Science and Technology Studies Collective
As an interdisciplinary group of scholars, we approach the social and cultural study of science and technology through historical, sociological, gender studies, critical race studies, anthropological and literary frameworks. Our research and teaching explore how science and technology shape human lives and how power and social structures, in turn, shape science and technology. Each of us focuses on specific cultural, historical, material, and socioeconomic contexts to critically interrogate the broader implications of technoscientific knowledges in these spaces—from studying the sites and methods of technoscientific knowledge production to tracing their modes of delivery and mobilization within society. Central to our work is a recognition that technoscientific knowledge can become complicit in sustaining social hierarchies, promoting colonialism, and fostering oppressive ideologies. As a Collective, we seek to gain a better understanding of how science and technology at times re/produces these structures of inequality and exploitation, and we work to build more equitable technoscientific futures in line with UBC’s commitment to anti-racism, decolonization, and social justice.
The group began in 2019/20 as the STS Reading Group, convened by Heather Latimer (Gender & Women’s Studies) and Natalie Forssman (Community, Culture and Global Studies), and focused on texts that challenged the naturalization of kinship, as defined through hereditary, biological relations and legal regimes. In 2020-2021 our theme was nature/artifice and the group was led by Heather Latimer and Margaret Carlyle (History & Sociology).
For 2021–2022 our theme was reproductive technologies and the group session included several guest speakers, including a lecture series funded by the provost’s anti-racism initiative.
The STS Collective’s goal is to support individual and collaborative research, teaching, and outreach in science and technology studies at UBC Okanagan. It is administered using consensual, democratic, and participatory strategies.
Feminist horror festival
Join us September 26 to Halloween for a series of film screenings, art activities, speaker series, book club and more.
Team bios
Learn more about the faculty members that make up the Science and Technology Studies Collective and the milestones they’ve achieved thus far.
Margaret Carlyle came to UBC Okanagan in 2020 from the University of Chicago’s Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, where she was also a faculty undergraduate honours and graduate supervisor on the Committee on the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science (CHSS), which operates in collaboration with the Fishbein Center for the History of Science and Medicine. She previously held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge (2013–15) and was an Affiliate of Christ’s College, was a Molina Fellow in History of Medicine & Allied Sciences, Huntington Library (2014), and held a visiting assistant professorship in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota (2015–17). Her research focuses on the intersection of gender, the body, and technology in the rise of modern medicine. She pays particular attention to the historic role of women—as healers, midwives, innovators, and artisans—in the formation of medical and scientific knowledge. Her work draws on diverse archival sources, including medical objects and instruments; imagery and visual culture; and printed and manuscript records.
Margaret has published in a variety of journals, from the well-established The Lancet to the recently founded KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge. She has co-authored a special journal issue on Anatomical Things (2022) with art historian Katherine Reinhart and has a co-edited volume (with Scottie Buehler) on “Obstetrical Objects” under review at the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. She has an advanced book contract for her monograph on Women and Anatomy in Enlightenment France with McGill-Queen’s University Press and is currently preparing her second book project funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant on Reproductive Technologies in the French Atlantic World (in conversation with University of Chicago Press). As a member of a UBC-based research group led by Dr. Fuchsia Howard focusing on educational tools for chronic pelvic pain, Margaret currently holds funding from the Innovation Funding Investment (HIFI) and Convening and Collaborating Michael Smith Health Research BC (MSHRBC). Margaret is the recipient of a UBC Curricular and Teaching Innovation Grant (2023–24) that will be used to support a course in which students will create a podcast on reproductive technologies.
Agnieszka Doll is a socio-legal scholar in law, health, science, and regulation and an Assistant Professor at the Department of History and Sociology at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. Her research agenda centers on critical engagement with regulatory spaces, professional power and processes of knowledge production in medico-legal borderlands, specifically at the nexus of law and mental health. She has a book, tentatively titled Unaccountable Legalities: Mental Health Law, Legal Aid Lawyering and Institutional Entanglements, under contract with the University of Toronto Press and a co-edited volume, Political Activist Ethnography: Studies in the Social Relations of Struggle, forthcoming in the Fall 2023 (Athabasca University Press). Currently, Agnieszka is completing an ethnographic project informed by science and technology studies on the regulations of psychedelics in Canada and is currently developing a project on technopsychiatry.
Natalie Forssman is Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Community, Culture and Global Studies, teaching and engaging in educational leadership in the Anthropology program and Bachelor of Sustainability degree. She received her PhD in Communication and Science Studies from the University of California, San Diego, where she researched histories and practices of knowledge production, particularly the roles of objects, mediational technologies, landscapes, and human and nonhuman bodies in constructing environmental knowledges. She was part of a transdisciplinary research project on the Anthropocene, bringing anthropology, environmental history, biodiversity and conservation, and arts practice methods into contact to understand human-altered landscapes. Before joining CCGS, she taught communication at UBC Okanagan’s School of Engineering, with a focus on equity, justice, participatory methods, and interdisciplinarity in engineering research, design, and professional practice. She has co-authored publications and presentations both in the scholarship of teaching and learning, and in interdisciplinary environmental humanities and science and technology studies methods, including a recent chapter in Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene: Curiosity, Collaboration, and Critical Description in the Study of Co-Species Worlds (University of Minnesota Press).
Catherine Higgs is professor of History in the Department of History and Sociology at UBC Okanagan. She earned her PhD in colonial and modern African history at Yale University. She is the author of two monographs, including Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery and Colonial Africa (2012), and co-editor of another two volumes, including In India and East Africa/E-Indiya nase East Africa: A Travelogue in isiXhosa and English (2020). A new book on women’s activism in apartheid South Africa is under review by the University of Wisconsin Press. Her approach to the study of practices of labour, technology, colonialism, and agricultural production is interdisciplinary and transnational. She has also authored additional articles and chapters that explore the intersections of politics, religion, labor, and activism. Her newest project will explore the environmental aspects of science and technology studies, focusing on the intersections between vegetarianism, food access, race and class in urban South Africa.
Heather Latimer teaches in Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies in the Department of Community, Culture and Global Studies. Her research seeks to understand and explain the history of reproductive politics and technologies by studying representations of reproduction, mostly in science fiction and film. She has published essays in leading journals such as Social Text, Modern Fiction Studies, Feminist Theory (2021); Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice (2020); Journal of Intercultural Studies (2019), and, most recently, in Feminist Studies (2022; 2023). She has also recently published essays in the anthologies Representing Abortion (2021) and Rewriting the Abortion Narrative (2023). Her first book is entitled Reproductive Acts: Sexual Polities in North American Fiction and Film (McGill-Queen’s, 2013) and she is currently writing a new book on the role of dystopian fiction in contemporary reproductive politics. She teaches classes on reproduction, biopower, feminist epistemologies, and critical sexuality studies.
Laura A. Meek is a cultural and medical anthropologist whose primary research centers around counterfeit pharmaceuticals, fugitive science, and the politics of healing in East Africa. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Community, Culture and Global Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Before joining UBC in 2022, she spent three years as a faculty member in the interdisciplinary Centre for the Humanities and Medicine at the University of Hong Kong. Dr. Meek received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Davis, and an M.A. in Women’s Studies from George Washington University. She teaches courses on embodiment and body politics, African fiction as world-making praxis, global health and international development, fugitive science, decolonizing the anthropological canon, and critical medical anthropology.
Dr. Meek’s first book project, Pharmaceuticals in Divergence: Radical Uncertainty and World-Making Tastes in Tanzania, is based on over three years of ethnographic fieldwork in Tanzania, and explores the bodily epistemologies and fugitive sciences through which interlocutors assess, decipher, and challenge biomedical claims, while also demonstrating how they transform pharmaceuticals, allowing these substances to act outside the logics of biomedicine. Her second project, The Grammar of Leprosy: Temporal Politics and the Impossible Subject, is a multi-sited and interdisciplinary research project on the temporal politics of leprosy elimination campaigns across historical archives, scientific knowledge production, and global health initiatives. Her work has appeared in leading cultural and medical anthropology and STS journals, including Feminist Anthropology; Medicine, Anthropology, Theory; Science, Technology, and Human Values; Anthropology and Humanism; and Medical Anthropology Quarterly, as well as in the edited volumes Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds (2020) and Covid Conspiracy Theories in Global Perspective (2023). Dr. Meek recently co-edited, with geographer Abigail Neely, a special issue of Medical Anthropology Quarterly (2023) on the limits of medicine and healing. She also regularly publishes public-facing scholarship in venues such as Platypus, Somatosphere, and Africa Is A Country.
Sajjad Nejatie is Assistant Professor at UBCO’s Department of History and Sociology. He obtained his PhD in Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations from the University of Toronto where he specialized in the history and culture of the Islamicate world, with a focus on Persianate Asia. While his interests encompass the history of science and technology in the Islamicate world more broadly, his current research focuses on the development of occult-scientific imperialism in 18th-century Iran and South Asia.
Mike Zajko’s interest in STS began when studying controversies over climate science that were prominent in the years around 2009, and became an important voice in this field after publishing an article in Society in 2011. Since then, Dr. Zajko has authored several works on telecommunications policy and infrastructure, including debates over internet regulation, privacy, surveillance, and cyber security. Since coming to UBC in 2018, he has published the most recent of these, a book entitled Telecom Tensions, (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021). He also studies various forms of social inequality and how these relate to algorithms, artificial intelligence, and the use of digital technologies to provide government services, with articles appearing in Surveillance and Society, AI & Society and Sociology Compass, one of the top-ranked Sociology journals in the world.
Courses
Learn more the courses delivered by members of the Science and Technology Studies.
Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Subject: Anthropology
Year/Level: 3
Prerequisites:
Theme(s): life sciences; environmental sciences; health sciences; Indigenous and non-Western knowledges; STS research methods
Description: This course is an introduction to ethnographic approaches to the study of science and technology, with a focus on the biosciences. We critically read a series of ethnographic articles, and each student produces their own mini-ethnography of a bioscientific knowledge practice. We consider the “building blocks” of life as understood by late 20th-century biology (eggs and seeds, cells, genes), investigate emerging epigenetic knowledges through a focus on food and ingestion, and investigate knowledges that consider living systems and aggregates, including concepts of species, carrying capacity, resources, and bio-social systems. Throughout the course, we consider both Western scientific knowledge production as well as Indigenous and non-Western knowledges of living entities.
Learning Objectives:
- Students will gain an understanding of the social contingencies of the production of scientific knowledge, and of the multiple theoretical and methodological approaches in the anthropological study of science and technology.
- Students will develop literacy regarding key terms, entities, and debates in the life and environmental sciences (such as fertilization, genes, cells, the nature/nurture dichotomy, nutrition, epigenetics, populations, invasive species, and ecosystems).
- Students will apply the disciplinary lens of anthropology of science to their own interactions with life sciences discourses and practices. Through this application of the theories and methods introduced in course readings and seminars, students will learn to phrase their observations about the entanglement of biology with culture in the disciplinary language of the anthropology of science
Instructor: Natalie Forssman
“Many students have been taught to revere Western science and take its findings as contextless and universal truths. I am driven to open their eyes to the complexities of how knowledge is generated, to help them imagine and enact more equitable and inclusive knowledges and futures.”
Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Subject: Sociology
Year/Level: 4
Prerequisites: SOCI 111 and third-year standing
Theme(s): legal, scientific, and medical knowledges; scientific innovation; scientification; judicialization; medico-legal borderlands
Description: This course canvasses and critically explores topics at the nexus of science, technology, medicine, and law. Topics include biobanking, genetic engineering, AI in healthcare, technopsychiatry, and more. It assesses social and legal challenges and implications of scientific innovation.
Learning Objectives:
- Question premises, logic, and methods according to or through which medical and legal facts are produced with the aid of science and technology.
- Analyze how power and social inequalities are structured, legitimized, and challenged at the nexus of science, technology, medicine, and law.
- Learn how to understand foundational legal concepts pertaining to scientific and medical innovation.
- Develop the capacity to use this knowledge to assess social policies, laws, and regulations.
- Advance skills in arguing multiple viewpoints.
- Practice group work and skills in public speaking.
Course Calendar entry
Instructor: Agnieszka Doll
Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Subject: Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies
Year/Level: 3
Prerequisites:
Theme(s): feminist STS theories and methods; feminist epistemologies: race and sexuality; Indigenous and non-Western knowledges; environmental justice; new materialisms
Description: This course focuses on feminist critiques of science and knowledge and includes the study of feminist influence on methodological techniques and debates of importance to feminist research and to social and political action. It analyzes the ways science has helped to construct and enforce sexual, gendered, racialized, and ableist norms, as well as the ways feminist and queer epistemologies, or ways of knowing, have challenged those norms, helping to shape both scientific language and scientific communities.
Learning Objectives:
- Identify feminist epistemologies and their implications for academic research, and write a research paper/ creative research project analyzing these connections
- Explain the importance of gendered ways of knowing to social stratification, and appraise the current state of knowledge in feminist and queer studies on this relationship
- Understand and apply feminist, queer, and anti-racist approaches to science, and take a position in relation to this research through activities such as seminar moderation, group discussion, and by posing research questions
- Turn academic research on feminist approaches to science into effective writing and communication suitable to various audiences
- Reflect on class readings and assignments, as well as your own experiences and learning, through critical writing and revision
Instructor: Heather Latimer
Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Subject: Anthropology
Year/Level: 2
Prerequisites: Second-year standing
Theme(s): health disparities; structural inequality; embodiment; medicalization; global health; cross-cultural approaches to health and healing; decolonial, anti-racist, and feminist STS
Description: Medical anthropology is the study of how social, cultural, historical, biological, and political-economic forces intersect to shape human health, illness, healing, and the body. For instance, we approach the “body” as biologically given as well as culturally “made-up” and historically situated, so that one can speak of “local biologies.” Thus, we can ask whether biomedical categories make sense in different contexts, and how other systems of knowledge define cure and the distinction between the normal and the pathological. Also central to our analysis will be attention to local and global inequalities. Biomedicine will be treated as one among many efficacious systems of medical knowledge and epistemological authority, and its embeddedness in forms of social inequalities—including gender, race, class, and ability—will be investigated in depth.
Learning Objectives:
- Read and interpret texts in medical anthropology and the social studies of medicine;
- Make connections between anthropological/social theory, ethnography, and health outcomes;
- Recognize the wide diversity of contemporary healing practices (beyond biomedicine) and the different norms, values, and understandings of illness and well-being cross-culturally;
- Identify the ways in which social inequalities and injustices—both contemporary and historical—contribute to illness and disease in today’s world;
- Employ methods from medical anthropology to analyze public and global health interventions;
- Articulate how medical anthropological approaches can be applied to address real-world health crises and inequities;
- Develop your own arguments about culture, social structure, inequality, and health, and express these in multiple modalities (e.g., multi-media presentations, written academic prose, verbal discussions, etc.);
- Draw ideas and examples from ethnographic case studies to participate in pressing dialogues about health and medicine in the world today;
- Critically reflect upon your own experiences of health and illness, and how these relate to broader social processes.
Instructor: Laura Meek,
“I am passionate about thinking with my students about how social inequalities make people (literally) sick, and envisioning alternative and more equitable ways of structuring health and medicine, both in Canada and globally.”
Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Subject: Anthropology
Year/Level: 4
Prerequisites: ANTH 100 and third-year standing. (ANTH 227 is strongly recommended.)
Theme(s): global health disparities; disease and neo/colonialism; (bio)medicine and racial capitalism; biopolitics; biosecurity; humanitarianism; decolonial, anti-racist, and feminist STS
Description: The term ‘global health’ is used to refer to our interconnected health in a globalized economy, to the goal of achieving universal coverage for basic health services, and to the emergence of transnational systems of governance and delivery in response to those challenges. Medical anthropologists’ contributions to global health and development range from the translation of public health knowledge and policy into effective action in specific social and cultural contexts, to critical reflection on how colonial histories and political-economic agendas influence the design and implementation of health interventions across our unequal world. Among our inquiries in this course, we will consider ethnographic critiques of contemporary global health and development as humanitarian, security, and political-economic projects.
Learning Objectives:
- Read and interpret texts in critical medical anthropology and the social studies of global health;
- Make connections between social theory, ethnographic data, and global health outcomes;
- Demonstrate knowledge of the structural factors contributing to contemporary global health disparities;
- Understand the major epistemological, theoretical, political, and ethical debates between different approaches to global health and development;
- Identify the ways in which global health and development initiates seek to intervene in health disparities, as well as the common challenges they face in achieving this goal;
- Articulate how ethnographic methods can contribute to identifying, understanding, and responding to such challenges;
- Conduct a literature review in the social sciences;
- Employ concepts and methods from critical medical anthropology to analyze a particular global health issue in depth;
- Develop a thesis statement and support your argument with scholarly evidence;
- Communicate ideas and knowledge about global health issues in multiple modalities (e.g., reflective prose; team-based teaching; class discussions; formal research paper; etc.);
- Draw on medical anthropology concepts and ethnographic evidence to contribute to culturally and structurally competent global health and development initiatives.
Instructor: Laura Meek,
“I am passionate about thinking with my students about how social inequalities make people (literally) sick, and envisioning alternative and more equitable ways of structuring health and medicine, both in Canada and globally.”
Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Subject: History
Year/Level: First year
Prerequisites: None
Theme(s): nature, alchemy, anatomy, physics, astronomy, navigation
Description: What are the foundations of science as we know it? What forms of knowledge count as science? Who gets to create it? This introductory course explores these questions by examining human interactions with the natural world since ancient times, from alchemy and anatomy to physics and navigation. We aim to dispel the notion that developments in science, medicine, and technology are mere indications of the “march of progress,” in order to critically assess their varied impacts on human societies across time. We will also unpack the dominant narrative in which “Western science” allowed Europeans to develop experimental techniques of unprecedented power for knowing and exploiting nature. This is a history of science that is globally connected, with emphasis on developments in the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Pacific worlds.
Learning Objectives:
- Analyze the concept of “science” and its precursor terms (technê/epistêmê, natural philosophy, experimental philosophy) in historical context
- Gain an awareness of current approaches to the history of science, medicine, and technology
- Critically assess the role of scientific knowledge in social, political, economic, and cultural contexts across time and space
- Develop an understanding of the variety of primary sources available to historians (e.g. manuscripts, drawings, instruments, maps), and their individual strengths and weaknesses as reliable sources of information about the past
- Engage in current secondary source scholarship in the history of science
Course Calendar entry (Note: this is the general one for all History courses; there is no individual link per course).
Instructor: Margaret Carlyle (Please email me for the latest version of the syllabus)
Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Subject: History
Year/Level: Second year
Prerequisites: 3 credits of HIST
Theme(s): colonialism, imperialism, botany, medicine, cartography, racial theory, transport technology
Description: This survey course looks critically at the central role of science-making in the creation and consolidation of imperial projects in a globalizing world, from the eighteenth century to the present. A central premise of this course is that colonialism and the construction of scientific knowledge are intertwined processes. The course will work through a series of case studies in which science and empire intersect, offering students with the analytical tools for understanding the role of botany, geography, mining, natural history, medicine, transport technology, and other forms of natural inquiry in the construction of imperialism. We will use this knowledge to unpack and critique imperial agendas, including industrialization and scientific racism and sexism.
Learning Objectives:
- Develop an understanding of “science” and “empire” in historical context
- Gain an awareness of current scholarly approaches to the history of science and empire
- Develop vocabularies around the history of scientific imperialism and colonial encounters
- Critically explore primary sources (travel memoirs, colonial reports, maps, natural history collections) with a view to deconstructing colonial biases in order to arrive at new understandings of the scientific cultures of ‘non-Western’ peoples
- Gain an appreciation for, and apply through assignments, current critical, theoretical, and methodological approaches to the study of science and empire
- Discuss and critique ideas in accordance with the standards and conventions of academic writing
Course Calendar entry (Note: this is the general one for all History courses; there is no individual link per course).
Instructor: Margaret Carlyle (Please email me for the latest version of the syllabus)
Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Subject: History
Year/Level: Third Year
Prerequisites: 3 credits of HIST and HIST 118; or HIST 218 and third-year standing.
Theme(s): natural philosophy, religion, early modern, Renaissance, Enlightenment, scientific method, anatomy, astronomy, alchemy, witchcraft, magic, nature
Description: “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution and this is a book about it” is the opening line of Steven Shapin’s, which also lends its titlt to our course: The Scientific Revolution. This course explores scientific developments in Western Europe from the sixteenth-century Renaissance to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. During this period, European understandings of the natural world—and the methods for achieving such understandings—underwent radical and far-reaching transformations often deemed ‘revolutionary.’ Students will examine how this period of change redefined authoritative knowledge inherited from the ancients. We will delve into new ideas about the macrocosm (astronomy, physics, astrology) and the microcosm (human body) in order to build a picture of how early modern people approached and increasingly exploited nature. We will also examine the forms of inquiry, like alchemy and witchcraft, that they increasingly dismissed. Our focus will be on the material, spatial, and social contexts in which the ‘new science’ developed, including the rise of scientific laboratories, observatories, journals, and societies.
Learning Objectives:
- Analyze the “Scientific Revolution” and develop an understanding of the concepts of “science” and “revolution” in historical context
- Develop and refine understandings of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment
- Gain an awareness of current approaches to the history of the “Scientific Revolution,” including both proponents and opponents of the concept
- Assess the role of scientific knowledge in social, political, economic, and cultural contexts
- Critically examine primary sources, including texts, images, and objects, in order to understand scientific knowledge-making as a multifaceted sociomaterial process
- Develop an understanding of the worldviews and priorities reflected in the rise of scientific rationality
- Engage in current secondary source scholarship in the history of the Scientific Revolution
Course Calendar entry (Note: this is the general one for all History courses; there is no individual link per course).
Instructor: Margaret Carlyle (Please email me for the latest version of the syllabus)
Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Subject: History
Year/Level: Third year
Prerequisites: 6 credits of HIST; or one of HIST 118, HIST 218 and third-year standing
Theme(s): pseudoscience; theories of race and science; natural history; early modern; Atlantic world; slavery and revolution
Description: How did science, race, and gender interact in the early modern Atlantic world (1500–1800)? How was science used to create new knowledge claims about racial and sexual inequality? Using British, Iberian, and French examples, this course uncovers the experiences of men and women from all corners of the Atlantic world: indigenous peoples, free people of colour, white European settlers, and especially enslaved Black Africans. Through primary and secondary sources—including maps, paintings, texts, music—we will analyze and critique white Europeans’ attempts to curate, control, and exploit the natural world, including and especially human bodies, and the agency of subjugated peoples in responding to these designs. Topics include: natural history collecting and racial classification; gender and human reproduction; slavery, resistance, and revolution; sailors, divers, and ship pilots.
Learning Objectives:
- Develop an in-depth understanding of historical uses of the terms “race,” “gender,” and “science”
- Gain an awareness of current approaches to the history of science, gender, and race in the early modern Atlantic world
- Assess the role of scientific and pseudo-scientific knowledge in social, political, economic, and cultural contexts
- Understand the historical role of ‘science’ in creating contemporary understandings of race and sex
- Respond with confidence, curiosity, and a critical eye when introduced to new primary and secondary sources
- Develop an understanding of the variety of primary sources available to historians (e.g. manuscripts, maps, drawings), as well as their individual strengths and weaknesses as reliable sources of information about the past
- Engage in current secondary source scholarship in the history of science, gender, and race in the Atlantic world
Course Calendar entry (Note: this is the general one for all History courses; there is no individual link per course).
Instructor: Margaret Carlyle (Please email me for the latest version of the syllabus)
Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Subject: History
Year/Level: Third year
Prerequisites: 6 credits of HIST; or one of HIST 118, HIST 218 and third-year standing
Theme(s): polygenesis, epigenesis, maternal impressions, mesmerism, alchemy, cartography, imperialism, Newtonianism, automata, colonial science, revolutions
Description: This course focuses on the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment and the rise of colonial science in the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. The terms “Enlightenment,” and “science” will be problematized within their historic contexts through a variety of primary and secondary sources, as well as images and objects. We will explore how emerging scientific discourses contributed to evolving understandings of the natural world, of human diversity, and of the role of religion in a world increasingly defined by ‘rational’ world. We will also consider how the liberatory potential of Enlightenment privileged white male European elites who, in turn, developed sexual and racial theories that emphasized fundamental human differences, which became central to their claims of dominion over nature across the globe. The course ends with the decades around 1800, the era of Revolution and Romanticism. Topics covered include Newtonianism and spectacular science; androids and the ‘man-machine’; homosexuality, monstrosities, and hermaphrodites.
Learning Objectives:
- Gain an understanding of the meanings of the terms “Enlightenment” and “science” in historic context
- Critically analyze the relationship of Enlightenment science to imperial agendas at a time of heightened European colonization of the globe
- Develop a baseline vocabulary in historical context to understand Enlightenment science (e.g. automata, alchemy, mesmerism, polygenesis, epigenesis, maternal impressions)
- Gain an awareness of current approaches to the history of Enlightenment science
- Respond with confidence, curiosity, and a critical eye when introduced to new primary and secondary sources
- Engage in current secondary source scholarship in the history of Enlightenment science in global context, including the Atlantic and Pacific world oceans
- Gain an appreciation for, and apply through assignments, current critical, theoretical, and methodological approaches to the study of Enlightenment science
Course Calendar entry (Note: this is the general one for all History courses; there is no individual link per course).
Instructor: Margaret Carlyle (Please email me for the latest version of the syllabus)
Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Subject: History
Year/Level: Third year
Prerequisites: 6 credits of HIST; or one of HIST 118, HIST 218 and third-year standing
Theme(s): patient zero; quarantine; vectors; epidemics; epidemiology; plague; vaccination
Description: In the wake of COVID-19, our collective curiosity invites us to look back at past human experiences of pandemics. This course surveys the history of pandemics globally, from ancient Babylon to COVID-19, by way of plague, cholera, tuberculosis, influenza, polio, and HIV. We will address questions like: What distinguishes a pandemic, an epidemic, and a plague? How have states, individuals, and society responded to past plagues? What belief systems and rituals shaped these responses? What role has medicine played? Do pandemics bring out the best or the worst in humans? How do they create or reinforce social, economic, racial, and gender inequalities? Finally, we will ask an especially urgent, if age-old, question: do pandemics end? If so, how? Topics include urban planning, quarantine, public health, travel, commerce, and vaccination.
Learning Objectives:
- Gain an understanding of the history of medicine and disease in social, political, economic, and cultural contexts
- Develop a baseline vocabulary in historical context to understand pandemics (e.g. plague, epidemic, quarantine, inoculation, patient zero)
- Gain an awareness of current scholarly approaches to the history of pandemics in global context
- Gain an appreciation for, and apply through assignments, current critical, theoretical, and methodological approaches to the study of the history of pandemics since antiquity
Course Calendar entry (Note: this is the general one for all History courses; there is no individual link per course).
Instructor: Margaret Carlyle (Please email me for the latest version of the syllabus)
Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Subject: History
Year/Level: Fourth year
Prerequisites: 3 credits of HIST and HIST 118; or HIST 218 and third-year standing
Theme(s): This course explores the historical dimensions of current debates about technology, focusing on a single, interdisciplinary theme. The latest iteration of this course, described below, focuses on the history of reproductive technologies. Interested students should contact the instructor for the latest course outline.
Description: This course is designed to explore the role of technologies of human reproduction in medicine and their reception by society. We will think broadly about historical sources, including photographs, film, advertising, texts, and museum artefacts in order to explore the long history of human interventions in reproduction and childbirth. We will focus on the period from 1700 to the beginning of the Cold War. A key aim of our course is to consider how medical and popular representations of reproductive technologies have shaped the status of the pregnant body and notions of mother-/parent-hood over time. We will also see how the liberating potential of new technologies have often served to reinforce, rather than resist or reimagine, longstanding medical motifs and larger societal beliefs surrounding reproduction and pregnancy. This includes the myths of the hysterical woman and the monstrous mother. Themes include: maternal imagination, obstetrical education, enslaved motherhood, racial mixing, and eugenics.
Learning Objectives:
- Develop a baseline vocabulary in historical context to understand the key terms “reproduction” and “technology”
- Develop a sound knowledge of the material, social, and political histories of a series of reproductive technologies and techniques
- Critically analyze the benefits, drawbacks, and ambiguities of reproductive technologies across space and time
- Achieve a new understanding of the medicalization of reproduction and childbirth through a critical analysis of historical sources
- Gain an awareness of current approaches to the history of reproductive technology
- Contribute new knowledge to these approaches through a multi-step term assignment focused on research skills development
Course Calendar entry (Note: this is the general one for all History courses; there is no individual link per course).
Instructor: Margaret Carlyle (Please email me for the latest version of the syllabus)
Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Subject: History
Year/Level: Third Year
Prerequisites: Either one of (a) HIST 218 and third-year standing, or (b) 6 credits of HIST.
Theme(s): The topic of this course varies each time it is offered. Generally speaking, we will cover themes at the intersection of gender and medicine. The last iteration of this course focused on the History of Motherhood and Reproduction in Multimedia. Please email me for the latest version of the syllabus.
Course Calendar entry (Note: this is the general one for all History courses; there is no individual link per course).
Instructor: Margaret Carlyle (Please email me for the latest version of the syllabus)