Course Descriptions

Instructor: John Beatty Section: 002 Term: 2 Meets: Thursdays 2:00-5:00pm We use the same term when we refer to political authority and scientific authority. And in spite of obvious differences, they do resemble each other in key respects. Most notably, both suggest broad contexts in which we should defer to others rather than think for ourselves. […]

Instructors: Alan Richardson Section: 001 Term: 2 Meets: Mondays 2:00-5:00pm This course will be a community-based learning course in which we bring readings on the public understanding of science to bear in places in the Vancouver area in which public presentation of science takes place. We will visit sites on UBC campus such as the […]

Instructor: Alan Richardson Section: 001 Term: 2 Meets: Wednesdays 1:00-4:00pm There are times when Science and Technology Studies/History and Philosophy of Science scholars fancy that their disciplines would be useful in helping to resolve actually occurring problems in, for example, the relevance of scientific knowledge production or technological innovation to community concerns, productive citizen engagement with […]

Instructor: Stephen Petrina Section: 001 Term: 1 Meets: Thursdays 1:00-4:00pm This seminar focuses on recent work of Bruno Latour, arguably the most creative and challenging scholar of Science & Technology Studies (STS). Latour’s reputation and scholarship traverses an extremely wide range of disciplines in addition to STS (e.g., anthropology, art, education, environmental studies, geography, history, law, […]

Instructor: Ian Hill Section: 001 Term: 1 Meets: Wednesdays 10:00am-1:00pm Although the intermingling of rhetoric, technology, and materiality was nascent in the mid-20th century writings of rhetoricians Kenneth Burke and Walter Ong, over the last several decades rhetorical inquiries into technology and materiality have developed in several discreet directions that owe few intellectual debts to […]