Terraformations Tech Cul Nature In A Globalizing World

AY2018/2019 Semester 2

Science and technology are the ubiquitous, yet often-invisible streams running through the variegated terrain of society. The ebbs and flows of science and technology have become one of the dominant mediating agents for human experience, and percolate through cultural and natural fault lines, reconfiguring channels between each, while themselves being altered through their passage. These dynamics, in short, are terraformations. Usually, only when we are confronted with catastrophes such as the terrorist attacks or massive oil spills or earthquakes, we recognize a fundamental paradox of modern times: As `socio technical' systems grow increasingly complex, our ability to explain, discipline and organize our world becomes drastically limited and uncertain, even as the stakes in successfully navigating these straits become unthinkably high. Only when we are faced with these dramatic events are the mists briefly lifted that normally obscure particular confluences of science, technology, power and culture from ordinary view. In this course, we will look at the less dramatic but equally pervasive circulations (and disjunctures) of global capital, technology and knowledge and how they remake our natural and social worlds.