| source Harvard (X) |
level |
department History of Science (X) |
In every time and place women and men have become ill and sought care. This course is organized around ethnographic and historical studies of caregiving, providing a framework for thinking comparatively about the illness experience in a variety of cultural and historical contexts. We will be examining the spectrum of care from local and family through highly bureaucratic and specialized settings. We will examine chronic as well as acute illness and disability and interrogate rationales for - caregiving including the moral and emotional as well as the operational and instrumental.
Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page
An opportunity to apply the methods and ideas of the history of health and medicine to understand the practical problems that have framed health policy in 20th-century America, and vice-versa, emphasizing the ways in which transformations in the epistemological and structural foundations of medical care have interacted with the broader public policy: the effects of the market upon standards of care; the rise of the clinical trial and Evidence-Based Medicine; and health-care reform.
Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page
Seeks to identify and explore salient ethical, legal, and policy issues - and possible solutions - associated with developments in biotechnology and the life sciences.
Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page
This course examines the phenomenon of "brainwashing" as a modern set of techniques that can apparently force a subject radically to alter her beliefs against her will. The Cold War roots of 'brainwashing' - both the myth and the reality -- lie in the politics of twentieth-century anti-Communism and the deeper fear that people's most strongly held thoughts, ideas, and ideological commitments could be vulnerable to powerful infiltration. In order to understand the dynamics of this process we will examine case studies beginning with the Korean War-era emergence of the term 'brainwashing', the American interdisciplinary science of "coercive persuasion" that arose in response, and successive waves of technological, political, and sociocultural developments. We will also look at how brainwashing and analogous persuasive techniques may operate among larger groups, crowds, organizations, and mass societies.
Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page
The body and its management in health and disease. Discussions of representative texts, underlining historiographical and substantive issues in the history of medicine, followed by student progress reports and drafts.
Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page
From tropical medicine to international health, infectious disease management and history of colonialism have been closely linked. Focusing on US and Australian history in particular, this course will examine the history of "medicine at the border" in the modern era of imperialism and globalization: the science, politics, and public health benefits and costs of quarantine and health screening; the connections between health interventions and territorial expansion; between disease, citizenship, and governance. Management of particular diseases will form a focus: smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, tuberculosis. We will work closely through the large historiography on national, colonial, and racial dimensions of tropical medicine and international health.
Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page
This course focuses on high-impact experiments - among them, the Milgram "Obedience" experiments and the Stanford Prison Experiment - carried out in the twentieth-century human sciences by anthropologists, sociologists, social psychologists, and/or experimental psychologists. Many dreamed of a "technology of human behavior" and conducted experiments toward this end. What were the results, and how do they continue to affect our thinking and daily lives today?
Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page
Examines the history of the culture and personality movement, considered narrowly and broadly, as well as technologies and techniques developed in the social and human sciences for measuring the self and its socialization processes.
Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page
Explores new methods for understanding disease, medicine, and society, ranging from historical demography to cultural studies. Topics include patterns of health and disease, changes in medical science and clinical practice, the doctor-patient relationship, health care systems, alternative healing, and representations of the human body. The course will focus on historical problem-framing, research strategies, and writing.
Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page
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Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page
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Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page
A consideration of changing conceptions of disease during the past two centuries. We will discuss general intellectual trends as well as relevant cultural and institutional variables by focusing in good measure on case studies of particular ills, ranging from cholera to sickle cell anemia to anorexia and alcoholism.
Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page
Examines the history of dogs and how we conceptualized (wo)man's best friend over time. Topics include the origins of dogs and the nature of domestication, breeding and dog breeds, mad dogs and rabies, learning theories and training methods, unwanted dogs and the humane movement, dogs as veterinary patients, dogs as experimental systems, dog emotion and social behavior, working and companion dogs, dogs as symbols, dog genomics.
Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page
Environmental sciences, politics, and polices in a global context. Topics to be covered: Pristine nature; built environments; managed forests, agriculture, biodiversity, population and environment in postcolonial contexts; the seas, GM organisms, global warming, environmental risk assessment, and narratives of nature. Course materials include films, novels, and policy papers, as well as scientific and other academic papers.
Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page
This course will compare the history and historiography of eugenics in the US, Australia, and Britain, 1860s to 1970s. Situated between natural sciences and social sciences, nineteenth century eugenicists presented some of the first faltering attempts to apply evolutionary ideas to human populations. The course will examine how eugenics came to flourish globally as part of early twentieth century modernity, and trace later scientific enterprises which were linked to eugenics. It will explore how local demographic, political as well as scientific contexts shaped different national histories of this controversial applied science.
Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page
This course takes a critical look at the assumptions underlying the use of expertise in policymaking and asks how our growing reliance on experts affects the quality, effectiveness, and accountability of public policy and governance. Case studies and theoretical readings are used to explore the basis for claims of expertise, the reasons for expert controversies, the relations between lay-people and experts, and the measures used to hold experts accountable in diverse decisionmaking frameworks.
Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page
Examination of the theory and practice of capturing scientific practice on film. Topics will include fictional, documentary, informational, and instructional films and raise problems emerging from film theory, visual anthropology and science studies. Each student will make and edit short film(s) about laboratory, field, or theoretical scientific work.
Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page
Examines imaging techniques from the Scientific Revolution to the twentieth century in astronomy, physiology, and criminology; interactions between art history (Benjamin, Krauss), philosophy (Bergson, Foucault, Deleuze), and science studies; the epistemological status of pictures.
Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page
Freud himself and Freud as used, adapted, and denounced in the academy. Freud himself on hysteria, dreams, the unconscious, sex, religion, and aggression. Appropriations and polemics within psychiatry, philosophy, literary criticism, psychohistory, feminism, and brain science.
Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page
Explores the medieval European understanding of the structure and workings of the cosmos in the context of medieval theology, physics, astronomy, astrology, magic, and medicine. Attention to the position of humans as cultural creatures at the intersection of nature and spirit; and the place of Christian Europeans in relation to non-Christians and other categories of 'outsiders' within and beyond Europe. Readings include Hippocrates, Aristotle, Pliny, Ptolemy, Augustine, Bacon, Aquinas, Marco Polo, Mandeville, and Columbus.
Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page
Through regular meetings with faculty advisor, each student will focus on research and writing with the purpose of developing a publishable research paper.
Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page
Through regular meetings with faculty advisor, each student will focus on research and writing with the purpose of developing a publishable research paper.
Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page
A survey of medical theory, organization, and practice in the context of other forms of contemporary healing, notably magical and religious. Topics include the gendering of healing and the body, the rise of hospitals and related institutions, and responses to "new" diseases such as syphilis and plague.
Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page
An advanced seminar focusing on Heidegger's assessment of modern technology and the relation of scientific and/or technological practices to human experience, history, and philosophy.
Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page
Philosophical questions raised by historical developments in 20th- and 21st-century physics, and conversely, historical-scientific questions raised by philosophical inquiry. Special and general relativity. Issues in quantum mechanics surrounding causality, determinism, realism, and probabilism. Atomic and thermonuclear weapons. Growth of large-scale experimental high-energy physics. What is meant by "unified" field theories? Is a reductionist theory of nature possible? Rise of string theory and nanosciences. Readings: scientific, historical, and philosophical texts.
Score: 10.717785 Details | Listing | Web page