Courses:

Technology and Culture >> Content Detail



Study Materials



Readings

Amazon logo When you click the Amazon logo to the left of any citation and purchase the book (or other media) from Amazon.com, MIT OpenCourseWare will receive up to 10% of this purchase and any other purchases you make during that visit. This will not increase the cost of your purchase. Links provided are to the US Amazon site, but you can also support OCW through Amazon sites in other regions. Learn more.

This section features not only the required readings, but also the films shown in class.


LEC #TOPICSFILMSREADINGS
Introductory Themes
1Introduction(no films)(no readings)
2Theories of Technology and CultureFilm Excerpt: The Matrix

Amazon logo Malinowski, Bronislaw. Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1992 [1948], pp. 17-35. ISBN: 0881336572.

Amazon logo Gusterson, Hugh. "Nuclear Weapons Testing: Scientific Experiment as Political Ritual." In Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge. Edited by Laura Nader. New York, NY: Routledge, 1996, pp. 131-147. ISBN: 0415914655.

Amazon logo Marx, Karl. "The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret." In Capital, Volume 1. Translated from the German by Ben Fowkes. London, UK: Penguin, 1976 [1867], pp. 163-177. ISBN: 0140445684.

Theme 1: Biology and Biotechnology
3Technologies of Sex and Gender: Reproduction, Birth, Risk(no films)

Martin, Emily. "Pregnancy, Labor and Body Image in the United States." Social Science and Medicine 19, no. 11 (1984): 1201-1206.

Amazon logo Rapp, Rayna. Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: A Social History of Amniocentesis in America. New York, NY: Routledge, 2000. ISBN: 0415916453. Skip chapters 8 and 10.

4Technologies of Race: Medical ExperimentationDocumentary: The Deadly Deception

Amazon logo Kapsalis, Terri. "Mastering the Female Pelvis: Race and the Tools of Reproduction." In Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997, pp. 31-59. ISBN: 0822319217.

Amazon logo Jones, James. "The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment: 'A Moral Astigmatism.'" In The "Racial" Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future. Edited by Sandra Harding. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993, pp. 275-286. ISBN: 0253208106.

Amazon logo Landecker, Hannah. "Immortality, In Vitro: A History of the HeLa Cell Line." In Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics. Edited by Paul Brodwin. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000, pp. 53-72. ISBN: 0253214289.

5Technologies of Death: Risk and the Biopolitics of RadiationDocumentary: Half LifeAmazon logo Petryna, Adriana. Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. ISBN: 069109019X.
6Genetically Modified FoodDocumentary: The Future of Food

Massey, Adrianne. "Crops, Genes, and Evolution." Gastronomica (Summer 2001): 20-29.

Amazon logo Haraway, Donna. "Mice Into Wormholes: A Technoscience Fugue in Two Parts." In Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_ Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. New York, NY: Routledge, 1997, pp. 55-63 and 79-94. ISBN: 0415912458.

Amazon logo Jasanoff, Sheila. "Unsettled Settlements and Food for Thought." In Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005, pp. 94-145. ISBN: 0691118116.

Amazon logo Stone, Glenn Davis. "A Science of the Gray: Malthus, Marx, and the Ethics of Studying Crop Biotechnology." In Embedding Ethics: Shifting Boundaries of the Anthropological Profession. Edited by Lynn Meskell and Peter Pels. Oxford, UK: Berg, 2005, pp. 197-217. ISBN: 1845200470.

Theme 2: Computers and Information Technologies
7Sociologies of ComputingFilm Excerpts: Tron, War Games

Schaffer, Simon. "Babbage's Intelligence: Calculating Engines and the Factory System." Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (1994): 203-227.

Edwards, Paul N. "The Army and the Microworld: Computers and the Politics of Gender Identity." Signs 16, no. 1 (1990): 102-127.

Pfaffenberger, Bryan. "The Social Meaning of the Personal Computer: Or, Why the Personal Computer Revolution Was No Revolution." Anthropological Quarterly 61, no. 1 (1988): 39-47.

Chan, Anita. "Coding Free Software, Coding Free States: Free Software Legislation and the Politics of Code in Peru." Anthropological Quarterly 77, no. 3 (1998): 531-545.

8From Artificial Intelligence to Artificial LifeFilm Excerpt: A.I.

Amazon logo Forsythe, Diana E. "Engineering Knowledge: The Construction of Knowledge in Artificial Intelligence." In Studying Those Who Study Us: An Anthropologist in the World of Artificial Intelligence. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001, pp. 35-58. ISBN: 0804742030.

Amazon logo Adam, Alison. Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine. New York, NY: Routledge, 1998, pp. 34-68. ISBN: 041512963X.

Amazon logo Helmreich, Stefan. "The Word for World Is Computer: Simulating Second Natures in Artificial Life." In Growing Explanations: Historical Perspectives on the Sciences of Complexity. Edited by Norton Wise. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004, pp. 275-300. ISBN: 0822333074.

Amazon logo Helmreich, Stefan. "Kinship in Hypertext: Transubstantiating Fatherhood and Information Flow in Artificial Life." In Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Edited by Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001, pp. 116-143. ISBN: 0822327961.

9

Our Machines, Our Music: From White Noise to Black Noise

Film Excerpts: Space is the Place, Scratch

Amazon logo Pinch, Trevo, and Frank Trocco. "Introduction," "Chapter 1: Subterranean Homesick Blues," and "Chapter 3: Shaping the Synthesizer." In Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 1-31 and 53-69. ISBN: 0674016173.

Amazon logo Fink, Robert. "Introduction: The Culture of Repetition." In Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005, pp. 1-22. ISBN: 0520245504.

Amazon logo Rose, Tricia. "Soul Sonic Forces: Technology, Orality, and Black Cultural Practice in Rap Music." In Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, MA: Wesleyan University Press, 1994, pp. 62-96. ISBN: 0819562750.

Amazon logo Williams, Ben. "Black Secret Technology: Detroit Techno and the Information Age." In Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. Edited by Alondra Nelson and Thuy Linh N. Tu with Alicia Headlam Hines. New York, NY: NYU Press, 2001, pp. 154-176. ISBN: 0814736041.

Theme 3: Technological Infrastructure and Social Forms
10InfrastructureFilm Excerpts: Modern Times, Man with a Movie Camera

Hughes, Thomas. "The Seamless Web: Technology, Science, Etcetera, Etcetera." Social Studies of Science 16, no. 2 (1986): 281-292.

Rubinstein, M. "Relations of Science, Technology, and Economics Under Capitalism, and in the Soviet Union." In Science at the Crossroads: Papers Presented to the International Congress of the History of Science and Technology held in London from June 29th to July 3rd, 1931 by the delegates of the U.S.S.R. 2nd ed. Edited by Nikolai Bukharin et al. London, UK: Frank Cass and Company, 1971 [1931].

Edwards, Paul. "Y2K: Millennial Reflections on Computers as Infrastructure." History & Technology 15 (1998): 7-29.

Amazon logo Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. "Introduction: Rhizome." In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated from the French by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 [1980], pp. 3-25. ISBN: 0816614024.

11Trains, Automobiles, Organs(no films)

Amazon logo Latour, Bruno. Aramis, or The Love of Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. ISBN: 0674043235.

Jain, Sarah. "Dangerous Instrumentality": The Bystander as Subject in Automobility. Cultural Anthropology 19, no. 1 (2004): 61-94.

Amazon logo Lock, Margaret. "On Making Up the Good-as-Dead in a Utilitarian World." In Remaking Life and Death: Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences. Edited by Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2003, pp. 165-192. ISBN: 1930618204.

12Student Paper Presentations(no films)(no readings)
13Party and Student Paper Presentations(no films)(no readings)

 








© 2010-2021 OpenCollege.com, All Rights Reserved.
Open College is a service mark of AmeriCareers LLC.