| | 01 | M-W---- | 4:00P-5:20P | Seigle / 305 | Kim | Default - none | 19 | 14 | 0 | | Desc: | Code and Craft: How Digital Cultures Shape and are Shaped by Human Life
How have digital tools and data-driven technologies transformed and been transformed by manual work, reason, and judgment; art, science, and expertise; beauty, democracy, and the self? We will examine historical and contemporary understandings of technical code, on the one hand, and human craft, on the other from the late nineteenth century to the present, paying attention to the social, cultural, and political contexts of efforts to formalize thought, design, and economic practices. Topics include cybernetics and information, computer graphics and automated design, gendered and racialized subjectivities, digital labor, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic thinking. The course is organized around five crosscutting domains in which we will analyze the shifting dynamics between code and craft from aesthetic, ethical, theoretical, and sociopolitical perspectives: (1) taste, (2) work, (3) governance, (4) intellectual property, (5) digital identities. |
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| 02 | M-W---- | 4:00P-5:20P | Simon / 021 | Whittington | Default - none | 15 | 13 | 0 | | Desc: | Walls, Borders, and Frontiers: Making Others, Making Ourselves
Borders and frontiers have been at the center of the project of creating modern states and societies. We will ask a set of key questions: What is a border? How do arbitrary lines take on practical significance? Where do states begin and end? What is the enduring impact of borders for those living on either side of it? How do borders shift between being porous and non-porous, and why? How is our understanding of ourselves tangled up in the process of creating 'the other'? We will draw from across time and space, observing the delimitation of borders as a project of early modern states; the "opening" of the American frontier; the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall; wild, competitive border ceremonies between India and Pakistan; the movement of corpses and things across the 'chessboard' borders of the Fergana Valley (Central Asia); the place of Crimea between Ukraine and Russia (and the Ottoman Empire, historically); and the current status of the US-Mexican border (and its proposed border wall). Readings would be both global and interdisciplinary in nature, including the work of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, journalists, and novelists.
Although global in scope, the course will have local dimensions. Because St. Louis (and its Gateway Arch) has served in popular lore as the gateway to the American Frontier, we will consider how even our current location has been historically implicated in the creation of national mythologies. |
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