,” Social Studies of Science, 2010, 40(5):705-30.

Rayna Rapp, “The communication of risk,” pp.53-78 of Rapp’s Testing Women, Testing the Fetus.

Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, “Introduction,” “Doubt is our Product,” and “epilogue,” pp.1-35 and 266-74 of their Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury 2010).

Feb 7Science andRace

Donna Haraway, “Race; Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture” in Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_Oncomouse (Routledge, 1997), pp.213-266

Geoffrey Bowker and Leigh Star, “The Case of Race Classification and Reclassification Under Apartheid,” pp.195-226 of Star and Bowker, Sorting Things Out (MIT Press, 1999).

Jonathan Kahn, “Exploiting Race in Drug Development: BiDil's Interim Model of Pharmacogenomics.” Social Studies of Science 2008 38: 737-758

Alondra Nelson, “Bio Science: Genetic Genealogy Testing and the Pursuit of African Ancestry.” Social Studies of Science 2008 38: 759-783

Charis Thompson, “Skin tone and the persistence of biological race in egg donation for assisted reproduction,” in Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Shades of Difference (Stanford University Press, 2009), pp.131-147.

Troy Duster, “Selective arrests, an ever-expanding DNA forensic database, and the specter of an early twenty-first century equivalent of phrenology” in D. Lazer (ed.) The Technology of Jutsice: DNA and the Criminal Justice System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 2004.

Feb 14DNA, Medicine and Culture

Emily Martin, “Medical Metaphors of Women’s Bodies: Birth,” pp.54-69 of Martin’s The Woman in the Body

Paul Rabinow, “Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality,” in Jonathan Crary & Samford Kwintner (eds.) Incorporations, 1992.

Shobita Parthasarathy, “Architectures of genetic medicine: comparing genetic testing for breast cancer in the USA and the UK,” Social Studies of Science 35(1) 2005, pp.5-40

Nicole Nelson, “Modeling mouse, human, and discipline: epistemic scaffolds in animal behavior genetics.” Social Studies of Science 43(1):3-29 (2012).

Barbara Prainsack and Martin Kitzberger

DNA Behind Bars: Other Ways of Knowing Forensic DNA TechnologiesSocial Studies of Science 2009 39: 51-79

Charis Thompson, “Stem Cells, women, and the new gender and science,” in Londa Schiebinger (ed.) Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering (Stanford University Press, 2008).

Feb 21Technologized Medicine

Sarah Lochlann Jain, Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us. (University of California Press, 2013).

Feb 28Technology and Capital

Tarleton Gillespie, “the copyright balance and the weight of DRM” chapter 2 of Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (MIT Press, 2007)

Kaushik Sunder Rajan, “Vision and hype: the conjuration of promissory biocapitalist futures,” chapter 3 of Sunder Rajan, Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (Duke University Press, 2004).

Emily Martin, “Introduction” to Flexible Bodies: The Role of Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS (Becon Press, 1994).

Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Commodity fetishism and organs trafficking” Body and Society 2001.

Donald Mackenzie, “Mechanizing the Merc: The Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the rise of high-frequency trading,” Technology and Culture 56(3) 2015, pp.646-75

John Abraham and Rachel Ballinger, “The neoliberal regulatory state, industry interests and the ideological penetration of scientific knowledge: deconstructing the redefinition of carcinogens in pharmaceuticals,” Science, Technology and Human Values 37(5):443-477 (2012)

March 7Science, Medicine and Neoliberalism

Adriana Petryna, When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects (PrincetonUniversity Press, 2009)

MARCH 14 SPRING BREAK

March 21Hacking the Information Society

Gabriella Coleman,Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso, 2014)

March 28Technopolitical Regimes and Postcolonialism

Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press, 2012)

April 4Risk

Ulrich Beck, “On the Logic of Wealth Distribution and Risk Distribution,” The Risk Society(Sage, 1992), 19-50.

Adriana Petryna, “Biological Citizenship,” chapter 5 of Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl (Princeton University Press, 2002).

Hugh Gusterson, “Nuclear weapons and the other in the Western Imagination,” Cultural Anthropology 14(1): 111-43, 1999

Barbara Allen, “Debating Economics: Corporate Myths and Local Realities,” and “Constructing Health in Cancer Alley,” chapters 3 and 5 of Allen, Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Activists in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor Disputes (MIT Press, 2003).

Stephen Hilgartner, “Overflow and Containment in the Aftermath of Disaster.” Social Studies of Science 2007 37: 153-158.Andrew Lakoff, “A fragile assemblage: mutant bird flu and the limits of risk assessment,” Social Studies of Science 2016, pp.1-22

April 11 Design and Control

Natasha Dow Schull, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton University Press, 2012).

Aril 18Climate Change

Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulocene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities vol.6 (2015)

Paul Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010) selected chapters

Candis Callison, How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts(Duke University Press, 2014), selections

Steve Yearly, “Sociology and climate change after Kyoto,” Current Sociology 57(3):389-405, 2009

April 25Science, the state and Democracy

Langdon Winner, “Do Artefacts have Politics?”Daedalus 109(1), 1980, pp.121-136

Sheila Jasanoff, Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States (Princeton University Press, 2007)