STS.S20 Discards, Technologies, and Everyday Ecologies
Spring 2025 | 3-0-9 Units | Tues/Thurs 11-12:30pm |Instructor: Prof. Ishani Saraf
How do we study a planet transformed by the things we make and throw away? This course will focus on both discarded things and processes of discarding to develop tools for studying relations between technology, environment, and society in our contemporary world. From going to the bathroom to encountering space junk, thinking with discards offers us an opportunity to delve into areas of our lives that are often taken for granted, unanticipated, or overlooked.
Over the semester, we will center discards as foundational to our planetary existence. Case studies will explore how discards are central to notions of identity and citizenship, how use and throw consumption becomes habit, how the global movement of discards reveals and constructs relations of power and inequality, how discarded materials present novel orientations to time and memory, and how people mobilize the material and symbolic properties of discards in artistic, scientific, and political practices.
Students will engage with different approaches, materials, media, and methods from the social sciences and humanities to explore and analyze the complex worlds and processes of which they are a part and that are a part of them. Active and engaged participation in class activities and discussions is expected.