2021-2022 Supported Courses
In 2021-2022, two types of course development support were offered. The traditional course development grants were open to lecturers and faculty across Columbia University. Awardees received $3,000 and the Center provided administrative support in conjunction with the faculty's home department. Supported courses were developed by Center faculty and scholars as part of our curriculum development and may be partially funded by the Center.
2021 Course Development Grants
Course Information
- Course Instructor: Elizabeth Bernstein (Professor of Women's Studies and Sociology at Barnard College)
- Course Type: Seminar to be offered in Spring 2023.
Course Description
- Open to undergraduate and graduate students, this course will explore ways in which our bodies have served as the repository and substratum of recent social, political, and economic transformations.
- Students will ask what critical histories of plagues, epidemics, and quarantines can teach us about emergent forms of biopolitics.
- The course will conclude by considering how disability and social justice activists have offered ways to re-imagine illness, embodiment, radical care and mutual aid.
Course Information
- Course Instructors: Rhiannon Stephens (Associate Professor of History at Columbia University) and Jason Smerdon (Lamont Research Professor at Columbia University)
- Course Type: Seminar course to be offered in Spring 2022
Course Description
- Open to undergraduate and graduate students, this course examines the duration and intensity of past climate events in Africa and their impact.
- Moving away from the binary of collapse vs. resilience, this class focuses on the significance of climate for food production, trade, and cosmologies.
- Combining paleoclimatology and African history, this class teaches students to think in complex ways about the response to climate change.
Other Supported Courses
Course Information
- Course Instructor: Raphaël Millière (Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience)
- Course Type: Seminar course offered Fall 2021
- Course webpage
Course Description
- What is Artificial Intelligence? Is it an impossible project? Does it even exist today and should we ever fear it? Students will consider questions at the intersection of philosophy and AI.
- The course explores the nature of AI and the possibility of building AI systems that has the same mental capacities as humans.
Course Information
- Course Instructor: Lisa Dolling (Teaching Professor and Associate Dean at Villanova University and Research Cluster on Science and Subjectivity Advisory Board member)
- Student Collaborators/TAs: Ellie Hansen (Research Cluster on Science and Subjectivity Scholar) and Kimia Heydari (Research Cluster on Science and Subjectivity Scholar)
- Course Type: Seminar course to be offered in Spring 2022
- Course webpage
Course Description
- Open to undergraduate and graduate students, this course aims to apply the tools of rhetorical inquiry to the various modes of scientific discourse.
- Special attention will be given to the feminist critique and analysis of science, in terms of both theory development and science communication.
- Students will learn how an awareness of rhetorical devices can enhance our understanding and practice of science.
Course Information
- Course Instructors: Zoe Crossland (Associate Professor of Anthropology) and Tracy Molis (Artist)
- Course Type: Laboratory class offered in Spring 2017, Spring 2019, and Spring 2022.
- Columbia University article about course
- Course webpage
Course Description
- The course traces the history of scientific illustration in archeology and explore current practice by learning different forms of line work, pen and ink and color wash.
- The class is a laboratory for exploring how science constructs its subject by thinking about the ramifications of archaeological representation and exploring the resonance of archaeology for artists.
- Students gain knowledge of illustrative techniques and develop a practical understanding of the history and practice of scientific illustration.
Course Information
- Course Instructors: Pamela H. Smith (Associate Professor of History and Founding Director of the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University) and Madi Whitman (Postdoctoral Research Scholar and Assistant Director of Co-teaching at the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University)
- Faculty Collaborator: Stuart Firestein (Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University)
- Course Type: Lecture course to be offered in Spring 2022
- Course webpage
Course Description
- Open to undergraduate and graduate students, this course uses historical accounts to show how science and pseudoscience developed in tandem in the period from 1400 to 1800.
- The class traces how areas of natural knowledge became marginalized when a new philosophy of nature came to dominate the discourse of rationality.
- Students will be equipped to examine contemporary issues of expertise, the social construction of science, pluralism in science, and certainty and uncertainty in science.