Courses

Introduces students to major texts and theoretical strands of science and technology studies through a combination of empirical case studies and theoretical reflections on themes central to science and technology studies scholarship, such as epistemology, objectivity, expertise and materiality.

This course is designed to help guide participants through the MRP research and writing process. This course addresses issues of both research and writing. Throughout the course we will read and discuss core elements of research design, methodology and analysis. Part of our meeting will be dedicated to introducing an element of research design, methodology, or analysis, and the other part will be a discussion of an assignment related to research design, methodology and analysis.

Permission of Program Director required

Permission of Program Director required

Introduces students to major texts and theoretical strands of science and technology studies through a combination of empirical case studies and theoretical reflections on themes central to science and technology studies scholarship, such as epistemology, objectivity, expertise and materiality.

Examines the diverse engagement of Science & Technology Studies with the study of material culture. Approaches to be considered include the history of scientific instruments and experimental practices, anthropology and museum studies, embodied epistemologies, and the analysis of space and architecture.

The Colloquium provides students with a regular forum to engage with Program members as an intellectual community. It involves a range of activities designed to stimulate a broad disciplinary engagement with science and technology studies, including research talks by invited external speakers, Program faculty and graduate students, and professional development workshops. It normally runs every two weeks over two terms.

Research Clusters foster theoretical and methodological innovation on a specific topic in Science and Technology Studies (STS). They involve biweekly meetings of faculty and graduate students who engage in a range of activities and they embed broader program requirements in an experimental, flexible, adaptable, and interdisciplinary intellectual space.

In this course we explore ethnography as a creative practice, as invention, and as improvisation. This seminar is offered as a writing collective, where we read each other's writings, practice how to read attentively, and give productive feedback. In so doing, we also explore the relationship between writing, fieldwork, and fieldnotes, and consider the ethics of ethnographic writing.

This course provides students with an advanced and critical introduction to the social study of technology and technological innovation. The course explores how technologies are shaped by and come to social, cultural, political, and economic institutions, structures, and processes. The course is organized around a series of theoretical debates and empirical case studies of contemporary technological developments (e.g. Big Data, biotechnology, nanotechnology, cleantech, etc.).

This course examines issues of technological design in computer accessibility and computational forms of assistive technology (hardware and/or software). Students learn to critically reflect on the hidden assumptions, ideologies and values underlying the design of these technologies, and to analyse and to design them.

This graduate seminar introduces students to indigenous and postcolonial perspectives in the study of science, technology, nature and medicine. Interdisciplinary perspectives are explored as the course considers the intersections of the political, scholarly, and creative through science and technology stdies, and postcolonial/subaltern studies, examining the unique ways in which science, medicine, and technology are taken up, created, contested, and circulated in postcolonial/indigenous settings.