[Sci-tech-public] New Course Offering This Fall

[rherzig@bates.edu]

For Graduate Students in STS......

STS909:  Advanced Topics in Science, Technology, and Society
TECHNOLOGY AND FREEDOM IN AMERICAN HISTORY

Fall 2005
Mondays 1:00pm-4:00pm
MIT Room E51-191


This seminar explores the relations between the emergence of technology as a
pivotal concept in Anglo-American thought and shifting understandings of human
freedom.  How were discussions of the liberating—-or enslaving—-character of
various machines, systems, and other innovations tied to the expansion of the
concept of "technology"?  How were discussions of technology intertwined with
the redefinition of "freedom" which attended the abolition of slavery, the
growth of contract labor, an increasing demand for women’s political
enfranchisement, and the spread of U.S. imperial ambitions?  Beginning with a
genealogy of terms, we study the connections between persons and things
imagined by a few key nineteenth-century American writers, reading canonical
texts through new lenses.

Instructors:  Rebecca Herzig and Leo Marx