GRAD 219C: Research on Racism in Science: Body Knowledge and Repair (2025)

Module: 3
Sponsoring Program: Graduate Division
Administrator: D'Anne Duncan

STUDY LIST INFORMATION
Course Number: GRAD 219C 
Course Name: Research on Racism in Science: Body Knowledge and Repair
Units: 3
Grading Option: S/U
Course Director: D'Anne Duncan
Co-Directors: Deren Pulley

MORE COURSE INFORMATION
Dates: May 12, 2025 - May 30, 2025
Campus: Zoom
Schedule: T/F, 11:10am-2:00pm
Minimum Class Size: 4
Maximum Class Size: 15

 

‘Body Knowledge and Repair’ is a mini-course dedicated to exploring the tension between the body as a site of scientific knowledge production, medical practice, and lived possibilities of existence. How do scientific methods of knowing the body condition our modes being in the world and encounters with otherness? Together we will approach the scientific legacies of colonialism by asking how disciplines such as immunology, microbial science, surgery, and population science contributed to the colonial political project by reinscribing racial and social hierarchies within the body itself. We will also examine the reparative ethics that scientific knowledge and medicine might offer. What kind of decolonizing work might be done through the very scientific tools, metrics, and methods that were used to craft the colonial body? Through academic writing, art, memoir, and speculative science fiction, this mini-course will contend with both the limits and possibilities of healing such wounds through the health sciences. By the end of the mini-course, students will be familiar with concepts such as embodiment, body schema, biopower, biopolitics, decolonization, and repair.

The mini-course will be designed for students in the health sciences to contend with how their own research methods and interventions condition lived realities through the body and what embodied futures might be imagined by practicing science otherwise. During the mini-course, students will work on three related reflection assignments. First, they will reflect on the biopolitical legacy of a specific metric, intervention, or procedure from their work. Next, they will reflect on how a specific metric, method, or procedure has affected their own embodied experience or their family history. Finally, they will reflect on how the body might be incorporated into their own scientific practice to disrupt existing systems of knowledge-power.