CEGU

During supervised laboratory times, the various techniques and analyses covered will be applied to sample archaeological data and also to data from a region/topic chosen by the student.

This course meets once every two weeks for a lecture by a curator at the Field Museum. A different curator lectures each week, presenting results of her/his current research on a range of topics in evolutionary biology, including phylogenetic systematics, molecular biology, paleontology, development, conservation biology and biodiversity, population biology, or biomechanics. Lectures often are followed by a tour of one of the major natural history collections in the world of living or fossil birds, mammals, plants, insects, fishes, invertebrates, or amphibians and reptiles.

Directed individual reading courses supervised by CEB faculty members who are curators at the Field Museum. Students must choose the instructor name from the faculty listing in the Time Schedules and register using that instructor’s assigned section number.

Advanced research under the direction of the faculty of the Committee on Evolutionary Biology, undertaken away from the University of Chicago campus at the Field Museum, the Chicago Zoological Park, Lincoln Park Zoo, established biological field stations under the direction of their staffs, or other locations approved by the Chair and the student’s advisory committee. Students must choose the instructor name from the faculty listing in the Time Schedules and register using that instructor’s assigned section number.

How has anthropology adapted in recent decades to humanity’s underlying technological condition? How has it recalibrated foundational assumptions in order to engage posthuman claims and speculative machinic philosophies? This seminar explores current anthropological approaches to questions concerning technology in conjunction with recent philosophies of technology. Of central concern will be examining the ways in which latter has informed a reconceptualization of the relationship between culture and technics in opposition to culturalist tropes and technologically determinist accounts of modern society. At the same time, we will examine the limits of ethnographic approaches to technological environments. Our overall aim will be to elaborate a language, analytic, and orientation for cultural encounters with technology, and the relevant insights.

This course will examine answers to four questions that have been foundational to environmental ethics: Are religious traditions responsible for environmental crises? To what degree can religions address environmental crises? Does the natural world have intrinsic value in addition to instrumental value to humans, and does the type of value the world has imply anything about human responsibility? What point of view (anthropocentrism, biocentrism, theocentrism) should ground an environmental ethic?

Since all four of the above questions are highly contested questions, we will examine a constellation of responses to each question. During the quarter we will read texts from a wide variety of religious and philosophical perspectives, though I note that the questions we are studying arose out of the western response to environmental crises and so often use that language. Some emphasis will be given to particularly influential texts, thinkers, and points of view in the scholarship of environmental ethics. As the questions above indicate, the course prioritizes theoretical issues in environmental ethics that can relate to many different applied subjects (e.g. energy, water, animals, climate change) rather than emphasizing these applied issues themselves. Taking this focus will give you the background necessary to work on such issues later.

In the twentieth and twenty-first century, modern western notions of individual identity, agency, and responsibility have been challenged by collective experiences. Studies of collective atrocities such as the Holocaust, apartheid, racism and sexism have informed research on collective identity, agency, and responsibility. Research and legal developments on corporate agency and responsibility add to the discussion. Finally, global environmental challenges such as climate change raise questions about the types of agents responsible for these harms and for combating them. This class will explore a number of theories of collective agency and responsibility to interrogate the differences and relationships between individuals and collectives.

This seminar invites students to examine recent scholarly experiments in architectural history. Participants will read and discuss a corpus of books published in the last five years. Each week, we will take a deep dive into a single publication by synthesizing its argument, unpacking its structure, and demonstrating its potential limits. In-class activities will catalyze dialogue and debate on the readings as well as highlight resonances across assigned books. By the end of the quarter, students will have developed transversal views of contemporary practices in architectural history and heightened their senses of methodological self-awareness.

This course will introduce students to recent debates in the environmental humanities and simultaneously to a range of creative interventions across fiction, documentary prose, poetry, and the visual arts spurred by the effects of what has come to be named the Anthropocene epoch (despite substantive challenges to the term that we will address)—in a moment of perceived grave environmental crisis. We will consider the differences between, and the potential imbrication of, critical/theoretical and imaginative responses to seemingly insurmountable challenges to the biosphere and their outsized effects on underserved communities. Students will, in turn, be asked to respond critically to the works at hand, but also to conduct their own experimental research and on-site fieldwork in Chicago on an environmental issue of their choosing. (20th/21st)

In this co-taught course between the departments of English (Jennifer Scappettone) and Visual Arts (Amber Ginsburg), we will deploy those senses most overlooked in academic discourse surrounding aesthetics and urbanism–hearing, taste, touch, and smell–to explore the history and actuality of Chicago as a site of anthropogenic changes. Holding the bulk of our classes out of doors, we will move through the city seeking out and documenting traces of the city’s foundations in phenomena such as the filling in of swamp; the river as pipeline; and the creation of transportation and industrial infrastructure–all with uneven effects on human and nonhuman inhabitants. Coursework will combine readings in history and theory of the Anthropocene together with examples of how artists and activists have made the Anthropocene visible, tangible, and audible, providing forums for playful documentation and annotations as we draw, score, map, narrate, sing, curate and collate our sensory experience of the Anthropocene into a final experimental book project.

This graduate proseminar serves as an introduction to the concepts and categories that orient the study of race, diaspora, and Indigeneity. This includes repertoires of Black and Indigenous worldmaking alongside histories of plantation slavery, settler colonialism, and their afterlives in the Americas; circuits of racialized labor in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans; and the construction of race and Indigeneity as categories of scientific and occult origins. Students will consult the works of Toni Morrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Audra Simpson, Amitav Ghosh, Kim Tallbear, Audre Lorde, and Frantz Fanon, among others.

This graduate seminar explores topics in environmental anthropology and science and technology studies through instances of ecological experimentation. By reading ethnographic accounts of experimentation alongside speculative ecosophies and climate fiction, it will consider the ways in which such ecological experimentations pose conceptual, methodological, and ethical challenges that help us develop an anthropological engagement adequate to an era dominated by concerns with the constant threat of pandemics and the declining condition of our global ecology. It will aim, as well, to elaborate the implicit possibilities born of thinking not only in terms of relation but also in relation to a politics and ethics of process. Of particular concern will be a number of questions, such as: how to (re)imagine the conceptual currency of nature as an analytic category or even object of inquiry; how ethnography might reshape technologies of nature; and what sort of social transformations might this reshaping render imaginable.

Imaginaries of the “wild” have long been employed as part of colonial projects, from the conquest of lands of the Great Eurasian Steppe to modern conservation initiatives. In this course, we examine ideas about the “wild” with a focus on the easts of “Europe” and easts of Russia, whether Ukraine, Qazaqstan, or Bulgaria, and ways in which these lands have been constructed as “wild” territories. We discuss ecologies and cultures of the steppe, nuclear and (post)industrial wastelands, and contemporary practices of re-wilding to study the violence of being framed as “wild”, as well subversive and liberatory potentials of (re)claiming all things “wild”. The course takes on an interdisciplinary approach, examining works of fiction alongside history books, and films alongside memoirs; additionally, a possibility of a field trip to Site A/Plot M Disposal Site, where the world’s first nuclear reactor is buried, is to be confirmed.

In today’s capitalistic world in which technology enables expectations that we are always able to be connected, rest can seem far away. In this course we will read classic and contemporary texts from a variety of religious traditions on the priority of rest, leisure, and/or a change from one’s daily life. Themes to be explored include the purpose of such breaks (worship, care for one’s self, building relationships, enabling one’s work); how rest is conceived and practiced; and the varying expectations and opportunities for rest among people of different ages, genders, races, financial statuses, and roles in society.

High performance and cloud computing, massive digital traces of human behavior from ubiquitous sensors, and a growing suite of efficient model estimation, machine learning and simulation tools are not just extending classical social science inquiry, but transforming it to pose novel questions at larger and smaller scales. The Computational Social Science (CSS) Workshop is a weekly event that features this work, highlights associated skills and data, and explores the use of CSS in the world. The CSS Workshop alternates weekly between research workshops and professional workshops. The research workshops feature new CSS work from top faculty and advanced graduate students from UChicago and around the world, while professional workshops highlight useful skills and data (e.g., machine learning with Python’s scikit-learn; the Twitter firehose API) and showcase practitioners using CSS in the government, industry and nonprofit sectors. Each quarter, the CSS Workshop also hosts a distinguished lecture, debate and dinner, and a student conference.

Readings in Ecology and Evolution 

This class will introduce a toolkit for thinking about and researching media, mediation, and new media cultures. We will begin with questions of technology. These will include the tension between technological determinism and the social construction of technology, as well as methods for investigating the historical evolution of media technologies. To explore how power operates within and through media, we will engage concepts and theoretical frameworks including algorithmic bias, transmedia, fan studies, platform studies, and media infrastructures. Students will develop critical and aesthetic perspectives on digital media, with special attention to games, participatory media, and code.

This course explores the interdisciplinary study of science as an enterprise. During the twentieth century, sociologists, historians, philosophers, and anthropologists all raised interesting and consequential questions about the sciences. Taken together their various approaches came to constitute a field, “science studies.” The course provides an introduction to this field. Students will not only investigate how the field coalesced and why, but will also apply science-studies perspectives in a fieldwork project focused on a science or science-policy setting. Among the topics we may examine are the sociology of scientific knowledge and its applications, actor-network theories of science, constructivism and the history of science, images of normal and revolutionary science, accounts of research in the commercial university, and the examined links between science and policy.

This graduate colloquium provides an advanced introduction to the vibrant field of environmental history. We will trace the evolution of this rich historiography, from first-generation classics-often focused on the American West-through to the geographical and thematic diversification of recent years. The course will give a flavor of this diversity, touching too upon influential works in emerging subfields like animal history, climate history, enviro-tech, and evolutionary history. Throughout, we will study how historians have addressed new analytical and aesthetic challenges: negotiating the insights of the natural sciences, incorporating nonhuman agency, and writing history at the vast scales of deep time and the planetary. The course is ideal for PhD students preparing a general examination field and/or designing a research paper, but is open to MA students as well. This course counts towards the Doctoral Certificate as a Foundations course. 

The environmental humanities have emerged in the past couple of decades as a crucial field to understand the multifaceted history of environmental thought and culture around the world as well as to grapple with the intractable challenges wrought by the current environmental crisis. In Latin America, the field has flourished in dialogue with Anglophone ecocriticism at the same time as it has expanded its thematic, theoretical, a critical reach. This course provides an overview of the environmental humanities in the context of Latin American literature and culture. We will delve into key concepts and problems in the field, from the debates on the Anthropocene and alternative terms to the cultural history of forests and deserts, subfields such as ecofeminism, plant studies, animal studies and energy humanities, as well as concepts particularly productive in the region such as (post)extractivism and multinaturalism. This course will combine primary sources, including works of literature, cinema and visual arts, with a robust attention to influential scholarship on the field. Taught in Spanish.

This course centers land in thinking about the development of dominant political, economic, social, and cultural systems in Africa during and after colonialism. It examines how different actors have articulated their relationships to specific areas of land and established systems and institutions to structure these relationships. Looking at the colonial period, we will focus on competition between indigenous and colonial land tenure systems and the transformative effects of colonial land tenure systems on how people in Africa engaged in political, economic, and social life. Under independence, we will examine how African states used land as part of decolonization processes and the interplay between colonial and indigenous land tenure systems in how the citizens of independent African states have framed and exercised their claims to land. Texts for the course will include historical and other scholarly monographs, primary documents, photographs, and film.