BIOE 5680 Science, Technology, Medicine and Society

This course will explore the relationship between science, technology, medicine, and society, thinking critically about the role that power, politics, culture, and history play in the framing and shaping of scientific and medical practice.  We will consider how science, technology, and medicine both construct the world around us and how we construct the understanding of them.  What role has culture played in diagnostic practice from the nineteenth century to the present?  How do we consider political and social debates on the development of technologies from x-rays to photographs to cars to the bomb?  Case studies will include biometric surveillance, appearance and beauty, and AIDS activism.