STS-Related Courses, Fall 2005

Courses related to STS are taught in dozens of departments. This list has been assembled from departmental schedules. Official course information, including accurate room and time information, can be found in the online schedule of classes. Course lists from other semesters are linked to the left.

Looking for courses in a particular department? Scroll down or use the menu to the right. We hope eventually to provide links to courses at other Northern California UC campuses. Until then please see the Northern California Network page.

Need to update course information? Aware of a relevant course not listed here? Please contact STSC staff.

Anthropology

• Anthro 112. Topics in Biology and Citizenship: Health, Identity, and Security. Rabinow.

  Progress in biological understanding is playing an important part in changing conceptions of health, identity and security. This course explores how understanding of molecular biology and genomics, elaborated through industrial and governmental structures, is impacting definitions, practice, and delivery of diagnostics, therapeutics, and health. It explores how the genome-based understanding of living organisms is changing the narratives and future trajectories of descriptions of human genetic differences and understanding of their significance. It explores the impact of the new biological technologies on US and international security in the changed conditions of the post-Cold War and post-9/11 world.

  Day/Time: TuTh 5-6:30 pm

• Anthro 115. Introduction to Medical Anthropology. Cohen.

  Ever wonder what the Terry Schiavo case was all about? Why there is so much HIV/AIDS in Africa? Where chronic fatigue syndrome came from? What shamans do for people? If placebos work? Find out in this class. This course introduces students to the fundamentals of the history and practice of medical anthropology and its allied fields. It examines the culture, organization, and politics of health, disease, medicine, and life itself in the world today. Topics covered may include privatization and managed care; new techniques and politics of pharmaceuticals and pharmacology globally with a focus on HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and Attention Deficit Disorder and related conditions; the study of "traditional" and "alternative" medicine; debates over mental health care; and the changing medicine of the elderly.

  Day/Time: TuTh 9:30-11am

Energy and Resources Group

• Energy and Resources 100. Energy and Society. Kammen.

  In this course, you will develop an understanding _ and a real working knowledge _ of our energy technologies, policies, and options. This will include analysis of the different opportunities and impacts of energy systems that exist within and between groups defined by national, regional, household, ethnic, gender distinctions. Analysis of the range of current and future energy choices will be stressed, as well as the role of energy in determining local environmental conditions, and the global climate.

  Day/Time: TuTh 2-3:30 pm

• Energy and Resources 151. Politics of Energy and Environmental Policy. Mason.

  How existing agencies and policy makers incorporate new concerns into their deliberations and how agencies given the mandate to address the newer concerns seek to fold their priorities into the existing institutional and policy structures.

  Day/Time: TuTh 2-3:30 pm

• Energy and Resources 200. Interdisciplinary Energy Analysis. Norgaard/Farrell.

  Graduate-level treatment of the interacting technological, economic, environmental, and sociopolitical aspects of energy supply and use, including regional, national, and international issues. Emphasizes systematic assessment of alternative strategies and options from an interdisciplinary viewpoint.

  Day/Time: W 9-10 am

• Energy and Resources 275. Water and Development. Ray.

  This class is an interdisciplinary graduate seminar for students of water policy in developing countries. It is not a seminar on theories and practices of development through the ‘lens’ of water. Rather, it is a seminar motivated by the fact that over 1 billion people in developing countries have no access to safe drinking water, 3 billion don’t have sanitation facilities and many millions of small farmers don’t have reliable water supplies to ensure a healthy crop.

  Day/Time: M 3-6 pm

• Energy and Resources 290. Technology and Sustainability. Nazaroff.

  Assessment of the consequences and opportunities of various technological systems (such as energy, buildings, transportation, materials, waste management) for sustainable development of society. Political and economic structures of societal decision-making. Environmental consequences of various technologies. Metrics and measures. Specific topics vary from year to year according to student and faculty interests. Course meeting include a mix of faculty lectures and student-led seminar presentations.

  Day/Time: TuTh 2-3:30 pm

Environmental Science, Policy & Management

• ESPM 100. Environmental Problem Solving. Frankie and Milton.

  Analysis of contrasting approaches to understanding and solving environmental and resource management problems. Case studies and hands-on problem solving that integrate concepts, principles, and practices from physical, biological, social, and economic disciplines. Their use in environmental policies and resource and management plans.

  Day/Time: TuTh 2-3:30 pm

• ESPM 161 P 001. Environmental Philosophy and Ethics. Merchant.

  A cross-cultural comparison of human environments as physical, socio-economic, and technocultural ecosystems with special emphasis on the role of beliefs, attitudes, ideologies, and behavior. An examination of contemporary environmental literature and the philosophies embodied therein.

  Day/Time: MW 3-4 pm

• ESPM 250. Environmental History, Philosophy, and Ethics. Merchant.

  A critical survey of classical and recent literature in the field of environmental history, philosophy, and ethics with special emphasis on the American environment. Topics will include environmental historiography, theories of environmental history, and the relationships between environmental history, philosophy, ethics, ecology, and policy.

  Day/Time: Tu 3:30-6:30 pm

Geography

• Geography 20. Globalization. Acker.

  How and why are geographical patterns of employment, production, and consumption unstable in the contemporary world? What are the consequences of NAFTA, an expanded European Community, and post-colonial migration flows? How is global restructuring culturally reworked locally and nationally?

  Day/Time: TuTh 9:30-11 am

• Geography 203. Nature and Culture: Social Theory, Social Practice, and the Environment. Sayre.

  The relationship between societies and natural environments lies at the heart of geographical inquiry and has gained urgency as the rate and scale of human transformation of nature have grown, often outstripping our understanding of causes and effects. The physical side of environmental science has received most of the emphasis in university research, but the social basis of environmental change must be studied as well. Recent developments in social theory have much to offer environmental studies, while the latter has, in turn, exploded many formerly safe assumptions about how and what the social sciences and humanities ought to be preoccupied with. This seminar allows students to explore some classics in environmental thought as well as recent contributions that put the field on the forefront of social knowledge today.

  Day/Time: Th 9:30 -12:30 pm

History

• History 30A. The Origins of Modern Science. Hahn.

  This course will cover the period through the era of Newton. An introductory overview of the development of scientific concepts in the West to the end of the 17th century. Emphasis will be on the establishment of a worldview among the ancient Greeks, its incorporation into a Judeo-Christian framework, and the transformations ushered in by the Scientific Revolution.

  Day/Time: MWF 9-10 am

• History 39K. Medicine in American Society Since 1880. Lesch.

  The years since 1880 have witnessed tremendous changes in American society and in medicine. This course will examine some of these changes through readings, discussion, and writing on selected topics that illustrate the relationships between society and medical knowledge, organization, and practice. Topics include the germ theory of disease and its popular meanings and uses, medicine in literature, widespread belief in and use of vitamins, controversies surrounding the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer, medicine and race, venereal diseases, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Course requirements include several papers.

  Day/Time: W 2-4 pm

• History 103S P002. Brave New Worlds: Biology and American History from the 1860s to the 1990s. Varno.

  At the turn of the 21st century, with the sequencing of the human genome complete, scientists and politicians hailed the coming of a new biotechnological age. Craig Venter prophesied “a new starting point” in human history, while James Watson promised a “giant resource that will change mankind, like the printing press.” President Clinton announced that “today we are learning the language in which God created life.” These bold visions were accompanied by deep anxieties and fears. New technologies posed new ethical challenges, and the eugenic programs of the first half of the 20th century cast a long shadow. In this seminar, we will broadly historicize our current biotechnological moment by considering the place biology has occupied in American history since the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Topics we will address include Social Darwinism, the growth of biology as a professional discipline, the eugenics movement, the emergence of Mendelian genetics, the Scopes Trial, the conservation movement and environmentalism, public displays of nature in zoos and museums in the 1950s and 1960s, the biotech boom of the 1980s and 1990s, the relation of film and literature to biology, biology and gender, and the place of biology in American politics. Along with focusing on well-known biologists like Thomas Hunt Morgan and Rachel Carson, our readings will also cover the history of the animals (like fruit flies and laboratory rats) that have been instrumental to creating our biological knowledge. We will read a wide range of types of sources: canonical texts, recent monographs, plenty of primary sources (including sizable excerpts from The Origin of Species and Carson’s Silent Spring), some journal articles, a biography (of Barbara McClintock), and a novel (Huxley’s Brave New World). Our readings will be supplemented by occasional short lectures on the history of biological thought.

  Day/Time: TBA TBA

• History C132B. Intellectual History of the United States. R. Candida Smith.

  In this course, we will be discussing key developments in US thought since the middle of the nineteenth century, roughly beginning with the reception of Darwin. The broader story told in the class weaves together the history of science and engineering, the arts and popular culture, philosophy, and education. Our goal is to trace how ideas, whether they are dominant, challenging, or look back, have affected the ways in which Americans live together. Sometimes the ideas we will examine will seem specialized. Nevertheless, fields like geology, genetics, psychoanalysis, or quantum physics have affected how Americans have looked at the world at large and have influenced the course of public policy. The sciences and the arts have provided raw material for a continual reconstruction of how to understand the world. They have inspired efforts to legislate a new society. As we look at this process over the past century and a half, we will look at how intellectual life has empowered and expanded the capacity of Americans to understand their world and achieve goals more effectively. We will also consider how intellectual theories have contributed to inequality and injustice.

  Day/Time: TuTh 3:30-5:00

• History 180. The Life Sciences Since 1750. Lesch.

  This course will survey the development of the sciences of living nature from the mid-18th to the mid-20th century. Topics include scientific and popular natural history, exploration and discovery, Darwin and evolution, cell theory, the organizational transformation of science, physiology and experimentalism, classical and molecular genetics, and the biomedical-industrial complex. Emphasis is on the formation of fundamental concepts and methods, long-term trends toward specialization, institutionalization, and professionalization, and the place of the life sciences in modern societies. Many lectures are illustrated by slides. Voluntary discussion section. Two midterms and a final examination. A paper may be substituted for part of the final examination.

  Day/Time: MWF 11-12 am

• History 181B. Modern Physics: From the Atom to Big Science. Carson.

  The course examines the establishment of the ideas and institutions of modern physics over the last century and a half. We begin with the nineteenth-century organization of the discipline and the debates over the classical world picture (mechanics, electromagnetism and optics, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics). We then follow the dramatic changes that undid the classical picture, from the discovery of radioactivity through Einstein's theories of relativity on to the the creation of quantum mechanics and the accompanying philosophical disputes. Alongside these conceptual upheavals we will look at the evolving structure of the discipline, its links with industry and government, and the massive transformations of the Second World War, culminating in the atomic bomb. In the postwar period we will deal with the conceptual consolidation of the modern physical worldview and the emergence of "big science" in alliance with the state.

  Day/Time: MWF 2-3 pm

• History C191. Death, Dying, and Modern Medicine: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Laqueur and Micco.

  This course is jointly offered by a physician and a historian. We will discuss contemporary questions of policy and practice: medical definitions of death; the "right to die", how we die and how we say we want to die; the role of the hospital and the hospice; the functions of the State in mediating between various views about the end of life; the role of doctors, family, and others at the end of life, for example. We will also consider questions in the social and cultural history of death: how and in what numbers people have died before and after the demographic revolution; whether some cultures were more successful in assuaging the pain of death than others, whether there really has been a secularization of death; where bodies have gone and how they have been remembered; what the relationship is between the history of life and of death. One of the instructors, Guy Micco, MD, was chair of the Alta Bates ethics committee for many years, regularly teaches medical humanities as well as clinical courses in the Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program, and is a consultant in palliative care. The other instructor, Thomas Laqueur, has taught about the history of the body in various contexts and is completing a book on the history of death called The Dead Among the Living.

  Day/Time: TuTh 9:30-11am

• History 275S. Introduction to the History of Science. Hahn.

  The course calls for intensive readings of secondary sources in the history of Western natural philosophy, from the Greeks through Newton. It is especially useful for students preparing for the graduate examination in this field.

  Day/Time: W 2-4 pm

• History 280S. American Science. Carson.

  American science is a Johnny-come-lately. Historically, it was long in a position of backwardness. Historiographically, it has remained relatively unself-conscious. And yet the American way of doing science has become a global model. Its historians may not have kept up. This seminar serves as both an introduction to the field and a consciousness-raising exercise. It looks for ways in which historians of U.S. science have contributed innovatively to the writing of history of science in general (e.g., "Big Science," science and race), as well as approaches that have been revitalized by developments in related fields (colonial science, environmental history). It hopes to highlight prospects for future innovative study. The seminar's compass includes studies that take their lead from "regular" U.S. history and from science studies. The instructor is a specialist in German science who regularly teaches on the U.S. The seminar is meant to be relevant to students interested in the present. Toward the end of the semester there will be space for students to suggest readings. Along with reading and class discussion, requirements include book reviews and a historiographic paper.

  Day/Time: W 10 am -12 pm

• History 290.001. Historical Colloquium: History of Science. Lesch.

  Meets together with the UCB-UCSF Colloquium in History of Science, Technology, and Medicine.

  Day/Time: M 4-6 pm

Integrative Biology

• Integrative Biology 24 P004. The Day After Tomorrow: Separating Science Fiction from Science Facts. Barnosky.

  The issue of global warming is politically charged and has widespread scientific and economic implications. We will view the recent Hollywood movie "The Day After Tomorrow" and use that as a springboard to identify what is scientifically validated about global warming, some of the ramifications of global climate change, and the problems encountered in bringing sound science to policy makers and the public. Each student will be expected to choose one issue highlighted in the movie, learn about its scientific validity and portrayal to the public using such sources such as journal publications, government policy documents, and news reports, and then present his or her findings to the rest of the class.

  Day/Time: M 11-1 pm

Nuclear Engineering

• Nuclear Engineering 24 P001. Ethics and the Impact of Technology on Society. Kastenberg.

  Because of the rapidly changing nature of technology, new and complex ethical issues are emerging that bring into question the ability of society to address and, ideally, resolve them. New issues are arising in such areas as biotechnology, information technology, nanotechnology and nuclear technology, and range from protecting the health and welfare of the public and the environment, to patenting living organisms and labeling products containing genetically modified organisms, to concerns regarding the alteration of the ecology of life. This seminar focuses on the nature of these emerging technical issues, their ethical, legal, and social ramifications, and what individuals and our society value in relation to these issues. We will examine what philosophy, religion and art, and natural and social science have to say about these issues.

  Day/Time: M 3-4 pm

• Nuclear Engineering 24 P002. The Scientists of the Mantattan Project, their Contributions to President Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace Initiative and their Lasting Legacy to Nuclear Power in the Twenty-first Century. Wirth.

  The discovery of the neutron in 1932 by James Chadwick, the 1932 experiment by John Cockroft and Ernest Walton that confirmed Albert Einstein's postulate from the theory of relativity about the equivalence between mass and energy (E=mc^2), and the subsequent discovery of fission in 1938 revolutionized atomic and nuclear physics. During World War II, the United States established the Manhattan Project, which brought together many of the world's preeminent scientists and engineers under the leadership of J. Robert Oppenheimer with the goal of building a new and more explosive weapon based on these discoveries. The world entered the nuclear age with the explosion of the atomic bomb at Trinity, N.M. on July 16, 1945 and less than a decade later, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower provided his vision for the peaceful use of atomic energy in a speech to the United Nations on December 8, 1953 entitled 'Atoms for Peace.' This course will cover the history of the scientists and engineers who participated in the Manhattan Project and their contributions to nuclear science and technology, within the context of President Eisenhower's 1953 address and nuclear power in the twenty-first century. Students in the course will be expected to perform a research report on an individual scientist or engineer from the Manhattan project and his/her contributions to nuclear energy.

  Day/Time: Tu 11-12 pm

• Nuclear Engineering 175/275. Principles and Methods of Risk Analysis. Kastenberg.

  Methodological approaches for the quantification of technological risk and risk based decision-making. Probabilistic safety assessment, human health risks, environmental and ecological risk analysis.

  Day/Time: MW 10 am -12 pm

Philosophy

• Philosophy 5. Science and Human Understanding. Skokowski.

  Introduction to the philosophy of science.

  Day/Time: TuTh 11-12:30 pm

Physics

• Physics 39.001. The Meaning Of It All. Hall.

  Why are we here? Is there a purpose to life, or is it an accident of physics and chemistry? By reading book excerpts, we will explore a variety of ideas put forward by scientists on such questions: from Bertrand Russell's "Why I am not a Christian" to Polkinghorne's "Belief in God in an Age of Science"; from Dawkin's "Selfish Gene" to Penrose's "Shadows of the Mind - a Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness"; and from Davies' "Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life" to Feynman on "The Meaning of it All."

  Day/Time: F 11-12 pm

Public Health

• Public Health 183. The History of Medicine, Public Health, and the Allied Health Sciences. Hook.

  This course will examine the historical developments of social and scientific responses to human disease from their beginnings to their current roles as major forces in modern society. It will consider the evolution of diagnoses, treatment, and prevention of human morbidity and death from both a humanistic and scientific perspective. It invites pre-medical, pre-dental, and other students preparing for careers in public health, nursing, optometry, or the other health sciences, students interested in public policy and health-related law, and students of history or the other humanities who wish an overview of medicine and health from a broad historical perspective.

  Day/Time: M 2-5 pm

• Public Health 213A. Family Planning, Population Change, and Health. Prata.

  Course examines the determinants of family size and the role played by contraception, voluntary sterilization, and induced abortion in the transition to small families. It looks at the factors controlling access to fertility regulation in developed and developing countries and discusses the factors that have made for successful family programs as well as those that have generated controversy. The course looks at the relationship between family planning and the health of women and children and at the role of family size in economic development and environmental problems. It looks at advances in family planning, organization, and promotion of services and discusses ethical issues facing providers.

  Day/Time: TuTh 2-3:30 pm

• Public Health 282. Topics in the History of Medicine and Public Health. Hook.

  A series of lectures and seminars providing detailed scrutiny of selected topics in the history of medicine and public health. The precise content will vary from year to year. Themes in the medical and selected ancillary sciences will also be addressed.

  Day/Time: M 10 am -12 pm

Public Policy

• Public Policy 190/290 P003. Cyberlife. Maurer.

  Three hours of lecture per week. Digital communication and the Internet have changed the world. How should society think about and stay ahead of this ongoing revolution? Our course will look behind the newspaper headlines by asking how the information economy differs from earlier industries. Like the Internet itself, lectures will combine economics, law, and technology. Topics will include the economics of information goods and intellectual property rights; network effects (tipping markets); digital technology; antitrust issues; and constitutional law. These basic concepts will be checked against real world examples like AT&T, Microsoft, Napster and Carnivore. Guest speakers will provide first-hand accounts of the digital economy.

  Day/Time: Th 5-8 pm

Rhetoric

• Rhetoric 1B P003. Nuclear Time: History and Representation. Pedretti, Carpenter.

  Physicist I.I. Rabi described witnessing the first atomic bomb test at Trinity as seeming "to last forever. You would wish it would stop; altogether it lasted about two seconds." Rabi's comment suggests the peculiar temporality at work in both the politics of the Cold War and the representations of the atomic bomb, at once too fast and too slow. This course will examine different artistic modes for representing the atomic explosion itself, and how our traditional concepts of time are implicated in those representational forms. We will consider the photography of Michael Light's 100 Suns, which attempts to freeze the instant of the explosion; then we will move on to Bruce Conner's film Crossroads, with its varied repetitions of an atomic test; we will consider Paul Kos's installation Just a Matter of Time, with its depiction of temporal uncertainty; we will watch Fred Zinneman's classic western film High Noon as a Cold War allegory; and we will devote significant attention to Thomas Pynchon's sense of belatedness and delay in his masterwork Gravity's Rainbow. This course will attempt to equate students with the fundamental tools of interpretive analysis for all of these media, and will continue to develop their critical and analytical writing skills.

  Day/Time: TuTh 3:30-5 pm

• Rhetoric 230. Advanced Topics in the History of Rhetoric: The Rhetoric of Things. Wintroub.

  What’s in a thing—are its characteristics attributed or innate? Are things simply passive mediums—mirrors—of our ideas about them? And what happens when we have conflicting ideas about them, and/or when they inhabit spaces that are ill defined, or alternatively, defined in a multiplicity of ways? How might things act to mediate different sorts of social practices, and conversely, how might social practice mediate the understanding and use of things? Might it be possible that things are not simply reflections/reifications of human needs and desires, but actors in their own right? Indeed, rather than reflecting our attitudes, interests and needs, might our identities and interactions with one another themselves be artifacts of, and responses to, the material world of things? In this sense, might things themselves be performative in so far as they enact—advance, undermine, inflect, and /or transform—particular forms of political and social organization? Are humans all that special then? or should we take a less prejudicial view of the world and recognize that things too are endowed with the capacity to be and to act?

  Day/Time: Tu 11am-2 pm

School of Information

• SIMS 141. Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business. Hearst.

  The World Wide Web brings much of the world's knowledge into the reach of nearly everyone with a computer and an internet connection. The availability of huge quantities of information at our fingertips is transforming government, business, and many other aspects of society. For most people, Web search engines (such as Google and Yahoo) are technologies which have enormous influence on how people find and think about information. They are the gateways, (or some might argue, gate keepers) to this vast sea of information. With the rising importance of search engines come new legal, business, and policy questions and considerations. This course will examine these issues via a series of lectures from experts in academia and industry. Students will first gain an understanding of the basics of how search engines work, and then explore how search engine design impacts business and culture. Topics include search advertising and auctions, search and privacy, search ranking, internationalization, anti-spam efforts, local search, peer-to-peer search, and search of blogs and online communities. [also 291.1]

  Day/Time: M 4-6 pm

• SIMS 296A. Open Source Development and Distribution of Digital Information: Economic, Legal and Social Perspectives. Samuelson/Kapor.

  Substantial investments are being made by many individuals and firms in the development and distribution of open source software and other information artifacts. This seminar will consider economic and business rationales for adoption of open source modes of production and dissemination and will consider how open source projects might be made sustainable by looking into the social and organizational dynamics used to coordinate their activities. The seminar will examine licensing models widely used by open source developers, which generally grant rights to use and modify licensed information on condition that users agree to carry over to derivative works the same license restrictions imposed by the open source developer. For software, this includes free publication of source code. Open source licensing models are being adapted to apply to more than just computer software, such as databases of scientific information, certain biotechnology innovations, and music. Whether the metaphor of open source has wider social ramifications as a modality of community governance will also be given attention.

  Day/Time: M 4-6:30 pm

Sociology

• Sociology 172. Development and Globalization. Evans.

  A survey of the comparative political economy of development. Begins with a brief review of the historical process of development in northwestern Europe, examines the interaction of states and markets in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, concludes by looking at the consequences of contemporary patterns of globalization and the prospects for development that is sustainable in terms of equity, human well-being and the environment.

  Day/Time: Tu 5-8 pm

 

If you would like your course to be added to this list, please contact STSC at: stsc@berkeley.edu