Black/Life/Science

What is the relationship of the production of scientific knowledge to Black life in the Americas? What can thinking that arises out of the intellectual traditions of Black Studies contribute to our understandings of the many genres of science (social, physical, earth, life) and their relationship to justice? Building from these essential questions, this course offers a framework for considering the ways that canonical sciences have constrained, categorized, and delimited Black lives, exploring such themes as: technoscientific constructions of race difference, epigenetic theories about the heritability of trauma, histories of biomedical experimentation, the long durée of eugenicist thinking, and the relationship of racialized (and gendered) bodies to their environments. We will also explore scientific scripts emergent from “below,” like: folk healing, speculative fictions, and Black nationalist origin stories, that have and continue to be sources of imaginative and emancipatory promise. In addition to developing the capacity to read widely across genres of science and critical studies thereof, students will develop skills in the deconstruction and speculative refiguring of scientific discourse.