STS 102
Breeding Controversy: Technologies and Ideologies of Population Control
Last Offered Fall 2021
Division II Difference, Power, and Equity
Cross-listed STS 102 / WGSS 103
This course is not offered in the current catalog or this is a previous listing for a current course.

What is “good breeding?” For whom is birth control “liberating?” This course traces the surprising ways that concepts of population growth and decline from the natural sciences come to inform social discourses on “overpopulation” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Science and politics mix to decide: who should be able to reproduce–and, consequently, who might not be born–so that some may live more prosperously? By studying the history of eugenics movements, contraceptive technologies in the context of development, and the racialized cultures of reproductive medicine, we will analyze how scientific ways of thinking about human lives reflect and reproduce social inequities. We will use the tools of feminist technoscience studies to understand how science, culture, power, and politics intersect to create new technologies of “selection” that are far from natural. New literatures in critical race STS, black feminist thought, and critical theory will inform our discussions.