Victoria Massie

This course will examine how narratives become a powerful tool for evaluating the social, political, economic, historical, and environmental conditions that shape our understanding of illness. By focusing on the gap between biomedical diagnosis and lived experience, the course will explore how larger social meanings (from colonialism, racism, sexism, ableism, and class) become embodied by patients, and the intimate and structural dynamics that shape the possibilities of care. However, by drawing on different narrative forms — from memoir, fiction writing, film, and poetry, in addition to ethnography — the course will enable students to experiment with narrative forms to reass whether and how the body becomes the source of sickness. By considering the relationship between narrative form and the metaphors of illness it enables, students will develop their own illness narrative projects to reimagine and re-write our understanding of health inequalities today.

This course engages Black feminist theory as a foundation for science and technology studies (STS). STS is a field that focuses on how power is infused in how we create scientific knowledge, how we disseminate “objective” information, and how it materializes in the technology we build into our everyday lives. However, how might we better understand “science” through an intersectional framework that attends to race, gender, sexuality, and disability simultaneously? Drawing on critical methods of speculation, the course will address the following themes: the role of racism in social reproduction through the body from colonialism and slavery to contemporary genomics; humanism; the racialization of physical matter and space; and concluding with Afrofuturism. In addition to mobilizing the theories and concepts developed to bear witness to the particularity of Black womxns lived experience, this class has us consider what Black feminism can teach us about how to reckon with building a more with just and equitable world with science and technology against various oppressive forces. Cross-list: ANTH 534. Mutually Exclusive: Cannot register for ANTH 334 if student has credit for ANTH 419/ANTH 534.

Directed reading and preparation of written papers on anthropological subjects not offered in the curriculum and advanced study of subjects on which courses are offered. Repeatable for Credit.

A two-semester sequence of independent research culminating in the preparation and defense of an honors thesis. Open only to candidates formally accepted into the honors program.

This course engages Black feminist theory as a foundation for science and technology studies (STS). STS is a field that focuses on how power is infused in how we create scientific knowledge, how we disseminate “objective” information, and how it materializes in the technology we build into our everyday lives. However, how might we better understand “science” through an intersectional framework that attends to race, gender, sexuality, and disability simultaneously? Drawing on critical methods of speculation, the course will address the following themes: the role of racism in social reproduction through the body from colonialism and slavery to contemporary genomics; humanism; the racialization of physical matter and space; and concluding with Afrofuturism. In addition to mobilizing the theories and concepts developed to bear witness to the particularity of Black womxns lived experience, this class has us consider what Black feminism can teach us about how to reckon with building a more with just and equitable world with science and technology against various oppressive forces. Cross-list: ANTH 334. Mutually Exclusive: Cannot register for ANTH 534 if student has credit for ANTH 334/ANTH 619.

This course is an independent study course organized between the faculty member and student, on a topic developed by them. Repeatable for Credit.

Repeatable for Credit.