This course provides an advanced introduction to key conceptual work in the anthropology of science, technology, and knowledge production. The course examines how truth-effects are produced in the world, and how people know what we know. It explores the social and political arrangements “built into” or materialized through the infrastructures and objects that help structure lives in the U.S. and globally. It asks how new information technology, media platforms, and data-rich practices change the questions of knowledge and truth. It examines such things as life by algorithm, data mining, the self-tracking movement (especially vis-à-vis health), and the infrastructures of “the cloud”.

Science and technology (including data-rich computing practices) are fundamental parts of the political and social worlds we inhabit, and of our intimate senses of ourselves. This course addresses this assertion in three clusters. First, it provides an advanced introduction to key conceptual work in the anthropology of science, technology, and knowledge production. The goal is to lay a foundation for stepping back and asking, what critical tools are available to us for thinking about how truth-effects are produced in the world today? How do we know what we know? How might we address the dilemmas of a so-called post-truth moment? Second, course readings will ask, what social and political arrangements are “built into” or materialized through the particular consumer and technological objects (from pharmaceuticals to AI) that saturate many of our lives in the U.S. and globally? Third, have new information technology, media platforms, and data-rich practices (data mining, self-tracking) fundamentally changed the questions we must pose vis-à-vis knowledge and truth? Here we will look at such things as crowd-sourcing knowledge production (and labor), the rapidly growing self-tracking movement (especially vis-à-vis health), platforms and practices documenting forms of state violence, and recent work on the infrastructures of “the cloud” to examine the forces that are giving shape to the circuitry of knowledge, experience, power, and work today.

Credit Restrictions

Students will receive no credit for ANTHRO 168 after completing ANTHRO 168. A deficient grade in ANTHRO 168 may be removed by taking ANTHRO 168.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.