KNOW courses are offered by the faculty of the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at both the graduate and the advanced undergraduate levels.
For graduate students, we offer a number of cross-listed seminars as well as an annual core sequence in topics in the formation of knowledge (KNOW 401, 402, 403). These seminars are team-taught by faculty from different departments or schools and are open to all graduate students regardless of field of study. Graduate students who enroll in two quarters of this sequence are eligible to apply for the Dissertation Research Fellowships.
For undergraduate students, we offer courses cross-listed in departments and schools across the University, as well as unique courses taught by the Institute's Postdoctoral Scholars. To browse courses, search by department, quarter, academic year, or type in a keyword that interests you. In addition, the Institute launched the Experimental Capstone (XCAP) in 2018-19, team-taught courses for fourth-year undergraduate students interested in building upon their UChicago educational experience by adding practice, impact, and influence as important dimensions of their undergraduate work.
"The IFK was not something I discovered until my fourth year in the College, and I still wish I had engaged with it sooner. The IFK granted me the opportunity to explore social-scientific questions on how new technology impacts what we know, how we know, and the limitations to access to knowledge. The course I took at the IFK gave me the freedom to explore these questions in more depth than has been allowed in other courses I have taken during my undergraduate experience. The courses of study provided by the IFK are unable to be found in any single other major, and brings together students from across disciplines and programs to engage in unique discussion."
-- Undergraduate student, History and Sociology double major, Fourth Year
"Explorations of Mars provided me the rare opportunity to engage with students of different majors and with Mars-related pieces published across a wide range of disciplines. In our seminars and assignments, Professor Bimm challenged us to think through complex societal questions whose answers benefitted from each student's unique perspective. We were also empowered to equally utilize critical thinking, creativity, and imagination as analytical tools and to steer the discussion towards our own emerging concerns. Overall, this class provided an intellectual environment I've encountered nowhere else at UChicago: one that valued each student's voice, that immersed us in contemporary space issues, and that thrived on the multidisciplinary approaches central to IFK's mission."
MENTORING: "I have brought undergraduate and graduate students into my research projects. They learn about sociological research methods and have the opportunity to contribute to ongoing studies that investigate the politics of biomedical knowledge production. In the College Summer Institute (2023) I trained three undergraduate students in sociological methods, and they contributed to data collection and analysis for two projects. All three of these students stayed on to work as Quad Scholars in the 23-24 year." Dr. Melanie Jeske, 2022-24 IFK Postdoctoral Researcher at the Rank of Instructor
Truth, Half-Truth, and Post-Truth
This course examines the philosophical and ethical issues surrounding lying, truth-telling, and everything in between. Students will put classics of the Indian and Western philosophical traditions into conversation with contemporary analyses of “alternative facts” and postmodern criticisms of absolute truth. Questions to be considered include: Are half-truths just another kind of lie, or stepping-stones to a more complex understanding? Is it even possible to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”? Is it morally permissible to mislead someone for their own good, or for a leader to deceive their citizens? How can we act responsibly when there are two sides to every story?
Being Human
What does it mean to be a human being – a person who fulfills individual capabilities and also contributes to a community’s well-being? What connects the individual and community to an ultimate vision, spirituality, or God? These questions and investigations can be described as an examination of and argument for constructing a theological anthropology. When one thinks intentionally about the being of a human and that human’s ties to some concern or force greater than the limited self, then transcendence and materiality involve themselves in a complex dynamic. How does one construct an individual and a community of individuals? We investigate different models of being human and engage other disciplines to help unpack “being human.” We expand texts from folktales to theory. Course Note: Undergraduates may petition to enroll.
Islam, Race, and Decoloniality
This course explores the historical and discursive practices through which the racialization of Muslims and Islamic cultures developed and remains sustained within colonial and neo-colonial contexts, modalities and relations. Particular attention to the “threat of Islam” is examined in various literary, media and ethnographic narratives. This course examines how race is constituted within contemporary imperialist practices, specifically the global war on terror’s focus on constructing Islam and Muslim cultures as uncivilized, inferior, and oppressive. Using a de-colonial framework, the course will engage the politics of pluralism, multivocality and resistance.
Magic and Divination in the Islamic World
From weather forecasts to stock market speculations, our modern world is saturated with predictions for the future. In spite of this, other divinatory methods such as astrology are often portrayed as superstitious, irrational, or unreligious. This course will introduce students to the unexpected interaction of science, magic, and religion through the exploration of divination in the Islamic world. We will ask how divination can be a part of religious practice and how methods of future-telling are said to “work” from the perspective of the philosophers and scientists who practiced them. We will also explore the arguments against divination and identify and understand religious and/or scientific objections to the practice. All readings will be in English translation.
Contagion: Ethics and the Other
This is a graduate seminar which explores the complex ways that epidemic disease has shaped and been shaped by religion, philosophy, literature, and the emerging sciences of modernity. Contagion has long been a central moral problem in theology and philosophy, the organizing terror of all human civilization because of the sudden, stochastic, and terrifying spread of visible, embodied changes. Contagion is our most intimate companion: Plague as punishment, as test, and as a sign of divine judgement have long been a topic of sacred texts, defining how societies thought about, duties, telos, meaning, and salvation. Contagious diseases raise stark ethical choices as well. The uses of quarantine as a defense, the establishment of isolation, and the fear of the stranger mark the historical responses to plagues. In this course, we will consider both the science behind the plagues that have torn across the course of human history, and the sacred and secular textual responses to them. Plagues leave behind cultural artifacts and traces of the puzzle of human behavior in response to epidemics: compliance, resistance imagination, and innovation. We will explore this theme in all its complexity, focusing on the textual and literary responses to the challenge of contagion.
Contemporary Theories of Religion
This course will explore developments in the study of religion from the Marburg Declaration of 1960 to the present. Participants will attend to the recent history of the field, intellectually and institutionally; to the analysis of select theoretical developments in this period, their prospects, accomplishments, and challenges; to the relationships between the History of Religions and work on religion in related fields of study (e.g., anthropology, sociology, history); and to the social location(s) of the study of religion in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. PQ: HREL 32900 / AASR 32900 "Classical Theories of Religion". Course Note: Undergraduates may petition to enroll.
Climate Justice
Climate injustice includes the disproportionate effects of climate change on people who benefit little from the activities that cause it, generally the poor, people of color, and people marginalized in other ways. Given the complex economic, physical, social, and political realities of climate change, what might climate justice entail? This course explores this complex question through an examination of classical and contemporary theories of justice; the gendered, colonial, and racial dimensions of climate change; and climate justice movements.
Histories of Women in Science
In the mid-1980s, only two female students drew women when asked what a scientist looked like and none of the male students in the study did. Only 8% of STEM workers in 1970 were women; in 2019 that number was still only 27%. This would seem to suggest that the history of women in science is a recent one. Yet historians of science have foregrounded women’s involvement in fields ranging from early modern medicine to twentieth century astrophysics. This class introduces students to these histories, investigates how and why science came to be a gendered as male, and asks to what extent gendered values continue to inform modern conceptions scientific achievement or value. In so doing, this course also introduces students to feminist science studies and challenges students to reflect upon their own (gendered) experiences of science. Students are strongly encouraged to develop final research projects that draw upon their own interests, scientific expertise, and linguistic competencies.
No prior experience with history is required for this course, although an enthusiasm for history is advised.
Introduction to Philosophy of Science
We will begin by trying to explicate the manner in which science is a rational response to observational facts. This will involve a discussion of inductivism, Popper's deductivism, Lakatos and Kuhn. After this, we will briefly survey some other important topics in the philosophy of science, including underdetermination, theories of evidence, Bayesianism, the problem of induction, explanation, and laws of nature. (B) (II)
Anthropology of Food and Cuisine
Eating is a physiological precondition for the reproduction of human life. Yet while human beings
are omnivores in biological terms, human food intake is neither random, nor based on genetically
encoded taste preferences. Rather, contemporary patterns of food recognition, procurement,
preparation, and consumption are highly differentiated in cultural and social terms, and have long
and complicated histories. It is not just that local and regional cuisines exhibit historically and
culturally contingent preferences for certain foods and food preparations but also that the foods
people consume within a single society can come to symbolize both powerful senses of allegiance
and deep social divisions. Similarly, patterns of food-sharing (or its avoidance) have long
characterized the ways in which people conceptualize, inhabit, express, and delimit their ethnic,
religious, political or even gender identities. What is more, certain foods (e.g. sugar, potatoes, corn,
cocoa, coffee, codfish, or beef) have played a decisive role in processes of European expansion
overseas, the establishment of colonial regimes, and the emergence of what is sometimes called the
“modern capitalist world system”. Since the 19th century, the mechanization of agriculture, new
techniques of conservation and conveyance, and industrial food preparation have, not only driven
processes of global commerce and capital accumulation – and social dislocation; such dynamics
have also significantly impacted the way the world eats today.
Anthropologists have long given attention to human foodways – but up until quite recently,
they have done so in an unsystematic, haphazard fashion. Food has figured prominently in theories
of gift exchange, religious sacrifice, classificatory systems, the analysis of social structure and
symbolic systems, but also political economy, cultural ecology, and applied work in famine-
modeling, food security, and medical anthropology. More recently, food and eating have become the
focus of an anthropology of the body, and have come to figure in attempts to theorize sensuality and
the politics of pleasure and suffering. This course will explore several such themes with a view
towards both the micro- and macro-politics of food. For what historical reason are people eating
what they eat today? What kinds of historical and present power relations underwrite contemporary
dietary patterns in different parts of the world? How does food come to express our identities? Why
are some people starving in the midst of global plenty, and why are others perceiving obesity as a
threat to their collective health? What relations exist between food, race, and gender? And why are
patterns of food-intake (similar to patterns of sexual behavior) so strongly and pervasively tied to
ideas about morality?
By examining a range of case studies and theoretical texts, this course aims to provide the
students not so much with specific answers to such questions than with an ethnographic, historical,
and theoretical basis for an informed and engaged discussion of them. The course takes the format of
a seminar augmented by lectures (during the first few weeks), scheduled video screenings, and
individual student presentations during the rest of the course.