SOC 270
Sociology of Science Fall 2013
Division II Writing Skills
Cross-listed ENVI 270
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

In this course we will investigate how people develop knowledge about the natural and social world. We will follow field biologists, medical students, AIDS activists, physicists, lab technicians, forest managers, and cartographers as they go about their work in order to understand how social relations and institutions affect the production of knowledge. Through these case studies, we will explore the ways in which personal relations, values, and power struggles are essential to scientific production rather than peripheral to it. Knowledge itself — what we think we know about the world around us — is socially created. Throughout this course, we will think about what counts as “knowledge” and “rationality”; we will question what it means to be “scientific” or “objective”; and we will explore how experts become experts. What claims to authority and credibility do they make? We will examine technologies for representing, categorizing, and theorizing about the natural and social worlds, as well as the effects those technologies have. We will also consider relationships between scientific knowledge, property, and speculative finance. We will conclude the course by analyzing case studies of current scientific controversies chosen by the class.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 19
Expected: 15
Class#: 1926
Grading: OPG
Requirements/Evaluation: six 150-word reading responses; two 5-page papers; and a 10-page final research paper completed in stages, including an annotated bibliography and rough draft
Extra Info: may not be taken on a pass/fail basis
Prerequisites: none; open to all
Enrollment Preferences: Anthropology and Sociology majors
Distributions: Division II Writing Skills
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
SOC 270 Division II ENVI 270 Division II

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