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.

In this course we read foundational texts in anthropology of science, exploring a range of sites, methods, and theories to equip students for ethnographic research within technoscientific cultures. Central themes include science as practice and culture; biopolitics; and technoscientific imaginaries.

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.

This course examines the concept of biomedicine as the twentieth-century hybridization of the normal and the pathological. Topics include medical specialization and education, laboratory/clinic relations, industrialization, health policy, drug regulation, and disease as self-identity.

An examination of the different ways in which epidemics are defined, deployed, promoted or criticized as objects of scientific knowledge. A diverse set of examples illustrates the various ways in which epidemics serve to reconfigure biomedical knowledge.

Mesmerism, Phrenology and their Influences on Twentieth Century Psychology and Psychotherapy Advanced History and Theory of Psychology: History of Psychological Practice. An advanced seminar devoted to the historical origins and development, with particular emphasis on the social contexts, of major psychological practices such as introspection, experimentation, psychological testing and statistical analysis. Prerequisite: GS/PSYC6020.06.

This course is designed to consider current debates about health and care within a feminist political economy framework. The focus will be Canada but a Canada located within an international context. Of course students will be invited to introduce other perspectives and other countries into the readings, discussions and their papers.

Contexts of Victorian Science. This course focuses on nineteenth century British and European science and its social, political, cultural, and intellectual contexts. Adopting the contextualist approach to the history of science allows us to raise a series of provocative questions: in what way did all of these different contexts shape the nature of nineteenth century scientific thought? How were scientific facts socially constructed? What was it about the nineteenth century context that led many intellectuals to reject Christianity and embrace science as providing a new, privileged form of knowledge? Included among the topics to be covered are the discourse of natural theology, the politics of geological controversy, Scottish philosophy and phrenology, radical working class Lamarckianism in England during the 1830s, the plurality of worlds debate, science and gender, the professionalization of science, English scientific naturalism and German scientific materialism, the literary structure of Darwin’s Origin of Species, Darwinian theory and its ideological uses, and late nineteenth century physics and psychics. This course will be of interest to students of British, European, social, and intellectual history.

The course covers three key theoretical strands of Science & Technology Studies research: science, technology and innovation policy studies; the ‘economic turn’ in STS; and the political economy of science and technology. It draws on a number of substantive topics, including intellectual property rights; research policy; neoliberal science and climate change; biofuels and bioeconomies; and sustainability transitions.