The Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence

  • Course Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
  • Department: Public Policy Studies - Harris School
  • Year: 2023-24
  • Term: Spring
  • Th 5:00-7:50
  • KNOW 38850, PPHA 38850
  • Andre Uhl

This course traces the emergence of AI ethics in public policy, examining the power dynamics and political strategies involved in building consensus within a highly dynamic discourse. Students will engage in detailed analysis of AI policy documents and delve into emerging key principles such as fairness, accountability, and transparency, exploring their origins and practical applications. The curriculum centers on a series of case studies that will challenge students to debate over the responsible use of AI systems in real-world contexts, ranging from issues of human rights to sustainable development and geopolitics. Through hands-on analytical and rhetorical exercises, this course is designed as a transformative leadership bootcamp for the rapidly evolving field of AI governance.

Sense & Sensibility & Science @Uchicago: Scientific Thinking in a Democracy

  • Course Level: Undergraduate
  • Department: Big Problems, Social Sciences Core
  • Year: 2023-24
  • Term: Spring
  • KNOW 26021, SOSC 26021, BPRO 26021
  • Reid Hastie, Jordan Kemp, Eamon Duede

In Sense & Sensibility & Science, you will learn how to better incorporate into your thinking and decision making the problem-solving techniques of science at its best. Many insights and conceptual tools from scientific thinking are of great utility for solving problems in your own day-to-day life and in a democracy. Yet, as individuals, as groups, as whole societies we fail to take full advantage of these methods. The focus in this course is on the errors humans tend to make, and the approaches scientific methodology has developed (and continues to develop) to minimize those errors. The course includes a discussion of the nature of science, what makes science such an effective way of knowing, how both non-scientific thinking and scientific thinking can go awry, and how we can reason more clearly and successfully as individuals, as members of groups, and as citizens of a democracy.

The undergraduate course will be simultaneously taught at UC Berkeley, Harvard and UChicago in spring 2024, with an opportunity for students from all three courses to participate remotely in the same deliberative polling capstone experience. UChicago’s spring 2024 course premiere builds on a decade of experience developing and teaching the popular course at Berkeley and Harvard’s adoption of its own version in 2021.

Man, Society, and Culture in Europe, 1700-1914

  • Course Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
  • Department:
  • Year: 2023-24
  • Term: Spring
  • W 1:30-4:20
  • KNOW 37250
  • Kris Palmieri

What makes us human? What is society and how do societies evolve? What is culture and how do we study it? These kinds of questions spurred the development of disciplines ranging from Anthropology, Sociology, and Linguistics to History, Psychology, and Religious Studies today. But in the period from the Enlightenment to the First World War, they were part of an emerging complex of entangled human sciences, which endeavored to answer questions about humanity, its origins, its nature, and its development. Moving from the Scottish Highlands and French Salons to German Universities and British India, this course takes a transnational and transdisciplinary approach that investigates how the answers to these questions changed over time. Students will also examine how distinct modes of scholarship and different knowledge making practices grew out of specific socio-political contexts and trace the development of concepts such as “progress,” “civilization,” “modernity,” and even “science” itself. In so doing, this course not only asks students to question what it means to belong to, or work within, a discipline but also to reflect on the ways in which our modern taxonomy of knowledge dictates what it is possible to know.

When Cultures Collide: The Multicultural Challenge

  • Course Level: Graduate
  • Department: Psychology, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Anthropology, Human Rights, Comparative Human Development
  • Year: 2023-24
  • Term: Winter
  • KNOW 45699, CHDV 45699, PSYC 45300, ANTH 45600, HMRT 35600, GNSE 45600
  • Richard Schweder

Coming to terms with diversity in an increasingly multicultural world has become one of the most pressing public policy projects for liberal democracies in the early 21st century. One way to come to terms with diversity is to try to understand the scope and limits of toleration for variety at different national sites where immigration from foreign lands has complicated the cultural landscape. This seminar examines a series of legal and moral questions about the proper response to norm conflict between mainstream populations and cultural minority groups (including old and new immigrants), with special reference to court cases that have arisen in the recent history of the United States.

Law and Citizenship in Latin America

  • Course Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
  • Department: Law, Letters, and Society, History, Latin American Studies
  • Year: 2023-24
  • Term: Winter
  • M/W 1:30-2:50
  • KNOW 36509, HIST 36509/26509, LACS 36509/26509, LLSO 26509
  • M/W 1:30-2:50

This course will examine law and citizenship in Latin America from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. We will explore the development of Latin American legal systems in both theory and practice, examine the ways in which the operation of these systems has shaped the nature of citizenship in the region, discuss the relationship between legal and other inequalities, and analyze some of the ways in which legal documents and practices have been studied by scholars in order to gain insight into questions of culture, nationalism, family, violence, gender, and race.

More Than Human Ethnography

  • Course Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
  • Department: Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization, Anthropology, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Masters of Arts in the Social Sciences
  • Year: 2023-24
  • Term: Winter
  • T 9:30-12:20
  • KNOW 32404, MAPSS 31404, ANTH 33807/21426, GNSE 31404/21404, CEGU 21426
  • Mary Wilhoit

In this course we explore the growing fields of more-than-human and 'multispecies' ethnography. We will examine theoretical antecedents promoting the inclusion of non-human social actors in ethnographic analysis and read many examples of such work, including foundational texts on interspecies engagements, exploitations, and dependencies by Deborah Bird Rose, Kim Tallbear, Eduardo Kohn, Anna Tsing, and Augustin Fuéntes among many others. We will consider the role other species and 'actants' played in early social science work and contemplate recent studies of "becoming with" other animals, plants, fungi, bacteria-encountering complex ecological kin relationships, examining naturalcultural borders, and querying decolonial legacies and the role of ecofeminist thought and queer ecologies in the 'more-than' turn. Multispecies and posthumanist approaches encourage a decentering of traditional methodologies; we will thus couple ethnographic examples with literature by geographers, biologists, and philosophers. The course is a discussion-based seminar, with significant time devoted to understanding the logistical or methodological aspects of 'more than' work-to querying how such studies have been conducted in practice. The final paper in the course will take the form of an exploratory essay (ethnographic, historical, or theoretical) based on data and observations collected during previous weeks.

Introduction to Science Studies

  • Course Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
  • Department: History, History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Science and Medicine, Anthropology, Sociology, Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, Health and Society
  • Year: 2023-24
  • Term: Winter
  • W 9:30-12:20
  • KNOW 31408, CHSS 3200, ANTH 32305, HIST 56800, SOCI 40137, HIPS 22001, HLTH 2201
  • Michael Rossi

This course provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary study of science, medicine, and technology. During the twentieth century, sociologists, historians, philosophers, and anthropologists raised original, interesting, and consequential questions about the sciences. Often their work drew on and responded to each other, and, taken together, their various approaches came to constitute a field, "science studies." The course furnishes an initial guide to this field. Students will not only encounter some of its principal concepts, approaches and findings, but will also get a chance to apply science-studies perspectives themselves by performing a fieldwork project. Among the topics we may examine are: the sociology of scientific knowledge and its applications; actor-network theories of science; constructivism and the history of science; and efforts to apply science studies approaches beyond the sciences themselves.

Black Social Thought

  • Course Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
  • Department: Gender and Sexuality Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
  • Year: 2023-24
  • Term: Winter
  • W 9:30-12:20
  • KNOW 30237, MAPS 30237, CRES 22237, GNSE 30237/29237, SOCI 30339
  • Brianne Painia

This course will familiarize students with social science academic and lay intellectual theorists who speak to and about the political, economic, and gender ways of being within the African Diaspora. Most of the course will highlight the voices of Western scholars, pan-African international scholars and thought will be discussed as well.

Conspiracy Theories and the Social Sciences

  • Course Level: Undergraduate
  • Department:
  • Year: 2023-24
  • Term: Winter
  • F 9:30-10:20
  • KNOW 27654, PLSC 27654
  • Winston Berg

This course combines readings from the empirical social scientific literature on conspiracy theories with readings dealing with philosophical and conceptual questions of interest to social scientists seeking to understand those who believe them. What kinds of claims count as conspiracy theories? Are conspiracy theories, as a category, epistemically deficient or problematic in some other way? How should social scientists deal with the fact that some conspiracy theories seem true or plausible, while others seem patently ridiculous? We will also give conspiracy theorists a chance to "talk back," reading diverse texts authored by conspiracy theorists themselves, ranging from the satirical to the deadly serious. How can we take conspiracy theorists seriously without overstating the coherence of many of their arguments? And, how can we best respond to the effects of genuinely harmful or prejudicial conspiracy theories in a way that does not uncritically affirm the authority of expertise or close off the possibility of external critique? It is recommended, but not required, that students enrolling in this class have taken one or more courses in the Social Sciences Core.

Bodies, Objects, Cognition

  • Course Level: Graduate, Undergraduate
  • Department: Art History, Russian and Eastern European Studies, Anthropology
  • Year: 2023-24
  • Term: Winter
  • T/Th 3:30-4:50
  • KNOW 37032/27302, REES 37032/27302, ANTH 37032/27032, ARTH 37032/27032,
  • Bozena Shallcross

This course explores the differences between objects and embodiment as examined in varied historical periods and artistic genres. We will probe the ontological indeterminacy of embodied beings versus machines in terms of agency, autonomy, subjectivity, and artificiality. Our main operative mode is a visual-verbal comparison and its perception. Through discussions of such visual strategies as pareidolia, abstraction, bodyscape, as well as the scientific phenomena of cloning and humanoid robotics, the course will destabilize once fundamental epistemologies to present a cognitive moment when the traditionally stable object-body dichotomy is understood anew as a dynamic site of affective, biological, representational, and mechanical relations. Visual artists, writers and critics studied will include Leonardo da Vinci, Hans Holbein, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Tadeusz Borowski, Stanislaw Lem, Allan Teger, Magdalena Abakanowicz, W.T.J. Mitchell and others. All readings are in English.