University Scholars & Global Scholars

Instructor: Nathan Wood, Associate Professor, History
4–6:30 p.m. Thursdays, Nunemaker 102

Humans have long used tools and machines to alter the way we work and move, but beginning about two and half centuries ago, our relationship to technology fundamentally shifted as we began to rely less on natural and animate sources of power and grew increasingly dependent on industrial machines.

This course will explore our complicated relationship with modern technology, which can at times seem to control us, even though we are its creators. We will explore some “charismatic” technologies such as the railway, automobiles, and airplanes, alongside more humble, but no less significant technologies such as the clock, the bicycle, the washing machine, the Haber-Bosch process, birth control, and corrugated steel. We will examine narratives of technological progress and futurism, while paying attention not only to the moment of introduction when hyperbole abounds, but also to technology as it is actually used, which can undercut the predominance of powerful white men and wealthy countries in the story of technology. Throughout, we will reflect on the ways that wealth and social class, race, gender, and age shape access to and use of technologies.

The course employs a historical approach to help students to think about patterns in our relationship to technology, so that we might be more mindful as we use technology now and design the technologies of the future. For their final projects, students will choose a technology, conduct historical research on its introduction, apply course themes to interpreting its use, and speculate on future developments and uses.

Instructor: Marike Janzen, Associate Professor, Department of Slavic, German, & Eurasian Studies
5–7:30 p.m. Tuesdays, Nunemaker 102

According to the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), the number of forcibly displaced people across the world currently numbers 89.3 million. The transition from lawful resident of a particular nation to refugee is a traumatic one, not least due to refugees’ loss of access to rights that are guaranteed to citizens of states. Depending on location, these include rights to safe housing, healthcare, education, and due process under the law. Refugees and citizens are human beings, but citizens are able to exercise their human-ness in ways that refugees cannot.

In this course, we will explore the diverging experiences of citizenship and refugee-dom, and examine how each shapes our understanding of what it means to be human. Our study will focus on cultural and political texts responding to crises in which the category of the refugee was codified in international law. These include the post-World War I period, World War II and its aftermath, and the steady increase of displaced persons in the past ten years due to (the often-interrelated phenomena) of war and climate change.