Adjustment Dis-order: Social Science, the State, and Culture in 20th-Century America

Catalog description

What do the social sciences claim to tell us about “us?” This course examines the history and politics of social scientific knowledge in the United States. We consider the emergence and deployment of ideas such as objectivity, rationality/rationalization, control, therapeutics, and privacy. What is the relationship between social science and social order? How has what is understood as “normal” served as description, prescription, and a locus of power? What role have the social sciences played in defining the ideal life in America? This course uses approaches from the disciplines of history, science and technology studies, and gender and sexuality studies to critically examine and interrogate the construction and maintenance of intersecting hierarchies of gender, class, and race, paying particular attention to their basis in material socioeconomic relations, reification in state authority, and their reflection in various forms of cultural production.