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Technologies of Enchantment—A mid-level undergraduate lecture on the anthropological study of traps, artworks, interfaces, and other technologies designed to have psychological effects. Students design and analyze a trap of their own and collect a research dossier organized around a particular technique of their choosing.
I taught an earlier iteration of this course, focused on reading research methods, as Trap Theory in Spring 2023.
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How to Pay Attention—An advanced undergraduate seminar examining attention as a social and cultural phenomenon.
I’ve run this in a variety of configurations, usually drawing together a bunch of interdisciplinary writing about attention and including weekly exercises (like counting the distractions they encounter while reading or going for a walk and attending to their gait) for students to practice outside of class. The version of the syllabus that’s spread the most online is the one from Spring 2018, which I wrote about for Somatosphere.
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Cultures of Computing—A mid-level survey course covering work on the social and cultural aspects of computers, from histories of calculation to internet infrastructure to algorithmic personalization.
You can see a syllabus from the first iteration, in Fall 2016; more recent semesters have been built out in Canvas in a way that makes them hard to share online. Recently, I’ve organized this course into four broad units: the history of computers and the internet; the materiality of computing; work and play; and the rise of algorithmic profiling.
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History of Anthropological Thought—This is a course intended for anthropology majors at Tufts, who usually take it in their junior or senior year, which introduces them to the canonical history of the field and some critiques of it. My version of it is not especially groundbreaking, but you can see how I taught it in Fall 2020.
I usually require four short essay assignments: the first involves reading a snippy exchange of letters between Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and Robert Lowie and appraising them in historicist and presentist terms; the second asks students to adapt mid-century anthropological critiques of new computational methods to contemporary big data techniques for making sense of cultural phenomena; the third has them choose a common figure in social theoretical writing (like trees, blood, or water) and analyze how authors have used it over the course of the semester; the fourth asks them to read a recent piece of ethnographic writing and to locate it in the history we’ve learned over the course of the semester.
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Introduction to the Anthropology of Science and Technology—An introductory survey of STS and the anthropological study of science and technology. This is a pretty typical, wide-ranging survey that covers things like boundary work and pseudoscience, techniques of the body, mechanical objectivity, and classification.
You can read a version of the syllabus from Fall 2020; more recent semesters have been built out on Canvas in a way that makes them hard to share online.