Courses of Study 2017-2018 
    
    Mar 28, 2024  
Courses of Study 2017-2018 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

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STS 6751 - [Science, Race, and Colonialism]

(crosslisted) HIST 6751  
     
Spring. Not offered 2017-2018. 4 credits. Student option grading.

S. Seth.

Scholarly work in the last two decades has increasingly focused on the oft-neglected linkages between technology and science on the one hand and the discourses and practices of colonialism and imperialism on the other. Texts of broad conception like Michael Adas’ Machines as the Measure of Men and Gyan Prakash’s recent Another Reason have made an attempt to provide an overview of many of the issues involved, but the field awaits a genuinely synthetic treatment. This course will aim to provide the framework for such a treatment by looking at a number of key areas of current interest. The first half of the course begins with a survey of the history of ideas of race and the development of “race-sciences” in the 19th century, including a sampling of primary materials on Darwinian theories of race and later formulations of social Darwinism. The latter part of the course will explore a number of specific themes, including the importance of social statistics and technologies of identification (fingerprinting), medicine and hygiene, scientific nationalism and nationalist science, the periphery as laboratory, and gender, savagery, and criminality. Readings will comprise a mixture of primary and secondary sources, and students are encouraged to contribute topics and texts of particular interest.



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