SHUM 4641 - [Technologies of Power in Latin American “Dirty Wars”]

Fall. Next Offered: 2019-2020. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Enrollment limited to:15 students. Co-meets with SHUM SHUM 6641.

This seminar explores Latin American political violence since the 1970s, focusing on the role technology played in internal conflicts called “Dirty Wars,” in which the state employed extrajudicial violence to halt leftist or communist “subversion.” These responses by police, military, and paramilitary groups left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead. Reports from large-scale investigations called truth commissions, first-person testimonies, fiction, and films underscore the employment of technology in these conflicts—electrical torture, the destruction of electrical towers, foreign-made weapons and vehicles, and seizures of media stations and newspapers. The seminar emphasizes the history of technology in human rights violations more broadly, from the 1994 Rwandan genocide to the United States’ responses to extremism after 9/11. For longer description and instructor bio visit http://societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/courses.