Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, April 27, 2006

Fall Courses at UC Berkeley

Here are the two courses I'll be teaching next fall at UC Berkeley. These descriptions and book lists are still preliminary, and more detailed versions will arrive later in the summer.

Rhetoric 121A: Biopunk and the Bioethical Imaginary

"Biopunk" is a fledgling genre of speculative fiction taking up many of the characteristic themes and gestures of cyberpunk literature but reinvigorating them through a focus on the emerging and ongoing pleasures and dangers of genetic science and medicine, bioinformatics, biotechnology, and biowarfare. In this course we will explore some of the provocative and unsettling connections between the wild insurgent speculation of biopunk fictions and the presumably more staid and conservative discourses of corporate futurism and bioethical policy making. How do the curious conversations, wary resistences, and imaginative interdependencies between these textual modes produce the argumentative resources available to each?

We will be reading novels like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire, as well as short stories by Octavia Butler, Paul di Filippo, Marc Steigler, William Burroughs, and Greg Bear. We will study some of the work of the Critical Arts Ensemble. We are likely to grapple with a film as well, Cronenberg's "The Fly," say, or possibly Almodovar's "All About My Mother." And we will read a number of theoretical pieces, editorials, and position papers by Annalee Newitz, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Chris Mooney, James Hughes, Michel Foucault, Eugene Thacker, Arthur Caplan, and others.

Rhetoric 132: Design for Living: Artifice and Agency

We find ourselves in a world we make, and we find that we are made and unmade in the making of it. What are we to make of the abiding artifice that is "the political" in a world of design-objects, of manufactured products, of consumer goods? What are we doing when we are doing design and what do we do when we discern that design has designs on us? Where is the agency in artifice? What are the political possibilities of design?

We will take selections from Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway as points of departure from which we will go on to read design-objects as texts as construed by Roland Barthes, Kobena Mercer, Carol Adams, Daniel Harris, and others. Finally, we will grapple with the politics of some contemporary design movements -- peer-to-peer coding, Green Design -- that would undertake to remake the world in the image of particular ends, like collaborative democracy or sustainability.

Our texts are likely to include selections from:

Carol Adams, The Pornography of Meat
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Janine Benyus, Biomimicry
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter
Michel Foucault, "Two Lectures," Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, I
Donna Haraway, Simians Cyborgs and Women
Daniel Harris, The Aesthetics of Consumerism
Lawrence Lessig, Code, Free Culture
William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle
Bruce Sterling, Tomorrow Now, Shaping Things
Film: V for Vendetta

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