"The Anthropology of Biology, Spring 2009"

Abstract:: " If the twentieth century was the century of physics, the twenty-first promises to be the century of biology. This subject examines the cultural, political, and economic dimensions of biology in the age of genomics, biotechnological enterprise, biodiversity conservation, pharmaceutical bioprospecting, and synthetic biology. Although we examine such social concerns as bioterrorism, genetic modification, and cloning, this is not a class in bioethics, but rather an anthropological inquiry into how the substances and explanations of biology — increasingly cellular, molecular, genetic, and informatic — are changing, and with them broader ideas about the relationship between "nature" and "culture." Looking at such cultural artifacts as cell lines, biodiversity databases, and artificial life models, and using primary sources in biology, social studies of the life sciences, and literary and cinematic materials, we rephrase Erwin Schrödinger's famous 1944 question, "What Is Life?" to ask, in the early 2000s, "What Is Life Becoming?""

Race and Science, Spring 2004

Abstract:: This course examines one of the most enduring and influential forms of identity and experience in the Americas and Europe, and in particular the ways race and racism have been created, justified, or contested in scientific practice and discourse. Drawing on classical and contemporary readings from Du Bois to Gould to Gilroy, we ask whether the logic of race might be changing in the world of genomics and informatics, and with that changed logic, how we can respond today to new configurations of race, science, technology, and inequality. Considered are the rise of evolutionary racism; debates about eugenics in the early twentieth century; Nazi notions of "racial hygiene"; nation-building projects and race in Latin America; and the movement in modern biology from race to populations to genes and genomes.