GWSS 3203W is also offered in Spring 2025
GWSS 3203W is also offered in Spring 2024
GWSS 3203W is also offered in Spring 2023
GWSS 3203W is also offered in Summer 2022
GWSS 3203W is also offered in Spring 2022
GWSS 3203W is also offered in Summer 2021
Spring 2020 | GWSS 3203W Section 001: Blood, Bodies and Science (54174)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- Student Option
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person Term Based
- Class Attributes:
UMNTC Liberal Education Requirement
- Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
Mon,
Wed 11:15AM - 12:30PM
UMTC, East Bank
Anderson Hall 250
- Enrollment Status:
Open (117 of 120 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Ways in which modern biology has been site of conflict about race/gender. Race/gender demographics of scientific professions.
- Class Description:
- This course is a critical engagement of Science Studies through the categories of race, gender, sex and sexuality. The course examines the historical and contemporary technologies that transform social relations of sex, gender, and race and human biology, products like Viagra, institutions like public health, and academic disciplines like genetics, to better understand how science has made our lives better through these technologies. Simultaneously this course examines how these same technologies worked to maintain and even create social inequality. Specifically we examine how scientific understandings of bodies, disease, life-processes, and desires shape how we understand who we are and our relations to others for the distribution of resources and the valuation of human life. The course resists the idea that the production of knowledge is objective. Often the products of racism, sexism, and homophobia produced in the pursuit of knowledge are explained as aberrations in the scientific method, as the moments were society and politics corrupts the production of truth in the scientific method. This class recasts this relationship and uncovers how scientific endeavors have often been driven by the production and reproduction of these social hierarchies based on the categories of sex, skin, and genes. This class argues that racism, sexism, and homophobia in their modern forms are technologies of liberalism developed through science and not their unresolved remainder. The goal of this course is two fold. First the student will learn the impacts of science and technology in the production of social inequality. Second the student will learn how to critically engage specific scientific methodologies. Students will deal with primary and secondary materials common in the social sciences, and will learn how to "read" and understand basic scientific research, including basic understandings of genetics or epidemiological modes of data collection. Students will be exposed to and learn how to analyse the following qualitative and quantitative approaches: discourse and text analysis, statistics, case study, epidemiological methods such as clinical trials, disease tracking and interpretation, contact tracing and disease reporting, and scientific research such as genetics. By exploring the history of these methods the student will gain a better understanding of how the production of scientific knowledge occurs and how it is translated into technologies that inform our social worlds.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/54174/1203
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 31 July 2013
ClassInfo Links - Spring 2020 Gender, Women, & Sexuality Std Classes