Popular Science

Catalog description

Science has often been depicted as a subject produced by experts, then transmitted to the “people.” Yet popular views have long shaped and challenged scientific concepts, methods, and notions of expertise. This course will explore the interactions between science, broadly conceived, and its diverse publics, with particular attention to moments of epistemic uncertainty and political controversy. How, we will ask, are scientific, technological, and medical publics made? How do they in turn shape the production of knowledge? We will consider how historians, science studies scholars, and cultural theorists have engaged such questions, in dialogue with scholarship about objectivity, biopolitics, and popular culture. Potential topics include visual cultures of science, medicine in the media, private enterprise and popular consumption, science in court, health activism, and more.