Spring 2021  |  GWSS 3203W Section 001: Blood, Bodies and Science (50523)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
Completely Online
Class Attributes:
UMNTC Liberal Education Requirement
Online Course
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/19/2021 - 05/03/2021
Tue, Thu 11:15AM - 12:30PM
Off Campus
UMN REMOTE
Enrollment Status:
Open (75 of 80 seats filled)
Also Offered:
Course Catalog Description:
What does the "social life" of Coronavirus and Covid-19 look like? Do pandemics have politics? Are diseases biomedical or socio-political phenomena? Why are African-Americans disproportionately affected by Covid-19 and HIV in the US? Why did the US become a hotspot for the rapid transmission of Coronavirus and what does this reveal about the market-based healthcare system? What are the global stories, struggles, failures, and successes of the Covid-19 pandemic? What will a post-pandemic world look like? In this class, you will answer these questions as they learn about the intersections of science and technology with the politics of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability.
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/50523/1213
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
31 July 2013

ClassInfo Links - Spring 2021 Gender, Women, & Sexuality Std Classes

To link directly to this ClassInfo page from your website or to save it as a bookmark, use:
http://classinfo.umn.edu/?subject=GWSS&catalog_nbr=3203W&term=1213
To see a URL-only list for use in the Faculty Center URL fields, use:
http://classinfo.umn.edu/?subject=GWSS&catalog_nbr=3203W&term=1213&url=1
To see this page output as XML, use:
http://classinfo.umn.edu/?subject=GWSS&catalog_nbr=3203W&term=1213&xml=1
To see this page output as JSON, use:
http://classinfo.umn.edu/?subject=GWSS&catalog_nbr=3203W&term=1213&json=1
To see this page output as CSV, use:
http://classinfo.umn.edu/?subject=GWSS&catalog_nbr=3203W&term=1213&csv=1
Schedule Viewer
8 am
9 am
10 am
11 am
12 pm
1 pm
2 pm
3 pm
4 pm
5 pm
6 pm
7 pm
8 pm
9 pm
10 pm
s
m
t
w
t
f
s
?
Class Title