Course Synopsis for a course I am teaching at Duke, Fall 2010

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LIT 20: Science in Context: Imagining science through culture, gender, and art
Course Description
The course begins by teasing out the multiple facets of science; looking at the origin of its meaning and the multiplicity of meanings beyond what you have been taught in science classes in high school and college. We will be reading excerpts of books on the subjects of the course title, some journal articles, watch a film or two, view some documentaries and examine multimodal creations of virtual ‘labs’, electronic science ‘texts’ (which do not consist solely of words) and the technological application of the natural sciences in design, aesthetics and non-scientific work/production. We will even spend some class time discussing the meaning of the ‘non-scientific’ and discover that it is not merely the opposite of ‘science’. We will look at actual science pieces, works performing science, works playing with science, works communicating science and works theorizing science. We will have class projects that allow you to make use of what you’ve learnt from the class to create your own original piece(s). The purpose of this course is to leave you with a set of flexible yet rigorous intellectual tools to interrogate knowledge objects across disciplines, as well as tools that you can critically apply to your own discipline.

See the rest of the syllabus here

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