ANTH 217 – Anthropology of Science

What are scientific facts? How do we know what we know? In this course, students will gain an introduction to thinking about science and technology as cultural practices shaped by power, politics, race, indigeneity, gender, and sexuality. Students will explore how anthropologists, long interested in how “culture” works, have recently turned their gaze toward critically examining the cultures of people in positions of technoscientific power, including nuclear scientists, Wall Street analysts, drone weapon designers, climate scientists, molecular biologists, and more. Students will also be trained in conducting ethnographic fieldwork on a group of experts in their own communities in order to ask questions about scientific rituals, truth-making, and distributions of power and privilege.