The CSTMS community offers a wide range of courses in many departments, along with our own STS courses. Here is a selection of courses offered this Spring. If these look interesting to you, you will probably also like our PhD Designated Emphasis in Science & Technology Studies.
Undergraduate Coursework
History 30. Science & Society
Monday Wednesday Friday 9:00-10:00
Instructor: Dr. Samuel A. Weiss EVANS
101 Barker
Scientific thought and society have always been interwoven. In this course, you will explore the various facets of this interrelationship, from deciding what counts as science to the ways that science has shaped and been shaped by the social, political, economic, religious, and natural environments it sits within. The focus for the course is providing historical grounding to the contemporary relationship between science and society.
History 182. Technology and Society in the Modern World
Monday Wednesday 4:00-5:30
Instructor: Massimo Mazzotti
88 Dwinelle
How do technology and society interact? What drives technological change? How does technology transfer across different cultures? These and other related questions are examined using historical case studies of productive, military, domestic, information, and biomedical technologies from 1700 to the present. We shall discuss the evolution of artifacts and technological systems such as industrial machinery, weapons, microwaves, computers, and contraceptives. The aim of the course is for you to learn about how technology affects social change and, especially, how technological change is invariably shaped by historical and social circumstances. At the end of the course you will be able to think historically about technology, and thus engage effectively with questions of technological change — or lack thereof.
Running parallel to Hist 182 is Hist 182T, intended for students interested in teaching elementary or secondary school science and math. Students in the “T” course will attend the regular 182 lectures and a special section; this section will focus on techniques, skills, and perspectives necessary to apply the history of science in the juvenile and adolescent science classroom, including pedagogy, devising lesson plans for their classrooms, finding reliable historical information, and writing. If you are interested in Hist 182T, speak to the instructor during the first week of class.
For more undergraduate courses, please visit the Townsend Center’s website for the Undergraduate Coursethread in Science and Society.
Graduate Coursework
These courses are examples of ones that satisfy the elective requirement for the PhD Designated Emphasis in STS.
Anthropology 250X. The Anthropology of Reason, Science and Modernity
Tuesday 12:00-2:00
Instructor: Paul Rabinow
219 Kroeber Hall
This graduate seminar is a challenging, high level overview of the relations of reason, science and modernity. It provides a genealogy of these topics taken up as an anthropological problem. It does so through close readings of major 20th Century thinkers (Max Weber, John Dewey, Georges Canguilhem, Hans Blumenberg, Michel Foucault), taken up in an anthropological perspective. The course focuses on the problem of science and rationality understood as practices of reason and their troubled relations with ethical and political registers.
ESPM 249 P001. Bioethics, Law and the Life Sciences
Wednesday 10:00-12:00
Instructor: David Winickoff
12 Boalt Hall
Developments in biotechnology and the life sciences are unsettling legal and policy approaches to intellectual property, reproduction, health care, medical research, and the criminal justice system. Through reading primary materials and relevant secondary sources, this course investigates ethical, legal, and policy problems associated with these developments, and explores possible solutions.
Geography 255 P001. Topics in Political Geography
Thursday 2:00-5:00
Instructor: Jake Kosek
575 McCone Hall
Research seminar on selected topics in political geography.
Health and Medical Sciences 298 P004. Directed Group Study
Monday 6:00-8:00
Instructor: Guy Micco
470 Stephens
Group study for graduate students. Intensive examination of health-related topics.
History 280.002. Enlightenment, Science, and Technology
Wednesday, 10:00-12:00 
Instructor: Massimo Mazzotti
123 Dwinelle Hall
The Enlightenment is more than a name for the eighteenth century in Europe and in its colonial networks. The term has been used to refer to a more or less coherent set of values and beliefs, to a historical process whose moral and political legacy continues to be fiercely contested. This seminar explores the intersection of these two meanings of Enlightenment, through the lenses of the transformation of scientific practice and of the very notion of rationality during the long eighteenth century. We shall discuss key works in the historiography of the Enlightenment and the cultural history of science, following the demise of the ‘grand narrative’ and the many moves from the transcendent to the mundane: from the mind to the body, from humanity to society, from the universal to the local. Keeping our focus on the universality of modern science as a historical construction, we shall be able to address effectively a set of questions have been defining the modern world ever since, and especially the tension between universality and locality, artificial and natural, centers and peripheries.
History 285U.001. Research Workshop with an Emphasis on Institutions of Culture and Structures of Cultural Exchange
Wednesday, 10:00-12:00
Instructor: Thomas Laqueur
3205 Dwinelle Hall
This is a workshop course on cultural history. All are welcome. But I invite especially projects that examine the institutional infrastructure for the making, transformation, and exchange of knowledge, art, technology, or ethical norms: printing and publishing; education; translation; travel; museums and concert halls; law and intellectual property, for example. I offer step-by- step guidance through the process of identifying, researching, and presenting the fruits of a manageable research project. In the first few weeks we will concentrate on basic structural and esthetic choices: a first paragraph, a last paragraph, deciding on an audience and on a narrative voice. Later, the seminar will constitute itself as an editorial collective that will read rough drafts and suggest revisions aimed at making the paper acceptable to our imaginary “journal.” The aim is to have a draft of a publishable paper for a real journal by May. For those topics on which I can offer no expertise we will rely, as I have in the past in my 285s, on the expertise of colleagues in this and other departments. Small grants-in-aid for research material will be available as needed.
Information 203 P001. Social and Organizational Issues of Information
Tuesday Thursday, 11:00-12:30
Instructor: Jenna Burrell
170 Barrows Hall
The relationship between information and information systems, technology, practices, and artifacts on how people organize their work, interact, and understand experience. Individual, group, organizational, and societal issues in information production and use, information systems design and management, and information and communication technologies. Social science research methods for understanding information issues.
Information 214 P001. Needs and Usability Assessment
Tuesday Thursday, 11:00-12:30
Instructor: Nancy Van House
210 South Hall
Concepts and methods of needs and usability assessment. Understanding users’ needs and practices and translating them into design decisions. Topics include methods of identifying and describing user needs and requirements; user-centered design; user and task analysis; contextual design; heuristic evaluation; surveys, interviews, and focus groups; usability testing; naturalistic/ethnographic methods; managing usability in organizations; and universal usability.