Introduction to the Anthropology of Science and Technology 202 Eaton Hall, Mondays and Wednesdays 3:00–4:15Pm

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Spring 2018, Anthropology 32/Science, Technology & Society 32 Introduction to the Anthropology of Science and Technology 202 Eaton Hall, Mondays and Wednesdays 3:00–4:15pm

Nick Seaver 311A Eaton Hall [email protected] Ofﬁce Hours: Monday/Tuesday 1–2pm (sign up online at nickseaver.youcanbook.me)

Course Description Everywhere, humans try to understand the world and to make things happen. Some people, in some places and at some times, call those efforts “science” and “technology.” Among the things that people do, science and technology are commonly considered to be some of the most important: private investors, governments, and universities like the one you are currently enrolled in spend vast amounts of money on them; people praise them as transformative human accomplishments (e.g. smallpox eradication, the internet) or blame them for social ills (e.g. nuclear weapons, the internet). And, although humans are the only kind of people known to describe their activities as science or technology, it is commonly supposed that science and technology have little to do with those humans’ human qualities: culture, society, race, gender, class, and a host of other things that matter a good deal to people are typically considered external to science and technology. Sometimes, science and technology are explicitly defined as the unique human endeavors where these factors do not matter. This course offers an introduction to the anthropological study of science and technology, which is another way of saying that we will investigate science and technology as though it does matter that humans do them. How does it matter? How does this change our ideas about what science and technology are, what they’re for, and how they evolve? Given the cultural dominance of science and technology, many students find it challenging to adopt an anthropological angle on these topics. So our main task will be learning how to pay attention in an anthropological way: We will learn how to ask anthropological questions of science and technology and how to raise anthropological concerns about them. We will do this through a wide-ranging and hopefully entertaining survey of topics including things like facts, infrastructures, traps, genomes, algorithms, bodies, and measurements. Along the way, we will cover basic theories from Anthropology and Science, Technology & Society, so that you will have a broad sense of those fields and be prepared to take more advanced courses in those majors. I am always happy to recommend further readings, to help you find other courses of interest, or to talk about your own potential research interests.

v 3.0 (ﬁnd the current version at introductiontotheanthropologyofscienceand.technology)

1 0. “Introduction to the Anthropology of…” Monday, January 22: What kind of thing is anthropology, and, by extension, this class?

1. “…Science…” Wednesday, January 24: Where are the edges of science, and how are they produced? Gordin, Michael. 2012. “Introduction: Bad Ideas” (excerpt). In The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe. University of Chicago Press, 1–14.

Hess, David. 1992. “Disciplining Heterodoxy, Circumventing Discipline: Parapsychology, Anthropologically.” In Knowledge and Society Vol. 9: The Anthropology of Science and Technology, edited by David Hess and Linda Layne. JAI Press, 191–222.

Monday, January 29: What kind of person is a scientist? Shapin, Steven. 1988. “The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England.” Isis 79(3): 373–404.

Traweek, Sharon. 1988. “Pilgrim’s Progress: Male Tales Told During a Life in Physics.” In Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physics. Harvard University Press, 74–105.

2. “…and Technology” Wednesday, January 31: How does technology relate to other domains of human life? Pfaffenberger, Bryan. 1988. “Fetishised Objects and Humanised Nature: Towards an Anthropology of Technology.” Man 23(2): 236–252.

Monday, February 5: What consequences do our definitions of technology have? Marx, Leo. [1997] 2010. “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept.” Technology and Culture 51(3): 561–577.

McGaw, Judith. 2003. “Why Feminine Technologies Matter.” In Gender and Technology: A Reader, edited by Nina Lerman, Ruth Oldenziel, and Arwen P. Mohun. Johns Hopkins University Press, 13–36.

3. Bodies Wednesday, February 7: Are bodies technology? Mauss, Marcel. [1934] 1973. “Techniques of the Body.” Economy and Society 2(1): 70– 88.

2 Watch: Taylor, Sunaura. 2009. Interview by Judith Butler. In Examined Life, directed by Astra Taylor. 15 minutes. youtu.be/k0HZaPkF6qE.

Monday, February 12: How do bodies relate to other technologies, like cars? Elyachar, Julia. 2011. “The political economy of movement and gesture in Cairo.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17(1): 82–99.

Jain, S. Lochlann. 2004. “‘Dangerous Instrumentality’: The Bystander as Subject in Automobility.” Cultural Anthropology 19(1): 61–94.

[Note: class discussion today will focus on self-driving cars. You may want to read this optional blog post for background: Cefkin, Melissa. 2016. “Human-Machine Interactions and the Coming Age of Autonomy.” Platypus: The CASTAC Blog. blog.castac.org/2016/01/ age-of-autonomy.]

4. Writing Wednesday, February 14: How are facts made? Latour, Bruno. 1987. “Opening Pandora’s Black Box” and “Literature” (excerpt). Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Harvard University Press, 1-44.

No class Monday, February 19 — Presidents’ Day

5. Seeing Wednesday, February 21: Does objectivity have a history? Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison. 2010. “Epistemologies of the Eye.” In Objectivity. Zone Books, 17–54.

Thursday, February 22: How do experts learn to see? Goodwin, Charles. 1994. “Professional Vision.” American Anthropologist 96(3): 606– 633. [content note: this reading discusses racist police violence]

6. Locating Monday, February 26: Where does science come from? Harding, Sandra. 1994. “Is Science Multicultural? Challenges, Resources, Opportunities, Uncertainties.” Conﬁgurations 2(2): 301-330.

Zhan, Mei. 2009. “Does it Take a Miracle?” In Other-Worldly: Making Chinese Medicine through Transnational Frames. Durham: Duke University Press, 91–117.

3 Wednesday, February 28: Are there viable alternatives to objectivity? Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–599. [note: this one is challenging, give yourself plenty of time to read]

Analytic Assignment I due: March 2, by 11:59pm

7. Tacit knowledge Monday, March 5: What do scientists know that they don’t say? Myers, Natasha. 2008. “Molecular Embodiments and the Body-work of Modeling in Protein Crystallography.” Social Studies of Science 38(2): 163–199.

Midterm Exam: March 7

8. Gender Monday, March 12: How does gender manifest in science? Guest: Christina Agapakis, Ginkgo Bioworks Martin, Emily. 1991. “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles” Signs 16(3): 485–501.

Wednesday, March 14: How does technological “progress” affect women? Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. 1976. “The "Industrial Revolution" in the Home: Household Technology and Social Change in the 20th Century.” Technology and Culture 17(1): 1–23.

Ong, Aihwa. 1988. “The Production of Possession: Spirits and the Multinational Corporation in Malaysia.” American Ethnologist 15(1): 28–42.

!!!. SPRING BREAK

9. Objects Monday, March 26: How do things tell people what to do? Latour, Bruno (as Jim Johnson). 1988. “Mixing Humans and Non-Humans Together: The Sociology of a Door Closer.” Social Problems 35(3): 298–310.

4 Akrich, Madeleine. 1992. “The De-Scription of Technical Objects.” In Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge: MIT Press, 205-224.

Wednesday, March 28: Where does stuff come from, and where does it go? Hodder, Ian. 2012. “Thinking about Things Differently.” In Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 1–13. [note: the full text of this book is available on archive.org]

Smith, James H. 2011. “Tantalus in the Digital Age: Coltan ore, temporal dispossession, and ‘movement’ in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.” American Ethnologist 38(1): 17–35. [content note: this article describes extreme violence]

10. Infrastructure Monday, April 2: What is infrastructure, and what does it do? Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure” (excerpt). American Behavioral Scientist 43(3): 377–391.

Winner, Langdon. 1980. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus 109 (1): 121–136.

Wednesday, April 4: Is infrastructure always invisible? Larkin, Brian. 2008. “Infrastructure, the Colonial Sublime, and Indirect Rule.” In Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham: Duke University Press, 16-47.

11. Classiﬁcation Monday, April 9: How do physical instruments classify people? Waidzunas, Tom, and Steven Epstein. 2015. “‘For Men Arousal Is Orientation’: Bodily Truthing, Technosexual Scripts, and the Materialization of Sexualities through the Phallometric Test.” Social Studies of Science 45(2): 187–213.

Wednesday, April 11: How do genomes classify people? TallBear, Kim. 2013. “Genomic Articulations of Indigeneity.” Social Studies of Science 43(4): 509–533.

Panofsky, Aaron and Joan Donovan. 2017. “When Genetics Challenges a Racist’s Identity: Genetic Ancestry Testing Among White Nationalists” (excerpt). SocArXiv. August 17. osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/7f9bc. [note: this reading presents excerpts from a white supremacist online forum]

5 Analytic Assignment II due: April 13, by 11:59pm

No class Monday, April 16 — Patriots’ Day

12. Magic Wednesday, April 18: What does magic have to do with science and technology? Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1937. “The Notion of Witchcraft Explains Unfortunate Events.” In Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Clarendon, 18–32.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1948. “Rational Mastery by Man of his Surroundings.” In Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays. Beacon Press, 8–18.

Gell, Alfred. 1988. “Technology and Magic.” Anthropology Today 4(2): 6–9.

Monday, April 23: Where kinds of divination happen where? Shaw, Rosalind. 1991. “Splitting Truths from Darkness: Epistemological Aspects of Temne Divination.” In African Divination Systems: Ways of Knowing. Indiana University Press, 137–152.

13. Traps Wednesday, April 25: Why are traps interesting? Mason, Otis. 1900. “Traps of the Amerinds—A Study in Psychology and Invention.” American Anthropologist 2 (4): 657–675.

Lemonnier, Pierre. 2012. “Entwined by Nature: Eels, Traps, and Ritual.” In Mundane Objects. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 45–62.

Monday, April 30: How do technologies capture people? Seaver, Nick. 2017. “Captivating Algorithms: Recommender Systems as Traps.” Working paper.

Schüll, Natasha Dow. 2012. “Programming Chance: The Calculation of Enchantment” and “The Rat People.” In Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 76–99 and 102–105.

Final Exam: May 4, 3:30–5:30pm

6 Learning Objectives This course has been designed to help you learn how: 1. To think expansively about science and technology and to become adept at locating facts and artifacts in broader contexts, including society and culture. 2. To become familiar with major schools of thought in STS and the anthropology of science and technology, preparing you for advanced courses in these ﬁelds. 3. To develop critical reading and writing skills, including the ability to analyze scholarly arguments and to make your own.

Your grade is divided as follows:

Assignment Due Date % of Grade

Reading micro-responses Daily 15 Analysis I March 2 15 Midterm Exam March 7 25 Analysis II (or paper, see below) April 13 15

Final Exam (or paper, see below) May 4 30 Attendance (extra credit only, see below) Daily up to +3

There may be occasions to earn extra credit throughout the semester by attending events at Tufts or in the greater Boston area and writing a short report. These occasions, should they arise, will be announced (exclusively) in class.

Reading This class has a lot of reading—typically one or two articles or book chapters per meeting. (Anthropologists are wordy people, see the rest of this syllabus for evidence.) You are expected to have done the reading before the class for which it is assigned, and you should bring a copy (digital or printed) to class so you can refer to it. I’ve done my best to keep the reading load manageable while including a wide range of topics, voices, and theoretical inclinations. Students in previous versions of the course have reported that the diversity of readings was one of their favorite features of it, and I hope that you will ﬁnd among them a few pieces that inspire you to read further. Given the reading load, we will not be summarizing everything in class—class time is for engaging with concepts. But, material from the readings that we do not cover in class may be useful for your assignments and exams, so read!

7 The readings vary widely in difficulty, and many are aimed at professional academics. This means that they are involved in debates you may not be familiar with and take for granted certain kinds of knowledge you may not have. Reading this kind of writing is a skill: you will need to learn how to identify when a reference is crucial to your understanding of an author’s main point and when it is incidental; you will need to learn how to skim effectively, spending more time on some parts of the readings than others. With practice, you will get better at this. (You already know how to skim, if you read with any regularity: whether you’re reading the news or a novel, you probably speed up and slow down with your own interest or sense of significance.) Don’t be afraid to do a little googling for context if you encounter an unfamiliar term, and bring these questions to class or put them in your responses so we can collectively unpack the hard parts. The Tufts credit-hour guidelines suggest that a course of this size will have on average six hours of work per week outside class times. If reading is taking you significantly longer than that, we can work on skimming tactics in more detail. At the end of most classes, I will give some pointers on how to approach the next day’s reading—sometimes including sections that can be safely skipped if you’re short on time—so make sure to note those down. This guide may be useful: Harvard Department of Anthropology, A Student’s Guide to Reading and Writing in Social Anthropology (especially pp. 7–19): goo.gl/FhescG. Many of the readings are journal articles available through the library. You should download these yourself—I will not provide copies of them. This is part of your training in how to do research, and download statistics help the librarians justify their subscriptions. I will go over how to do this in class. It is, in most cases, as simple as copy-pasting some text into a search engine while on a campus internet connection (or off-campus, from a VPN). If a reading is not available digitally through the library, I’ll provide a PDF via Trunk. If you’re having trouble accessing something, I can help you if you let me know with enough lead time. Failure to acquire the reading is not an acceptable excuse for not doing it.

Micro-responses By 9am each class day, you are expected to post a “micro-response” for each assigned reading to the corresponding topic in our class forum on Trunk (as text posts, not attachments, please). These are short written responses intended to ensure that students engage with the readings and to surface topics of interest before class. I use these to decide what to spend time on in class. (While you won’t be able to see your peers’ responses until you post your own, you will be able to see them afterwards, and I recommend taking a peek to see what other people in the class are thinking.) I call them micro-responses because they are supposed to be short: literally three sentences long is sufﬁcient, so long as you demonstrate that you’ve read and thought about the piece. Here are some of the topics you might cover in your sentences,

8 depending on how well you feel you understood it: What is the author’s central point? What kind of evidence do they use to support that point (and do you think it is sufficient)? Why does the author think this point is worth making? (Often this has to do with what they are arguing against or what they think the common sense position is.) Were there any topics in particular that confused you? Did you find anything (an argument, a concept, a bit of empirical detail) particularly interesting or exciting? These will be graded credit/no-credit solely for their earnest completion: it is possible to not get credit for a post longer than three sentences if you are clearly slacking, but you should think of this as a very easily acquired 15% of your final grade. They should take you very little time to prepare if you are mentally engaging with the readings while reading them.

Analytic assignments

There will be two written assignments that require you to use course concepts to analyze something (e.g. an object, a practice, a text) from outside class. These will be roughly 600 words, and I’ll give more information about them as they come up.

Exams This class has an open-note midterm and ﬁnal exam. These will be primarily composed of short answer and essay questions, aimed at conceptual, rather than factual details (e.g. “What is technological determinism? Give an example and one critique” rather than “What was the name of the architect who designed the bridges in ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’”). A twist: you will come up with the questions. At the end of most classes, we will break into groups and generate questions based on the day’s topic. Those questions will go into a question bank for all of you to see. I will do some light editing and may toss in a question or two of my own to the bank. For the exams, I will draw questions only from this list. Because you will already know the set of possible questions (and because you have your notes), my standards for good answers will be higher than they might have otherwise been. The point of this is that it is important to learn how to ask anthropological questions, not only to answer them. So we will be trying to collectively improve on our questions as the term progresses. The ﬁnal exam will be weighted toward the last half of class, but it will still be cumulative.

Final paper (alternate option) You have the option of writing a 3000-word final paper instead of both the second analytic assignment and the final exam. This is intended for more advanced students who have a clear idea of a topic they want to write about. You should, at least, have experience writing final papers on topics of your own choice in other social science or

9 humanities courses. I will be available to talk about papers in ofﬁce hours, but you should have the basic mechanics down already. Feel free to talk with me after class or in ofﬁce hours if you’re interested but unsure. To activate this option, send me a short paper proposal (~200 words) no later than 11:59pm on March 30. Your proposal should indicate your intended topic and the class readings and ideas you want to explore in your paper. I will approve paper proposals based on these criteria: the clarity of your plan and its relevance to the course, your performance in the course so far, and evidence that you are prepared to write a self- directed research paper. If I approve your proposal, then you’re good to go (and committed to this track). You should plan to email me a snapshot of your work in progress on the Analysis II deadline (April 13)—this could be an outline, some rough writing, or anything else that indicates that you’re making a good start on the paper. Failure to do so will impact your paper grade. Final drafts are due to me, via email, by 9am on May 7.

Engagement I expect you to attend and actively engage in class, whether during lecture, group discussion, or other in-class activities. People learn differently and have different propensities for participating in class, so I do not think of engagement as simply a matter of speaking some number of times in class. Rather, I expect you to engage constructively, respectfully, and generously with the ideas of your classmates and the readings. This means coming to class prepared, using inclusive language, not having side conversations, and not burying your attention in your computer screen. I do not have a policy restricting the use of technology in class. Take notes with whatever technology suits you. Some research indicates that note-taking on computers reduces the amount of information students retain from lectures. I do not find these results compelling, given the assumptions about course structure and what counts as “learning” embedded in most of the experiments. I am also concerned that restrictive technology policies harm students with learning disabilities who work better on a keyboard and don’t want to be outed to the class as having an exception. Some instructors justify no-laptop policies by saying that it will be good practice for your future to pay attention to something not on a screen during class time; I agree with this, except that in most of your life, you’ll need to learn to pay attention while having a screen available to you, so realistic practice involves having laptops around, not put away. So, I encourage you to experiment with your technical supports (especially if you’re a first-year student finding your footing). However, if your devices appear to be distracting you or others, I reserve the right to revoke these privileges immediately and permanently. I am not shy about spontaneously calling on students who are obviously lost in social media, and it is very obvious when you are (tip: if you want to use your computer to read and take notes, try turning off the wifi during class to avoid the pull

10 of precisely engineered attention-sucking websites, or install an app that blocks these sites for you). It’s your grade, do what you want to affect it.

Attendance I will be taking attendance in class, but it counts only for extra credit. That means that there is no penalty for missing class—you can, in principle, get 100% without ever attending class (though, for obvious reasons, this is unlikely). You’re adults, you can make decisions about how to allocate your time. So, I do not distinguish between excused and unexcused absences, and I do not need you to let me know if you’re going to miss class. If you miss only one class, you will get 3% added to your final grade (this is enough to summarily bump you from, say, a B+ to an A-). If you miss two, I will add 2%. Miss three, I’ll add 1%. After that, there’s no extra credit. I do not respond to emails that ask me to explain what happened in missed classes, nor do I summarize missed classes in office hours. Ask your classmates to fill you in if necessary. I also respond very poorly to grade complaints from students who regularly miss class or show up but do not engage. In extreme circumstances, I may decide not to count you present if you are here but actively disengaged from class. This is rare and I will let you know if it happens promptly, so you can cut it out as soon as possible.

Accessibility Your success in this class is important to me. If there are any circumstances that may affect your performance, please let me know as soon as possible so that we can work together to adapt assignments to meet both your needs and the requirements of the course. These may be personal, health-related, family-related issues, or other concerns. The sooner I know about these, the earlier we can discuss possible adjustments or alternative arrangements as needed. Any such discussion will remain confidential. (With one exception: I am a mandatory reporter under Title IX, which means that I am obligated to report instances of on-campus sexual harassment or discrimination to the University if I find out about them.) Even if you do not have a documented disability, remember that other support services are available to all students. You do not need to have a documented disability to ask me for accommodation; I am significantly more permissive than the minimum required by the university, but I can’t help if I don’t know. If you do need accommodation as a result of a documented disability, you should register with the Disability Services Office at the beginning of the semester. You can find out how to do so here: http://students.tufts.edu/student-accessibility-services. I try to be available via email, and you should generally receive a reply within 24–48 hours of emailing me. Some topics are easier dealt with in conversation, so I may ask you to come to office hours. As a rule, I do not answer email over the weekend or after 5pm. Plan ahead.

11 I am available for meeting with students during office hours or by appointment if you absolutely cannot make my scheduled office hours. Please sign up at nickseaver.youcanbook.me so I know who to expect. My office in Eaton Hall is only accessible via stairs (Tufts calls this “accessible with assistance,” though it is unclear what assistance means in this case). If stairs don’t accommodate you, let me know, and we can meet elsewhere.

Late Policy I may grant extensions on assignments if you provide at least three days’ notice send me evidence that you are working on an idea that requires more time. These are necessary, not sufficient, conditions for an extension: we will negotiate a new deadline, and there may be reasons for me to decline to extend one. Do not ask for an extension if you have not started work yet. Late assignments will be docked one quality letter grade per day (i.e. after 10 days, you cannot earn a grade higher than F). Reading responses cannot be turned in late (though they can be turned in early!). I will not schedule makeup exams unless you get permission from me in advance or can provide a note from the dean’s office excusing you. Missing an exam by accident is a very efficient way to destroy your grade, so make sure you put them in your calendar.

Academic Integrity Our expressions are not our own. Humans communicate with words and concepts— and within cultures and arguments—that are not of our own making. Writing, like other forms of communication, is a matter of combining existing materials in communicative ways. Different groups of people have different norms that govern these combinations: modernist poets and DJs, painters and programmers, blues musicians and attorneys, documentarians and physicists all abide by different sets of rules about what counts as “originality,” what kinds of copying are acceptable, and how one should relate to the materials from which one draws. In this course, you will continue to learn the norms of citation and attribution shared by the community of scholars in the social sciences. Failure to abide by these norms is considered plagiarism, as laid out in the Tufts Academic Integrity Policy, which you should familiarize yourself with: students.tufts.edu/student-affairs/student-life- policies/academic-integrity-policy. I am required to report suspected violations of this policy to the Dean of Student Affairs, and consequences can be severe. If you have any questions or doubts about this policy or my expectations regarding assignments, please get in touch with me immediately. Cheating in any form will not be tolerated and offenders will be penalized, reported, and potentially removed from the class. However, plagiarism policies tend to focus on the less productive side of the issue, urging students to be “original” and telling them what not to do (buying papers, copying text from the internet and passing it off as one’s own, etc.). While you should

12 obviously follow these rules, I encourage you to take a more expansive view of what academic integrity means. Academic integrity is not a matter of producing purely original thought, but of recognizing and acknowledging the resources on which you draw. In light of this, I do not use “plagiarism detection” services like Turnitin. Rather than expending your energy worrying about originality, I suggest that you think instead about what kind of citational network you are locating yourself in. What thinkers are you thinking with? Where do they come from? How might their positions in the world inform their thoughts? What is your position relative to them? How might you re-shape your citational network to better reﬂect your priorities or ideals? If you are interested in these issues, I recommend these pieces: Ahmed, Sara. 2013. “Making Feminist Points.” feministkilljoys. http:// feministkilljoys.com/2013/09/11/making-feminist-points/

Biagioli, Mario. 2014. “Plagiarism, Kinship and Slavery.” Theory, Culture & Society 31(2-3): 65–91. Introna, Lucas. 2016. “Algorithms, Governance, and Governmentality: On Governing Academic Writing.” Science, Technology & Human Values 41(1): 17–49.

You may write a 500-word analytic response to these readings for 1% extra credit at any point prior to the last day of class. See me in ofﬁce hours for details.

The Syllabus is a Living Document This syllabus is a starting point for the course. It is subject to change as the term unfolds, in response to your comments and my assessment of how things are going. I’ll be seeking out your feedback regularly. Some adjustments are likely. These adjustments may involve altering assignments or adding, removing, or modifying readings. Any changes will be discussed in class and announced via email, so attend class to participate in those discussions and check your inbox to discover their results. The current syllabus version number is on the front page. You can always ﬁnd the current version at introductiontotheanthropologyofscienceand.technology.