Offering: Intersession 2025

This course will interrogate and deconstruct modern institutionalized scientific fields with attention to their emergence and roles in formations of power from empires to nation states. Topics will include how disciplines from biology and medicine to chemistry, physics, and environmental sciences, have been historically and continually bound up with ideologies and practices of colonialism, race, gender and sexuality, militarism, and nationalism. We will address how these are differentially mediated and distributed across sites from the body to ecologies. Furthermore, the course will consider the range of knowledge and practices that people have used to resist sciences of domination and oppression and mobilize a range of knowledge and sciences towards more just worlds. Drawing from history, Indigenous studies, Black studies, postcolonial and feminist science studies, and environmental humanities, the course aims to equip students with critical methods to interrogate the knowledges and practices we inherit, and collectively find more just paths forward. 

Pre requisites: None