Fall 2024 Anthropology UN3811 section 001

TOXIC

Call Number 10693
Day & Time
Location
W 10:10am-12:00pm
302 ALFRED LERNE
Points 4
Grading Mode Standard
Approvals Required None
Instructor Vanessa L Agard-Jones
Type SEMINAR
Method of Instruction In-Person
Course Description It is no secret by now that we live in a toxic sea. Every day, in every place in this world, we are exposed to an unknown number of contaminants, including those in the places that we live, the air that we breathe, the foods that we eat, the water that we drink, the consumer products that we use, and in the social worlds that we navigate. While we are all exposed, the effects of these exposures are distributed in radically unequal patterns, and histories of racialization, coloniality, and gendered inequality are critical determinants of the risks to wellness that these toxic entanglements entail. Scientists use the term body burden to describe the accumulated, enduring amounts of harmful substances present in human bodies. In this course, we explore the global conditions that give rise to local body burdens, plumbing the history of toxicity as a category, the politics of toxic exposures, and the experience of toxic embodiment. Foregrounding uneven exposures and disproportionate effects, we ask how scientists and humanists, poets and political activists, have understood toxicity as a material and social phenomenon. We will turn our collective attention to the analysis of ethnographies, memoirs, maps, film, and photography, and students will also be charged with creating visual and narrative projects for representing body burden of their own.
Web Site Vergil
Department Anthropology
Enrollment 13 students (14 max) as of 9:05PM Wednesday, December 4, 2024
Subject Anthropology
Number UN3811
Section 001
Division Interschool
Note Prerequisite: Instructors permission is required vaj2116
Section key 20243ANTH3811V001