Courses:

All students must give at least one seminar presentation over the course of the term, offering a critical evaluation of positions represented in the readings for their chosen day.

There are two writing assignments for this course:

1. A short paper (5 pages) on course readings up through week 6. For this paper, pick a selection of the readings from Kuriyama through Wailoo and make an argument about an important theme that runs through your selections. Themes can be general (e.g. language, representation, gender, visualization, reductionism) or specific (e.g. influence of Foucault, Haraway, or some other theorist; varied uses of concepts like biosociality or biocapital), or something else that provides an interesting and meaningful approach to the readings. The argument can be about what works, what doesn't, what is interesting, what remains unexamined, and so forth.

   
   
   
   Student Example
   
   
   

   "Who Are You and What do You Want?" (PDF)  Courtesy of Michael Rossi.  Used with permission.

2. A longer, final paper. For this final paper (15-20 pages), pick a topic of interest to you and of relevance to the course and write either a research paper or a literature review. If you choose the research paper, conduct primary source research (historical, ethnographic, or otherwise) about the topic and write an analytic paper, informed by readings and theorists from the course, about what you find. If you choose the literature review, identify a relevant and interesting collection of secondary sources from science studies, history of science, or anthropology, and write a synthetic review of this existing literature. In either case, your paper must make specific arguments that engage the literature of science and technology studies.

   A prospectus for this paper will be due in week 9 and the final paper will be due in the last session, in time for our class conference. During this conference, each student will give a presentation on his or her final paper.

   
   
   
   Student Example
   
   
   

   "Credulousness, Credibility, and American Indian Therapeutic Knowledge in John Josselyn's New-Englands Rarities Discovered" (PDF)  Courtesy of Rebecca Woods.  Used with permission.