Course Description: This seminar adopts an inter-disciplinary approach to the study of naturecultures - the entanglement of the natural and the cultural, the body and the mind, the material and the semiotic (among other oppositional binaries of the modern) - drawing from science and technology studies, communications and media studies, political anthropology, globalization studies, social theory, and feminist and post-colonial/de-colonial theory. This seminar is designed for students interested in contemporary developments in STS and interrogating the sociotechnical and naturecultural as means to examine the coshaping of such forces. It is particularly concerned with examining how diverse ‘disciplinary’ orientations and practices come to work at the interface of the naturecultural (and related emerging paradigms of new materialism and post-humanism) in the humanities and natural sciences alike.
