STS 6675

Pandemics Past and Pending

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2022-2023.

How have epidemics and pandemics changed social worlds and created new futures? How is colonization political and microbial? What will it take to repair human-animal-environmental relations when they can be pathologized as sources of contagion? By examining American colonization of the Philippines, One Health in contemporary Vietnam, and other ethnographic and historical examples, the course shows how interventions that took place in the wake of epidemics have had profound societal and planetary impacts. This course ultimately argues that pandemics are never just about a singular bacterium or virus. Instead, pandemics and epidemics reveal deeper social inequalities, interact with profound cultural and historical relations, and both create and foreclose different kinds of futures. For longer description and instructor bio visit the Society for the Humanities website.

When Offered Fall.

Permission Note Enrollment limited to: graduate students.

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