Course Schedule and Catalog

Long Title: THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF TOXICITY: RETHINKING HEALTH AND SOVEREIGNTY

Department: Anthropology

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Language of Instruction: Taught in English

Course Type: Seminar

Credit Hours: 3

Description: Through ethnographic, scientific, and personal accounts of toxicity in a range of sites—from warzones to office buildings—this course explores toxicity as an analytic that helps us think critically about health and sovereignty. We explore the way that colonial geographies imprint geographies of toxicity and the ways that capitalism and consumption produce and distribute toxicity. In relation to health, we explore the ways that the materiality and biology of toxic exposure are embodied in specific ways that undermine singular or universalizable concepts and measures of human and environmental health and require us to think about the health in relation to the specificities of race, class, gender, disability, and intimacy in particular places and times. In relation to sovereignty, we explore the ways that the promiscuous movement of toxicants provokes but also eludes regulations that hew to the ridged boundaries of law and territory and raise new questions of accountability and evidence. Graduate/Undergraduate Equivalency: ANTH 393. Mutually Exclusive: Cannot register for ANTH 593 if student has credit for ANTH 393.