Class meetings: Tuesday and Thursday, 9:10-10:05, Page Hall 0010 Office Hours: Tuesday, 12:30-2:00, or by appointment, Hagerty Hall 428 Phone: 292-2559; E-mail: horn.5@osu.edu
Gabriel Piser (piser.1@osu.edu) Thursday, 4:105:05, Scott Lab E0105 Friday, 3:003:55, Hagerty Hall 0351
I. Course Description
This course explores, from a variety of perspectives, the multiple relations among social and cultural formations, scientific and technical work, and the production and circulation of knowledge. Topics include the everyday life of the laboratory; the shifting boundaries of science and other ways of knowing; the political and ethical contours of scientific and technical work; and the social effects of objects and technological systems.
Lectures will frequently focus on material not addressed in the assigned readings, as well as introduce terms for which you will be responsible on exams and in papers; recitation meetings will be devoted to careful consideration of texts and films, and to the review of issues raised in lectures. It is therefore essential that you complete each weeks readings before attending your recitation section, be present at all lectures and screenings, and be prepared to ask questions and contribute to discussions.
You will be graded on the basis of your attendance and participation in lecture and recitation sections (10%), and on the basis of your performance on an in-class midterm exam (30%), a five-page essay (30%), and a final exam (30%). Exams will combine short answer/identification and essay questions. More than two unexcused absences from lectures or recitation sections will result in a grade penalty.
This class fulfills the GE Cultures and Ideas and the Diversity: Global Studies requirements (see section VI below), as well as the College of Engineerings Professional Ethics requirement. Assessments of progress toward GE and course goals will be
2 incorporated into exams and writing assignments.
II. Texts (available at SBX and Barnes & Noble)
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work For Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave (Basic, 1985) Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists (Harvard University Press, 1988) Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Basic, 2012) Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986)
III. Schedule of Readings
Week 1: Introduction
28 August Introduction
Week 2: Technology, Science, and Society
2 September Lecture: Our Two Cultures
4 September Lecture: Technologies, Lives, and Politics
Read: Winner, Technologies as Forms of Life and Techn and Politeia, in The Whale and the Reactor, 318 and 4058
Week 3: Black Boxes and Blurred Boundaries
9 September Lecture: Making Facts and Machines
11 September Lecture: Contested Terms: Science and Its Others
Read: Bruno Latour, Opening Pandoras Black Box, in Science in Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 117 (Carmen)
Andrew Ross, New Age: A Kinder, Gentler Science? in Strange
3 Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (London: Verso, 1991), 1574 (Carmen) Week 4: Science and Revolution
16 September Lecture: Normal and Abnormal Science
18 September Lecture: Incommensurability
Read: Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 134, 5265, 111-135 (Carmen)
Week 5: Science and Difference
23 September Lecture: Revolution and the Female Skeleton
25 September Lecture: Technologies for the Production of Difference
Read: Steven Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 5161, 176263 (Carmen)
Week 6: Science and Culture
30 September Lecture: Culture of No Culture
2 October Lecture: Rites of Passage
Read: Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes, ix162
Week 7: Making Physicists, Making Bombs
7 October Film: Day after Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb, Jon Else (Pyramid, 1981)
9 October Film: Day After Trinity (continued)
Week 8: Technology, Ethics, and Politics
14 October Lecture: Knowing Sin?
Read: Winner, Do Artifacts Have Politics? in The Whale and the Reactor,
4 1939
16 October In-class midterm
Week 9: Domestic Technologies
21 October Lecture: Gender and Technology: The Story of Man the Hunter
23 October Lecture: Engineering the Domestic Sphere
Read: Schwartz Cowan, More Work For Mother, 315, 69150, 192216
Week 10: Energy
28 October Lecture: Questioning Questionable Questions (Piser)
30 October Lecture: Science for What Future? (Piser)
Read: Laura Nader, Barriers to Thinking New about Energy, Physics Today (1981), 9, 99100, 102, 104 (Carmen)
Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, Daedalus 142 (2013), 4058 (Carmen)
Week 11: Risk and Crisis
4 November Lecture: The Life and Death of Nature
6 November Lecture: Making and Taking Risks
Read: Winner, The State of Nature Revisited and On Not Hitting the Tar Baby, in The Whale and the Reactor, 12154
Week 12: Technologies of Food
11 November No Class (Veterans Day)
5 13 November Movie: Food, Inc., Robert Kenner (Magnolia, 2008)
Paper due Week 13: Animals and Us
18 November Movie: Food, Inc. (continued)
20 November Lecture: Eating Animals (Josephson)
Read: John Berger, Why Look at Animals? in About Looking (Pantheon, 1980), 328 (Carmen)
Week 14: The Limits of the Human
25 November Lecture: Post-human/Trans-human (Josephson)
Read: Winner, Brandy, Cigars, and Human Values, in The Whale and the Reactor, 15563
12 December Final exam
IV. Students With Disabilities
6 Students with disabilities that have been certified by the Office for Disability Services will be appropriately accommodated and should inform the instructor as soon as possible of their needs. The Office for Disability Services is located in 150 Pomerene Hall, 1760 Neil Avenue; telephone 292-3307, TDD 292-0901; www.ods.ohio-state.edu.
V. Academic Integrity
It is the responsibility of the Committee on Academic Misconduct to investigate or establish procedures for the investigation of all reported cases of student academic misconduct. The term academic misconduct includes all forms of student academic misconduct wherever committed; illustrated by, but not limited to, cases of plagiarism and dishonest practices in connection with examinations. Instructors shall report all instances of alleged academic misconduct to the committee (Faculty Rule 3335-5-487). For additional information, see the Code of Student Conduct (studentlife.osu.edu/csc).
VI. GE Expected Learning Outcomes
1. Cultures and Ideas
Expected Learning Outcomes:
1. Students analyze and interpret major forms of human thought, culture, and expression.
2. Students evaluate how ideas influence the character of human beliefs, the perception of reality, and the norms that guide human behavior.
2. Diversity (Global Studies)
Expected Learning Outcomes:
1. Students understand some of the political, economic, cultural, physical, social, and philosophical aspects of one or more of the worlds nations, peoples and cultures outside the U.S.
2. Students recognize the role of national and international diversity in shaping their own attitudes and values as global citizens.
Comparative Studies 2341 enables students to analyze and interpret scientific discourses and technological systems, in and outside the United States; to evaluate how ideas shape the norms that guide scientific and technical work; and to ask sophisticated
7 questions about the cultural contexts and social effects of new sciences and technologies. In these ways and others, it prepares students to be self-aware global citizens.