Fall 2006 Courses

STS CORE COURSE

Science and Technology Studies 901
“Science, Technology and Medicine in Society”
Jason Delborne
Thursday 3:30 – 6:00
5322 Social Science Building

As the core graduate seminar in the Science and Technology Studies (STS) program, this course will expose students to major theoretical developments and trends in the interdisciplinary field of STS. We will reflect upon and challenge the ideas of some of the foundational scholars (e.g., Kuhn, Fleck, Merton, Polanyi), interrogate various branches of scholarship that developed as the field matured (e.g., laboratory ethnographies, sociology of scientific knowledge, actor-network theory, controversy studies), as well as explore emerging directions in the field (e.g., postcolonial science, feminist approaches in STS, STS and race, science and policy, science and social movements). The course will provide a foundation for incorporating STS into further research and writing, and will challenge students to self-reflect on their own assumptions about the relationships among knowledge, science, technology, politics, and publics. Graduate students from any discipline are welcome to participate (advanced undergraduates with consent of instructor). The course is reading-intensive and discussion-based, and students will complete a number of collaborative and individual assignments rather than a major term paper.

Jason Delborne (Ph.D. University of California,
Berkeley Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management)
is visiting this year as an NSF Fellow in Science and Society. His
work addresses the practice of scientific dissent in agricultural
biotechnology.

OTHER STS COURSES

Curriculum and Instruction 975
“Education and the Public Understanding of Science Curriculum”
John Rudolph (Curriculum and Instruction)
Mondays 4:30 – 7:00
215 Teacher Education Building

The relationship between science and the American public varied considerably over the course of the last 150 years. Science has gone from being a source of public fascination and idle amusement to being viewed as the driving force of economic and political progress in a global marketplace. In similar fashion, education has increasingly assumed a central role in our modern society. Yet science education has been largely overlooked as an agency that shapes public understandings of and attitudes toward institutional science and socio-scientific issues in this country. In this seminar, we will examine the current literature related to the Public Understanding of Science and explore the manner in which school science, at both the university and secondary levels, has functioned to mediate the relationships between the average citizen, the research activities of the scientific community, and the applications of techno-science that have emerged in modern society. From there, we will examine the nature of current science education reform efforts in the United States and ask what these reforms have been designed to accomplish, and, more important, what role science education should play in current affairs. Readings will include, among others, Philip Kitcher’s Science, Truth, and Democracy (Oxford, 2001); Gregory and Miller’s Science in Public: Communication, Culture, and Credibility (Plenum, 1998); Sheila Jasanoff’s Designs on Nature (Princeton, 2005); and AAAS, Project 2061: Science For All Americans (Oxford, 1990). Additional information may be obtained at: jlrudolp@wisc.edu, or 265-3431.

History of Science 339
“Technology and Its Critics Since World War II”
Eric Schatzberg (History of Science)
Tuesday and Thursday 1:00 – 2:15
6116 Social Science Building

Prerequisites: junior standing or consent of instructor.
Graduate students must enroll concurrently in History of Science 639 (which meets Wednesday 9:55 in 6109 Social Science, and will provide graduate students with advanced discussion and additional readings supplementing the themes in HS339, as well as additional written work).

This course examines intellectuals and activists who questioned the dominant faith in technology in the United States from World War II until roughly 1980. The course begins by examining the tremendous enthusiasm for science and technology that emerged after World War II, inspired by the new military technologies created by scientists and engineers. These technologies include the atomic bomb, radar, digital computers, and ballistic missiles.

Some people challenged this faith in the inevitable benefits of technological change. At first this challenge was limited to a few intellectuals who criticized the consumer society of the 1950s, with its bland suburbs, conformist white-collar bureaucracies, and mind-numbing advertising. In the late 1950s, this critique was taken up by new social movements that attacked the most dramatic technological achievement of World War II, the atomic bomb. In the early 1960s, critics shifted ground to new technologies, most importantly synthetic pesticides and the automobile, and made connections with the new environmental movement. Critics of technology drew strength from the counterculture of the 1960s, which encouraged political and social activism against large-scale technologies like nuclear power. The counterculture also strengthened groups seeking to create counter-technologies, such as solar energy. Even in the midst of today's enthusiasm for everything digital, technology's critics continue to expose the dark side of technological change.

 

History of Science/Medical History 919, sec. 2
“Ecology and Disease in Historical and Contemporary Perspective”
Gregg Mitman (History of Science and Medical History) and Jonathan Patz (Environmental Studies, Population Health Sciences)
Wednesday 9:00 – 11:30
272 Enzyme Institute

Malaria. Avian Influenza. Asthma. The emergence and spread of such diseases has drawn recent attention to the ways in which human and wildlife health problem are intimately related to environmental change. While disease ecology has become a focus of interdisciplinary exchange across the fields of medicine, public health, wildlife and veterinary medicine, conservation biology, ecology, geography, sociology, environmental history, and other disciplines, ecological approaches to the understanding of health and disease have a long history. In this seminar we will explore that history and consider how such past efforts at integrating ecology and health can inform current research questions, directions, and policy affecting current and future environmental health challenges. The seminar will dovetail with the first EcoHealth ONE conference to be held in Madison in the fall of 2006 that will provide a unique forum to (1) advance emerging, highly interdisciplinary scientific work in this arena, (2) promote the interaction of a diverse audience concerned with sustainable health and environment, and (3) consider how to address challenges in an effective and unified way.

Journalism and Mass Communication/Life Science Communication/
Environmental Studies 860
“Science and Environmental Communication”
Sharon Dunwoody (Journalism and Mass Communication)
Monday 10:00 – 12:00
2625 Humanities Building

This graduate-level readings course is for students seeking professional or research training and who are interested in science and environment communication. It will tackle a set of issues and content areas important to both professional and scholarly worlds and will ask you to evaluate them through the lens of science and environmental communication scholarship and informed commentary. The major goals of the effort are to share with you the latest scholarly literature in this area and, ultimately, to help you become more introspective about the process of enhancing public interaction with science and environmental issues.

Journalism and Mass Communication 676
“Cyberspace, Hypermedia, and Society”
Greg Downey (Journalism and Mass Communication, Library and Information Studies)
Tuesday and Thursday 9:30 – 10:45
1180 Grainger Hall
– open to both undergraduate and graduate students –

Through primary sources, secondary texts, and on-line experiences, we will explore the historical and geographical evolution of “cyberspace” and "hypermedia" in the US, beginning in the 19th century with telegraphic and telephone signals, continuing into the 20th century with the development of the computer and the ARPANET, and accelerating today with our existing telephone, TV, radio, library, and mail systems all converging on the World Wide Web. We will pay close attention to how various "new" technologies were understood by users in their original context, how technologies of "virtual space" hide the place-bound material and labor components necessary for their functioning, and how different technologies work to "produce" and "compress" both time and space in a society characterized by uneven (and often arguably unjust) geographic development.

More info online at http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/~gdowney/

Medical History/History of Science/Population Health Sciences 553
“International Health and Global Society”
Rick Keller (Medical History and Bioethics)
Tuesday and Thursday 9:30 – 10:45
155 Van Hise Hall

–Graduate students must also register for Medical History 753–

SARS in East Asia and Canada; AIDS and malaria in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America; malnutrition and deficiency diseases in the developing world; stress, heart disease, and eating disorders in the United States and Europe: wherever we turn, we are assaulted by these images. The Internet, television, and print journalism ensure that we are never unaware of the health crises that besiege our globalizing society, to the extent that we see these problems as a symptom of globalization itself.
 
Yet such concern is far from new. Historians and epidemiologists have long recognized that the “microbial unification of the world” dates at least to the Black Death of the fourteenth century. Throughout the nineteenth century, cholera devastated South Asia, Europe, and the United States; a century ago, bubonic plague and flu each killed millions globally. In this course, we will draw on a wide range of historical and anthropological materials and methods to examine the history of public health and medicine as international phenomena. Focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we will explore topics such as the connections between global pandemics of infectious disease and European colonial expansion; strategies for curtailing the spread of disease across borders; historical and contemporary anxieties about the health consequences of global migration; and the emergence of a global medical marketplace. Particular themes include the connection between health and wealth; the relationship between culture and medical ideas and practices; and the tensions of practicing medicine in multicultural settings.


Philosophy 920
“Evidence and Evolution”
Elliott Sober (Philosophy)
Wednesday 1:15 – 3:15
5181 Helen C. White Hall

This seminar will begin with a general consideration of the concept of evidence, using tools from probability theory. In this early part of the seminar, we’ll consider Bayesian, likelihoodist, and frequentist ideas. The rest of the seminar will apply these tools to questions about evidence that arise in connection with evolutionary theory. One topic we’ll consider will concern intelligent design, but the rest are internal to evolutionary biology. The main focus here will be on questions that arise in connection with testing (i) hypotheses about phylogenetic relationships (e.g., why think that the species we currently observe have common ancestors?) and (ii) hypotheses about adaptation. Students who take this course may want to prepare for it over the summer by reading my textbook Philosophy of Biology and Ian Hacking’s textbook An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic.

OTHER COURSES OFFERED BY STS FACULTY

Anthropology 901
“Anthropology and International Health”
Claire Wendland (Anthropology, Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Medical History and Bioethics)
alternating Wednesdays 5:30 – 8:00
5230 Social Science Building

Global health has become a major focus of scholarly and popular interest in recent years as “emerging” infectious diseases become an unpleasant global threat to an increasingly interconnected world. Health indicators have become widely recognized markers of a state’s commitment to its people – augmenting and perhaps in a moral sense even replacing GNP as a measure of national development. Concerns about the effects of socio-economic inequality and cultural difference on health and disease are part of every health-policy maker’s milieu and every clinician’s daily practice. In this two-credit evening seminar, graduate students in anthropology, population health and other departments will come together and examine medical anthropological work in international health critically, using interdisciplinary perspectives. Consideration of case studies in applied medical anthropology will allow us to identify and interrogate the methods used by practitioners attempting to put specific global health problems in social, political, and economic context, with the ultimate goal of deepening our understanding of these problems and strengthening the design of public health interventions. On the macro level, we will also attend to anthropological critiques of the institutions and discourses of international public health and development. .

Library and Information Studies 861
“Information Architecture”
Kristin Eschenfelder (Library and Information Studies)
Thursday 12:00 – 2:30
4191F Helen C. White Hall

This course encompasses a variety of issues related to the design and management of digital information infrastuctures/spaces. Design topics include: organization of information, usability, online reading and navigational behaviors, and management issues include: content management, metadata, XML tools, planning and evaluation. Students also do a fair amount of XHML and CSS coding.

Library and Information Studies 910
“Research Design and Methodology”
Kristin Eschenfelder (Library and Information Studies)
Friday 9:00 – 11:30
4246 Helen C. White Hall

In-depth examination of a sample of exemplary research studies in the discipline. Each student, under supervision, prepares a research proposal for discussion and evaluation during class meetings. (Note that this course does not survey data collection methodologies. It focuses instead on approaches to and assumptions about research, as well as study quality issues.)

Philosophy 524
“Philosophy of Economics”
Daniel Hausman (Philosophy)
Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 11:00 – 11:50
4281 Helen C. White Hall

This course will focus on questions concerning the nature of rationality and decision making in both strategic and non-strategic contexts and with questions concerning the moral appraisal of economic outcomes, institutions, processes, and policies. Comparatively little will be said about economic methodology. There will be two papers (with an opportunity to revise the second) and exams.