Carlo Sariego

What does it mean to say the family is a political institution? This course will take up that question by examining the family as a key site where value is produced, distributed, and contested. At stake are questions of what and whom we value, including which families circulate wealth and security, which are rendered disposable or precarious, and how the reproductive practices of some populations are protected and encouraged while others are regulated, stigmatized, or denied. This seminar will introduce students to core sociological theories of race, family, and reproduction, beginning with Marx and Engels and moving through Black feminism, feminist political economy, queer and trans theory, disability studies, and contemporary debates over reproductive politics. We will examine how United States family ideals have been shaped through long histories of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, slavery, immigration control, and imperial power, and how family separation has functioned as a recurring political technology from enslavement and Native American boarding schools to contemporary practices at the United States border. We will supplement this history with sources ranging from science fiction films (Alien) and documentaries (No Más Bebés) to literature, poetry, and speculative fiction (Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild”) to explore how the political family is imagined across genres. By the end of the year, students will have a substantive grounding in key sociological debates, using the family as a lens through which to understand how power operates in intimate life and how intimate life, in turn, shapes power. Coursework will involve creating kinship maps or family trees, tracing the histories of particular families across generations or institutions, and incorporating structured personal reflection into final projects.

Why have trans bodies become central to brain imaging studies? Can facial recognition technologies identify queerness? Why do animals such as “gay penguins” attract outsized scientific and cultural attention? More broadly, how did science come to position itself as an authority on sex, gender, and sexuality, and how does that history shape our lives today? This interdisciplinary course will examine how science has defined queerness—and how queer critiques have reshaped it in return. It will trace sex and sexuality science from racialized theories of evolution and sexual dimorphism to contemporary biomedical and computational technologies that claim access to bodily truths. The course will ask how critique can be put into practice when struggles for queer survival and rights have often depended on recognition by scientific and state institutions, and whether science itself can be reworked through queer commitments. The course will combine social theory with hands-on engagement across disciplines through field trips, artistic and activist encounters, and interdisciplinary readings. Students will examine how knowledge is produced not only in laboratories and clinics, but also through art and digital media, using these sites to reflect on the stakes of scientific classification in everyday life. Throughout, we will emphasize the political construction of scientific knowledge and consider how queer inquiry might transform both science and the worlds it helps make. Conference projects may include archival research on the history of sex; ethnographic or interview-based studies; critical analyses of biomedical or computational technologies (such as medical devices or artificial intelligence); or fieldwork in museums, labs, clinics, or community organizations. Students may also design interdisciplinary projects that rethink scientific methods, classification, or public science through queer and trans critique.

What does the future of health and medicine look like, and who gets to imagine it? This course will introduce students to the social study of science, medicine, and technology by exploring how medical knowledge is produced across hospitals, laboratories, activist movements, community clinics, art spaces, and imagined futures. We will examine both medical utopias and dystopias, moments when science promises care and progress, as well as moments when it produces harm or exclusion. A key focus of the course will be how knowledge is produced not only by experts, but also by communities. We will examine alternative and grassroots health movements (from the Black Panthers and ACT UP to disability activism and feminist texts like Our Bodies, Ourselves) alongside mainstream medical institutions and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, longevity drugs, and GLP-1s. We will take seriously how medical knowledge is built and used in real-world settings, and how scientific authority influences everyday decisions about bodies, care, and risk. Students will develop practical skills in analysis, research, and writing while learning how to think across disciplines in ways that are useful for pre-med, clinical work, public-facing careers, and future study. Students will learn introductory field methods and research skills through conference work that investigates how scientific and medical knowledge circulates across different spaces, from social media and emerging reproductive technologies to protest art, public health campaigns, and community-based expertise. The course will culminate in a collaborative research project modeled on a mini academic conference, where students will present original work on how science and medicine operate in everyday life. By the end of the course, students will understand science and medicine not as neutral fields, but as social forces that can both heal and harm.