Readings and deadlines, all in one place.

On the first day of class, we’ll go over the syllabus together, share what we already know about science and technology, and get to know each other. (And I’ll tell you what anthropology is.)

Gordin, Michael. 2012. “Introduction: Bad Ideas” (excerpt). In The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe. University of Chicago Press, 1–14. [On Canvas; read this one closely]

Hess, David. 1992. “Disciplining Heterodoxy, Circumventing Discipline: Parapsychology, Anthropologically.” In Knowledge and Society Vol. 9: The Anthropology of Science and Technology, edited by David Hess and Linda Layne. JAI Press, 191–222. [On Canvas; this has lots of long quotations that you can skim.]

Traweek, Sharon. 1988. “Pilgrim’s Progress: Male Tales Told During a Life in Physics.” In Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physics. Harvard University Press, 74–105. [On Canvas.]

Shapin, Steven. 1989. “The invisible technician.” American Scientist 77(6), 554–563.

Marx, Leo. [1997] 2010. “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept.” Technology and Culture 51 (3): 561–577.

Le Guin, Ursula. 2004. “A Rant about ‘Technology.’” https://web.archive.org/web/20220331024430/http://www.ursulakleguinarchive.com/Note-Technology.html

Behaving ourselves, managing computers in the classroom.

There are a few ground rules for participating in this course:

Treat each other with respect and patience.

Avoid destructive critique of the readings.

Participate actively, even if you’re not confident in your thoughts.

Communicate openly and regularly, so I know how you’re doing. If you are having issues that impact your ability to participate in class, please don’t stay silent!

You are allowed to use computers in this class to take notes or to refer to the readings. This is counter to a lot of current ideas about how to manage the attention of students, but I think it is worth the tradeoff to have materials ready at hand.

You should only be using your computer for course-related work during class time. I have, obviously, minimal ability to ensure that this is all you do with it. I may ask you to close your laptop if it seems like a distraction for you, and if we don’t need the computers for something, I’ll ask everyone to shut them.

I may call on you at random during class time, and you should be ready to answer—not buried in your computer.

AI usage, accessibility, availability, late work, academic integrity.

The point of a class like this is to use your brain—to learn new ways of thinking that you can take with you when you graduate and to practice thinking so that you can get better at it. The way that the recent generation of AI tools has been marketed and designed typically works against that: having ChatGPT generate a summary of a text instead of reading it yourself, generating a paper using Gemini, or having Claude answer discussion questions are all analogous to bringing a forklift to the gym. This is not a necessary fact of large language models, but it is a problematic (for our purposes) feature of how they exist right now.

I work under the assumption that you’re here to learn and that the forklifts only come out when other pressures push you away from that goal. To continue over-extending this metaphor, I am like your personal trainer: I cannot lift the weights for you, but I’ve designed a program to help you build your capacities over the semester, and I will give you feedback and advice to hone your form as we go. I discourage the use of LLMs for any aspect of this course, but if you do use them, you should use them in ways that make things more challenging for you, not less. Figuring out what that means is your job. (Here’s some inspiration from the world of poetry.)

And, for my sake, do not submit computer-generated text as your own writing. (For related guidance, see the academic integrity policy below.) I’m not here to evaluate the output of machines, and you will be wasting both of our time. If you submit work that is obviously AI-generated (e.g., it includes hallucinated citations or quotes, or framing text like “as a large language model...” or “sure, I can write that for you...”), I will return it to you ungraded and you will receive a 0 on that assignment. AI-detection tools do not reliably work, and I do not use them.

Your success in this class is important to me. If there are any circumstances (personal, health-related, family-related, religious, etc.) that affect your ability to participate, please let me know as soon as possible so that we can work together to come up with reasonable accommodations for you. The sooner I know about any issues, the better. Any such discussion will remain confidential.

For disability-related accommodations, I encourage you to consult with the StAAR Center, which can arrange for formal accommodations across your classes. But you do not need to register with them or provide documentation to me in order to request accommodations in this course.

Following university expectations, this course is designed to meet in person; in some situations, I may move meetings online. Please check your email before we meet in case I’ve had to make a last-minute change.

I try to be a responsive emailer; you should expect a reply within 24–48 weekday hours of emailing me. (Please don’t use the Canvas inbox thing to message me—it’s hard enough to stay on top of one inbox.) If you don‘t get a reply in that window, you should feel free to follow up with me as your message may have gotten buried in my inbox. I generally don‘t answer emails over the weekend or after 5 pm.

I hold regular office hours to meet with students. Currently, these are held via Zoom, a few days per week. I use an online sign-up sheet to make sure that there‘s enough time for everyone who wants it and to spread you out through the hour. This time is reserved for you, and you should feel free to use it to talk to me about anything: the course, your academic program in general, or whatever you‘re interested in. You don‘t need to have a specific problem to sign up, and I enjoy talking with you outside the classroom, so feel free to make use of office hours as often as you like.

As I rule, I tend to be flexible about deadlines, guided by a few principles: I do not want to make your life hard for no reason; I value my own time as well as yours; and extensions are not always in your best interest. If you need an extension and ask for one before a deadline (and not just the night before), we can usually work something out that balances your needs with mine and does not inadvertently make your life harder later on. I will not automatically deduct points for late work (though in some cases, especially for small assignments, I will simply not accept late work). You can find information about any assignment-specific late policies on the pages of those assignments.

For ongoing engagement and attendance.

It is important to the functioning of this class, and to your learning, that you read. So, at the start of every class meeting, you’ll have a few minutes to fill out a reading ticket.

This is a notecard (provided by me), on which you’ll write down one idea, phrase, or example from one of the day’s readings that you’d like to remember or ask a question about. These should include a page number and the last name of the author, as well as your own name and the date.

I’ll gather these at the end of class and use them for tracking attendance, but they are also meant to refresh your memory and to give you something to refer to during class, in the event I call on you to participate. While you read, you might think ahead to what you’ll put on your reading ticket.

You can skip four of these without penalty over the course of the term. This is intended for days you have to miss class for some reason, or in the event that you’re unable to do the reading for a day. You don’t need to tell me that you’re using one of these free skips; you can use them for “good” or “bad” reasons—I don’t need to know, and having a good reason will not get you more of them.

Two short reports that apply course concepts to outside objects.

About one- and three-quarters of the way through the term, you’ll have short written analytic assignments that ask you to use a course concept to analyze an object of your choice from outside of class. Where the quizzes are designed to ensure you have a grasp of the basic concepts, these written reports are meant to give you practice applying those concepts to new objects. These will be about 800-1000 words each, with the second one counting for slightly more points than the first.

Four in-class quizzes, to assess your understanding of course concepts.

At regular intervals, we’ll be dedicating one in-class period to annotated multiple choice quizzes. These are like conventional multiple choice quizzes, except that for every question, you are expected to annotate your answer: you will explain why it’s right, and you’ll choose a plausible but wrong answer and explain why it’s wrong. This serves a few purposes:

Choosing an explicit answer tests whether you actually know the arguments from class (without the vagueness that sometimes comes with short answers).

Explaining your reasoning gives you a chance to get partial credit, even if your chosen answer is incorrect.

Having to explain your answer makes you more likely to catch issues that stem from reading comprehension problems.

These quizzes will be on paper, with no outside resources allowed. You’ll have the whole class period to finish them (though students in the past have only taken about 30 minutes, on average). If you have an extra time accommodation, do let me know ASAP, and I’ll arrange things so you can continue after the class period ends, if necessary.

Many multiple choice questions test for recognition: one answer is right, and if you’ve done the readings or come to class, you’ll recognize it, but not the others. My questions are harder than this, designed so you will recognize most of the answers. They are almost always have the same set of possible answer types:

The right answer.

A true statement from the readings that does not answer the question.

A statement that an author has brought up but argued against.

A "common sense" answer that you’d likely hold before taking the class.

And sometimes a joke answer, so I can entertain myself.

Answering questions like these correctly requires you to do more than just recognize an answer, since most of the wrong answers will be both familiar and plausible. Here’s an example:

Two take-home essay exams, for synthesizing and applying course concepts.

At the middle and end of the term, you will have open-resource take-home essay exams. These contain three prompts, which will be descriptions of various fictional technoscientific situations. You'll choose two of them to analyze using sources from at least two different days of the class. The prompts are designed to have some “obvious” relevant sources. (So, for example, if I describe a situation that involves a witch casting spells to affect the outcome of genetic ancestry testing results, you should not be confused about where to look in the reading list.) But, it's possible to do well with the “wrong” texts, provided you make an argument that makes sense given the concepts you choose to bring to bear on the situation. The point of this assignment is to give you a chance to synthesize multiple course concepts together and to practice the use of course concepts without being told which ones to use.

Your answers will be about 500 words long and quote directly (with page numbers) from course readings. The exams will be administered via Canvas, with a time constraint. I do not expect them to take longer than three hours, but you'll have 24 hours to complete them once you start, within a week-long window. (That means I’m not expecting super-polished writing, and you shouldn’t go way over the word count just because you have more time.)

You can use whatever resources you want (the texts themselves, obviously, and also your notes, wikipedia, whatever), but you should not submit AI-generated text as your own. I will not use any “AI detection” tools against you (these do not work, and I don’t like submitting student labor though corporate ed-tech parasites), so I am appealing to you as a matter of respect and principle. Don’t waste our time. (Also, obvious evidence of AI generation like hallucinated quotations or citations will result in a 0 on a question. So, if you were thinking of using AI anyway, you better do a very thorough job double-checking its work.)