Biology & Society (BSOC)

BSOC 1180 - Biology and Society First Year Seminar (1 Credit)  
This course is for first-year students entering or planning to enter the Biology and Society major in either the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) or College of Arts & Sciences. This course will facilitate your transition to college life, developing your academic identity, and making your time at Cornell a meaningful experience. You will develop a learning community, identify your support network, and explore what Cornell offers to you as a first-year student. We will work with you to develop skills for balancing academic success with extracurricular and interpersonal activities during your time in the major.
BSOC 2051 - Ethical Issues in Health and Medicine (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with STS 2051  
In the rapidly changing world of healthcare, complex ethical issues arise from interpersonal interactions between patients and clinicians to broad controversies that propel medicine into headline news. This course will examine ethical challenges in contemporary medicine, healthcare, and biomedical research from the bedside to health policy. Using case-vignettes, news stories, narratives, and readings from the healthcare, ethics, and social science literature we will examine issues from multiple vantage points. A range of topics will be explored including the patient-clinician relationship, heath care decision-making, issues at the beginning and end-of-life, technological advances, human experimentation, healthcare systems, and distributive justice. The course will also examine the fluidity of normative ethical boundaries, and how context and point of reference influence our perceptions of and approach to ethical issues.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, ETH-AG, KCM-AG), (ETM-AS, SCD-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
BSOC 2061 - Ethics and the Environment (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with STS 2061, PHIL 2960  
Politicians, scientists, and citizens worldwide face many environmental issues today, but they are neither simple nor straightforward. Moreover, there are many ways to understand how we have, do, and could value the environment from animal rights and wise use to deep ecology and ecofeminism. This class acquaints students with some of the challenging moral issues that arise in the context of environmental management and policy-making, both in the past and the present. Environmental concerns also highlight important economic, epistemological, legal, political, and social issues in assessing our moral obligations to nature as well as other humans. This course examines various perspectives expressed in both contemporary and historical debates over environmental ethics by exploring four central questions: What is nature? Who counts in environmental ethics? How do we know nature? Whose nature?
Distribution Requirements: (ETH-AG, KCM-AG, SBA-AG), (ETM-AS, SSC-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
BSOC 2071 - Introduction to the History of Medicine (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with STS 2071, HIST 2710  
This course offers an introductory survey of the history of medicine (principally in Europe and the United States) from classical antiquity to the early twentieth century. Using a combination of both primary and secondary sources, students will learn about the Hippocratic Heritage of contemporary western medicine; medicine in late antiquity; faith and healing in the medieval period; medicine and knowledge in the Islamic world; medicine during the Renaissance (particularly the rise of the mechanical philosophy); medicine in the age of Enlightenment; professionalization, women-doctors and midwives, and battles over 'quackery' in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the role of medicine in colonialism and empire; and the promises and perils of modern medicine (dramatic decreases in mortality on the one hand, the rise of Eugenics and the importance of Medicine to the National Socialist State on the other). As well as this temporal survey, we will consider a number of ongoing themes: race, bodily difference, and medicine; medicine and the environment; women, gender, and medicine; the history of the body; the history of sexuality; and the close connections between forms of social order and forms of medical knowledge. The course meets three times a week (for two lectures and a section) and is open to all.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021  
BSOC 2101 - Plagues and People (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ENTOM 2100  
Human diseases have affected human lives and society through history. This course focuses on the pathogens, parasites, and arthropods causing human plagues through multiple perspectives (biomedical, social, ethical, cultural). Those plagues that have had the greatest impact on human culture and expression are emphasized. Lectures are supplemented with readings and videos . Also addresses emerging diseases, bioterrorism, and future plagues.
Distribution Requirements: (BSC-AG, ETH-AG, OPHLS-AG), (SCT-IL)  
Exploratory Studies: (AFAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2021, Fall 2019, Fall 2017  
Learning Outcomes:
  • 1.1 able to explain the biology, transmission and factors that lead to disease outbreaks based on investigation of in-depth examples from the class. 1.2. aware of the sources that report emerging infectious diseases and how the media can influence public perception of diseases. 1.3. able to explain the historical impact of some key infectious diseases. 1.4. know some of the key people who have contributed to or impacted historical disease outbreaks (e.g. Typhoid Mary). 1.5. able to describe how bioterror agents are categorized and some pathogens and/or parasites that may cause future epidemics.
  • 2.1. able to describe key factors (e.g. reassortment, mutation, host shifting) that can lead to the emergence of a new pathogen or parasite. 2.2. able to provide specific examples of how pathogens have cause major outbreaks (pandemic flu, SARS).
  • 3.1. able to discuss the ways some arthropod-borne infections have impacted human health in the past, present and future. 3.2. able to explain to others (those not knowledgeable about the topic) the impacts of arthropods on human health.
  • 4.1 able to objectively understand and articulate the facts and fears surrounding disease outbreaks. 4.2 able to engage in informed debate about issues related to disease outbreaks.
  
BSOC 2131 - Science Fiction (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with COML 2035, STS 2131, ENGL 2035  
Science fiction is not merely a literary genre but a whole way of being, thinking, and acting in the modern world. This course explores classic and contemporary science fiction from Frankenstein to The Hunger Games alongside a rich array of fiction and films from Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America. Our discussions will position these works vis-?is seminal thinkers, ranging from Plato to Descartes and Donna Haraway to Paul Crutzen, who ask the same questions as science fiction does about our selves, our world, and our future.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: undergraduates.  
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS), (CA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2022, Fall 2020, Fall 2019  
BSOC 2201 - Society and Natural Resources (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with NTRES 2201, GDEV 2201  
The actions of people are crucial to environmental well-being. This course addresses the interrelationships between social phenomena and the natural (i.e., biophysical) environment. It is intended to (1) increase student awareness of these interconnections in their everyday lives; (2) introduce students to a variety of social science perspectives, including sociology, economics, psychology, and political science, that help us make sense of these connections; (3) identify the contributions of each of these perspectives to our understanding of environmental problems; and (4) discuss how natural resource management and environmental policy reflect these perspectives.
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-SBY); (AFAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
Learning Outcomes:
  • Identify the theories and approaches that social scientists use and apply to environmental issues.
  • Articulate and explain the interconnections between social phenomena and the environment in everyday life, with a strong campus-community focus.
  • Apply methods and theories from the social sciences, including sociology, economics, psychology, and political science, that help us recognize and make sense of these connections.
  • Identify the contributions of each of these perspectives to our understanding of environmental problems.
  • Identify how natural resource management and environmental policy reflect these perspectives.
  
BSOC 2211 - Early Agriculture (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ANTHR 2201, ARKEO 2201  
Throughout most of the human career, people survived by hunting and gathering wild foods. The advent of food production is one of the most profound changes in history and prehistory. This course examines the current evidence for the appearance and spread of agriculture - plant and animal domestication - around the world. We will consider definitions of agriculture and domestication, the conditions under which it arises, the consequences for those who adopt it, and why it has spread over most of the world.
Distribution Requirements: (AFS-AG, CA-AG, HA-AG), (GLC-AS, HST-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2021, Spring 2020, Spring 2019  
BSOC 2245 - Health and Disease in the Ancient World (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ANTHR 2245, ARKEO 2245, SHUM 2245  
The history of humankind is also a history of health and disease; the rise of agricultural societies, ancient cities, and colonial empires had wide-ranging effects on diet and nutrition, the spread of infectious diseases, and occurrence of other health conditions. This history has also been shaped by complex interactions between environment, technology, and society. Using archaeological, environmental, textual, and skeletal evidence, we will survey major epidemiological transitions from the Paleolithic to the age of European conquest. We will also examine diverse cultural experiences of health, illness, and the body. How do medical practices from pre-modern societies, such as the medieval Islamic world and the Inca Empire, challenge dominant narratives of scientific development? The implications of past health patterns for modern-day communities will also be explored.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2021, Fall 2019, Fall 2018  
BSOC 2350 - Literature and Medicine (3 Credits)  
How does literary language depict the experience of physical suffering? Can a poem or a novel palliate pain, illness, even the possibility of death? From darkly comic narratives of black plague to the rise and fall of hysteria to depictions of the AIDS crisis, this course examines literature centered on medical practices from the early modern period through the twentieth century. Why have medical practices changed, and how do writers address their political, social, and ideological implications? Readings will include a broad range of genres, including poetry (Dickinson, Whitman, Keats), fiction (McEwan, Chekhov, Gilman, Kafka, Camus), theater (Kushner), nonfiction prose (Woolf, Freud), and critical theory (Foucault, Scarry, Canguilhem, Sontag).
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS), (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2021, Spring 2019  
BSOC 2420 - Nature-Culture: Ethnographic Approaches to Human Environment Relations (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ANTHR 2420, AIIS 2420  
One of the most pressing questions of our time is how we should understand the relationship between nature, or the environment, and culture, or society, and whether these should be viewed as separate domains at all. How one answers this question has important implications for how we go about thinking and acting in such diverse social arenas as environmental politics, development, and indigenous-state relations. This course serves as an introduction to the various ways anthropologists and other scholars have conceptualized the relationship between humans and the environment and considers the material and political consequences that flow from these conceptualizations.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, D-AG, SCH-AG), (GLC-AS, SCD-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021, Fall 2020  
BSOC 2468 - Medicine, Culture, and Society (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ANTHR 2468, STS 2468, FGSS 2468  
Medicine has become the language and practice through which we address a broad range of both individual and societal complaints. Interest in this medicalization of life may be one of the reasons that medical anthropology is currently the fastest-growing subfield in anthropology. This course encourages students to examine concepts of disease, suffering, health, and well-being in their immediate experience and beyond. In the process, students will gain a working knowledge of ecological, critical, phenomenological, and applied approaches used by medical anthropologists. We will investigate what is involved in becoming a doctor, the sociality of medicines, controversies over new medical technologies, and the politics of medical knowledge. The universality of biomedicine, or hospital medicine, will not be taken for granted, but rather we will examine the plurality generated by the various political, economic, social, and ethical demands under which biomedicine has developed in different places and at different times. In addition, biomedical healing and expertise will be viewed in relation to other kinds of healing and expertise. Our readings will address medicine in North America as well as other parts of the world. In class, our discussions will return regularly to consider the broad diversity of kinds of medicine throughout the world, as well as the specific historical and local contexts of biomedicine.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, D-AG), (GLC-AS, SCD-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
BSOC 2561 - Medicine and Healing in China (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with HIST 2562, ASIAN 2262, CAPS 2262, STS 2561  
An exploration of processes of change in health care practices in China. Focuses on key transitions, such as the emergence of canonical medicine, of Daoist approaches to healing and longevity, of scholar physicians, and of traditional Chinese medicine in modern China. Inquries into the development of healing practices in relation to both popular and specialist views of the body and disease; health care as organized by individuals, families, communities, and states; the transmission of medical knowledge; and healer-patient relations. Course readings include primary texts in translation as well as secondary materials.
Distribution Requirements: (ALC-AS, HST-AS), (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2020  
BSOC 2581 - Environmental History (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with HIST 2581, AMST 2581  
This lecture course serves as an introduction to the historical study of humanity's interrelationship with the natural world. Environmental history is a quickly evolving field, taking on increasing importance as the environment itself becomes increasingly important in world affairs. During this semester, we'll examine the sometimes unexpected ways in which natural forces have shaped human history (the role of germs, for instance, in the colonization of North America); the ways in which human beings have shaped the natural world (through agriculture, urbanization, and industrialization, as well as the formation of things like wildlife preserves); and the ways in which cultural, scientific, political, and philosophical attitudes toward the environment have changed over time. This is designed as an intensely interdisciplinary course: we'll view history through the lenses of ecology, literature, art, film, law, anthropology, and geography. Our focus will be on the United States, but, just as environmental pollutants cross borders, so too will this class, especially toward the end, when we attempt to put U.S. environmental history into a geopolitical context. This course is meant to be open to all, including non-majors and first-year students.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG, SCH-AG), (HST-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
BSOC 2599 - Medicine, Magic and Science in the Ancient Near East (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with NES 2599, JWST 2599, RELST 2599  
This course explores the history of medicine and other sciences in the ancient Near East, broadly defined. In addition to medicine, the other scientific disciplines covered in this course include mathematics, astrology, astronomy, alchemy, zoology, among others. Geographically, the course traces the transmission of scientific knowledge in ancient Babylonia, Iran, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, and beyond. As such, the course offers students a tour of different ancient civilizations and corpora. Students read selections from cuneiform Akkadian tablets, Egyptian Christian Coptic spellbooks, rabbinic sources such as the Talmud, among many other works. At the same time, students will be required to critically engage recent scholarship in the history of science and medicine as a way to help frame their analyses of the ancient materials. The course interrogates how ancient civilizations transmitted and received scientific knowledge, as well as the relationship between what we today tend to call science, medicine, magic, and religion. This course is intended not only for students in the Humanities and Social Sciences, but also for those majoring in science or medicine.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-ITL)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Fall 2021  
BSOC 2640 - Introduction to Ancient Medicine (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with CLASS 2640, ARKEO 2640  
An introduction to the origins and development of Western medicine in ancient Greece and Rome. We will read a variety of sources on the ancient theory and practice of medicine, including pre-Hippocratic works, the Hippocratic corpus, and the prolific and opinionated Galen. These texts will be complemented by secondary sources which will put them in scientific and social context, as well as by visual and material evidence. Questions to be considered will include the treatment of women, the relationship between medicine and magic, the evolving state of the arts of anatomy and physiology, and rival schools of thought about the right way to acquire medical knowledge.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2016, Spring 2014, Spring 2013  
BSOC 3011 - Life Sciences and Society (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with STS 3011  
Biology and biotechnology are major influences on modern life. In addition, socio-political and historical conditions have shaped biological research and its applications in medicine, agriculture, environmental science, etc. Life science research is itself a social process involving complex human dynamics, different kinds of work and an array of social and natural systems. The course aims to introduce students to critical science and technology studies (S&TS) perspectives on the knowledge and practices of life sciences. The course is designed to prepare students for more advanced courses in the Biology & Society and S&TS majors, but students who do not plan to take further courses in those subjects can get critical insight into biology's profound role in both science and society.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: seniors, juniors, and sophomores.  
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, SBA-AG), (SCT-IL), (SSC-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Fall 2021  
BSOC 3111 - Social Studies of Medicine (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with STS 3111, SOC 3130, GDEV 3111  
This course provides an introduction to the ways in which medical practice, the medical profession, and medical technology are embedded in society and culture. We will ask how medicine is connected to various sociocultural factors such as gender, social class, race, and administrative cultures. We will examine the rise of medical sociology as a discipline, the professionalization of medicine, and processes of medicalization and demedicalization. We will look at alternative medical practices and how they differ from and converge with the dominant medical paradigm. We will focus on the rise of medical technology in clinical practice with a special emphases on reproductive technologies. We will focus on the body as a site for medical knowledge, including the medicalization of sex differences, the effect of culture on nutrition, and eating disorders such as obesity and anorexia nervosa. We will also read various classic and contemporary texts that speak to the illness experience and the culture of surgeons, hospitals, and patients, and we will discuss various case studies in the social construction of physical and mental illness.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: seniors, juniors, and sophomores.  
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, SBA-AG), (SCT-IL), (SSC-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2019  
BSOC 3181 - Living in an Uncertain World: Science, Technology, and Risk (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with STS 3181, HIST 3181, AMST 3185  
This course explores the history, sociology, and ethics of risk. In particular, we will focus on the complex and often ambiguous relationship between science, technology, and risk. A historical perspective shows how science and technology have generated risks while they have also played key roles in managing and solving those very risks. By examining several case studies, including 19th-century mining, the 1911 Triangle fire, nuclear science, the space shuttle disasters, asbestos litigation, Hurricane Katrina, and the contemporary financial crisis, we will consider how risk and ideas about risk have changed over time. By exploring different historical and cultural responses to risk, we will examine the sociopolitical dimensions of the definitions, perceptions, and management of risk both in the past and the present.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG), (HST-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2022, Spring 2021, Spring 2020, Spring 2018  
BSOC 3230 - Humans and Animals (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ANTHR 3230, ARKEO 3230, SHUM 3230  
Human-animal relationships are often seen in utilitarian, nutritional terms, particularly in archaeology. But animals and meat have significance far beyond their economic value. This course focuses on a broad range of these non-dietary roles of animals in human societies, past and present. This includes the fundamental shift in human-animal relations associated with domestication; the varied meanings of wild and domestic animals; as well as the importance of animals as wealth, as objects of sacrifice, as totems or metaphors for humans, and as symbols in art. Meat can be used in feasting and meat sharing to create, cement, and manipulate social relationships. This course is open to students of archaeology, cultural anthropology, and other disciplines with an interest in human-animal relations.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG), (GLC-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2021, Spring 2018, Spring 2016  
BSOC 3231 - Global Health Security and Diplomacy (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with STS 3231  
Exploratory Studies: (EAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2019, Fall 2018  
BSOC 3235 - Bioarchaeology (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ANTHR 3235, ARKEO 3235  
Bioarchaeology is the study of human remains from archaeological sites. Like forensic scientists at the scene of the crime, bioarchaeologists search for clues embedded in human bone and mummified tissues to reconstruct how ancient peoples lived and died. As a dynamic living system, the human skeleton responds not only to hormones that govern human development but also to physiological stress brought on by disease, malnutrition, and trauma. The human body is also an artifact molded by cultural understandings of gender, prestige, self-expression, and violence. In this course, students will learn the scientific techniques for estimating skeletal age and sex, diagnosing pathology, and reconstructing diet and migration patterns. This course emphasizes the critical integration of biological and cultural evidence for understanding past individuals and societies.
Distribution Requirements: (BIO-AS, SSC-AS), (OPHLS-AG, SBA-AG)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022  
BSOC 3311 - Environmental Governance (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with NTRES 3311, STS 3311, GDEV 3311  
Environmental governance is defined as the assemblage of institutions that regulate society-nature interactions and shape environmental outcomes across a range of spatial and temporal scales. Institutions, broadly defined, are mechanisms of social coordination including laws (formal) and social norms (informal) that guide the behavior of individuals. Participants in the course will explore the roles of governments, markets, and collective action in environmental management and mismanagement. We will emphasize interactions among leading environmental policy strategies: public regulation, market-based incentives, and community-based resource management. The course is focused around a set of analytic perspectives. These theoretical frameworks allow us to synthesize empirical observations and material changes in ways that inform our understanding of contemporary evolution of environmental policy and management.
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-AG, SCH-AG), (SSC-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
Learning Outcomes:
  • Students will gain familiarity with the concepts, theories, and applications of institutional analysis applied to environment.
  • Students will develop critical awareness of the strengths and weakness of states, markets, and collective structures as resources for social regulation.
  • Students will develop an historical appreciation of environmental policy in order to reflect critically on contemporary status and trends.
  • Students will develop an interdisciplinary understanding of environmental policy through exploration of economic, sociological, and political scientific perspectives.
  • Students will be exposed to a broad range of environmental problems and policy and management responses. Coverage includes national and international cases, and analyses at multiple scales.
  • Students will develop capacity to conduct institutional analysis including the specification of a research question, policy research, synthesis, and communication.
  • Students will build generic competencies including reading of scientific and popular texts, writing, oral communication, group work, and critical analysis.
  
BSOC 3390 - Primate Behavior and Ecology with Emphasis on African Apes (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ANTHR 3390  
The course will investigate all aspects of non-human primate life. Based on the fundamentals of evolutionary theory, group and inter-individual behaviors will be presented. In addition, an understanding of group structure and breeding systems will be reached through an evaluation of ecological constraints imposed on primates in different habitats. Subjects include: primate taxonomy, diet and foraging, predation, cooperation and competition, social ontogeny, kinship, and mating strategies.
Distribution Requirements: (BIO-AS), (OPHLS-AG), (SCT-IL)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021  
BSOC 3441 - Insect Conservation Biology (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ENTOM 3440  
In-depth look at the concepts and issues surrounding the conservation of insects and other invertebrates. Topics include sampling rare populations; insect conservation genetics; the role of phylogeny in determining conservation priorities; refuge design; saving individual species; plus the unique political, social, and ethical aspects of insect conservation and preservation of their ecological services (i.e., pollination, decomposition, pest suppression, and insectivore food sources).
Prerequisites: entomology or conservation biology course or permission of instructor.  
Distribution Requirements: (BSC-AG, OPHLS-AG, SCH-AG)  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2021, Fall 2019, Fall 2017  
Learning Outcomes:
  • 1.1 Students will appreciate the often overlooked economic and ecological roles of insects and by extension the dangers associated with their declining diversity. 1.2 Students will be able to identify and evaluate ethical issues involved with conservation.
  • 2.1 Students will acquire the abilities to use multiple integrated techniques to assess the state of insect diversity in general and for individual species and services. 2.2 Students will develop underlying skills to prioritize among conservation alternatives and developing conservation plans.
  • 3.1 Students will participate actively in discussion and debate about insect conservation with peers. 3.2 Students will work together to facilitate discussion and understanding of contentious issues. 3.3 Students will gain experience searching the scientific literature to learn more about insect conservation biology from primary sources.
  • 4.1 Students will collect and organize information with team members to report on a specific insect species or issue of their choice. 4.2 Students will summarize and codify data from a literature review to learn about the hypothesis-driven approach to scientific research.
  
BSOC 3460 - Anthropology of the Body (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ANTHR 3465, STS 3460, SHUM 3465  
This class considers the relationship between the body, knowledge and experience. We investigate the production and reproduction of the body across different times and spaces. Students examine specific histories through which the physical body came to be the purview of science, and its meaning the purview of social science and the humanities. In addition, students study other ways of knowing and being that capture the relations though which bodies emerge as simultaneously material and social. Ethnographies concerning healing and medicine, discipline and labor, governance and religion, aesthetics and desire offer alternative ways of approaching the body as both subject and object. Together, we will consider the historicity of the body, and in so doing explore questions of gender, race, class, sexuality, and coloniality.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, SBA-AG), (SCD-AS, SSC-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2015, Fall 2012, Fall 2010  
BSOC 3751 - Independent Study (1-4 Credits)  
Projects under the direction of a Biology and Society faculty member are encouraged as part of the program of study within the student's concentration area. Applications for research projects are accepted by individual faculty members. Students may enroll for 1 to 4 credits in BSOC 3751 Independent Study with written permission of the faculty supervisor and may elect either the letter grade or the S-U option. Students may elect to do an independent study project as an alternative to, or in advance of, an honors project. Information on faculty research, scholarly activities, and undergraduate opportunities are available in the Biology and Society Office, 303 Morrill Hall. Independent study credits may not be used in completion of the major requirements.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: Biology and Society majors with permission of faculty supervisor.  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-UG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023  
BSOC 4101 - The Entangled Lives of Humans and Animals (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with STS 4101, ANTHR 4101  
One animal behaviorist speculates that big brains develop when species are social; that is, when they must read cues from members of their group to understand when to approach, when to flee, when to fight, when to care. This course looks not only at animals in their social lives, but also at animals in their lives with us. We ask questions about how species become entangled and what that means for both parties, about the social lives of animals independently and with humans, about the survival of human and animal species, and about what it means to use animals for science, food, and profit. The course draws on readings from Anthropology, Science & Technology Studies, and animal trainers and behaviorists.
Distribution Requirements: (SBA-AG), (SSC-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2018  
BSOC 4127 - The Body Politic in Asia (4 Credits)  
Visions of bodily corruption preoccupy ruler and ruled alike and prompt campaigns for moral, medical, and legal reform in periods of both stability and revolution. This seminar explores the links between political, sexual, and scientific revolutions in early modern and modern Asia. The focus is on China and Japan, with secondary attention to South Asia and Korea. Interaction with the West is a major theme. Topics include disease control, birth control and population control, body modification, the history of masculinity, honorific violence and sexual violence, the science of sex, normative and stigmatized sexualities, fashion, disability, and eugenics. The course begins with an exploration of regimes of the body in traditional Asian cultures. The course then turns to the medicalization and modernization of the body under the major rival political movements in Asia: feminism, imperialism, nationalism, and communism.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, HA-AG), (HST-AS, SCD-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (SAAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2021, Spring 2020, Fall 2017  
BSOC 4131 - Comparative Environmental History (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with STS 4131, HIST 4131  
One of the most troubling realizations of the 20th century has been the extent to which human activities have transformed the environment on a global scale. The rapid growth of human population and the acceleration of the global economy have meant that the 20th century, in environmental terms, has been unlike any other in world history. This course takes a comparative approach, examining crucial themes in the environmental history of the 20th-century world in different times, places, and ecologies.
Distribution Requirements: (HA-AG, SCH-AG), (HST-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2020, Fall 2016, Fall 2012  
BSOC 4227 - Embodiment of Inequality: A Bioarchaeological Perspective (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ANTHR 4227, ARKEO 4227  
Critical approaches to embodiment compel bioarchaeologists to consider how social norms and institutional inequalities are enacted and materialized through the body. This course contributes a deep archaeological perspective on the lived experience of inequality and the historically contingent nature of sexuality, gender, and violence. Drawing upon the study of human skeletons, social theory, and a rich comparative literature in cultural anthropology, we will theorize bones as once-living bodies and explore topics such as body modification and mutilation, masculinity and performative violence, gender and sexual fluidity, and sickness and suffering in past societies. We will not only consider privilege and marginalization in lived experience, but also in death, examining how unequal social relationships are reproduced when the dead body is colonized as an object of study.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG), (SCD-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2021, Fall 2018  
BSOC 4280 - Health and Environmental Justice (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with STS 4280, AMST 4280  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2021, Spring 2020  
BSOC 4351 - Postcolonial Science (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ANTHR 4435, STS 4351  
Scientific knowledge and practice enacted colonial divisions and served postcolonial struggles. How then might we understand the work of science in the struggles that shape our world today? This class considers science outside Europe and the United States. We take the postcolonial as a dynamic space reworking the dichotomies that structured colonial power and knowledge, including western-indigenous, modern- traditional, global-local, centers-peripheries, and developed-underdeveloped. In the process, students confront the complex histories embodied in institutions, identities, bodies, and landscapes. Through controversies over the environment, medicine, and indigenous knowledge, we investigate the processes through which claims to the universal emerge and the effects of such claims. We attend to the collaborations and alliances through which substance is articulated, and the world in all its multiplicities is apprehended.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, SBA-AG), (GLC-AS, SSC-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2017, Fall 2012, Spring 2011  
BSOC 4412 - Conceptions of the Body in Medicine and Healing (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with STS 4412  
The working of the human body is a universal phenomenon, yet different medical traditions have vastly different conceptions of what a body is. How can something so intimate and tangible like the body be understood so contrastingly in medicine across the world? With examples from classical Greek and ancient Chinese medicine to contemporary practices in biomedicine, Ayurveda, Unani and others, the course questions the everyday, taken for granted assumptions like the distinction between mind and the body, or what counts as a healthy body. It then explores how these multiple perceptions of the body in medicine are often culturally informed and are deeply linked with experiences of personhood and identity.
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, KCM-AG), (ETM-AS, SCD-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2023, Fall 2022  
BSOC 4413 - Environments, Disasters, Health (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with STS 4413  
Environments shape who we are. Environment is omnipresent, and sometimes seems timeless, yet what we experience around us is an outcome of centuries of making, reworking, and reconstructing. This course begins with readings that familiarize students with historically informed meanings and descriptions of the environment. By using examples drawn from different parts of the world, it then interrogates how relations between environmental disasters and health are mediated through social categories like class, gender, race, or caste. Broad topics include social justice and the environment, multispecies relations, nature-culture debates, slow violence, and environmental disasters and catastrophes.
Enrollment Information: Priority given to: seniors.  
Distribution Requirements: (D-AG, SBA-AG, SCH-AG), (SCD-AS, SSC-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2023  
Learning Outcomes:
  • Familiarity with key concepts and current debates around the environment and environmental disasters
  • Understand the relation between theory/concepts and practice/empirical examples, and learn how concepts are contextual and how they change over time.
  • Identify how "scientific", "cultural", "political" ideas, and practices are co-constituted.
  • Read/experience inter-disciplinary materials and value knowledge from different sources.
  • Develop tools to think critically and be able to write complex ideas in structured and legible ways.
  • Be able to identify one's own research topic and learn how to write a thesis statement/ argument.
  
BSOC 4460 - Lightscapes (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with STS 4460, HIST 4466, VISST 4460  
Sunset, polar night, Times Square, satellites in space—these are just four lightscapes. Light is essential to humanity in multifaceted ways. It both reflects and shapes human interactions with the environment. Yet light is also complex, multiple, and contested. This seminar explores diverse lightscapes in varied contexts. How do we know light? How does light define and shape landscapes and nightscapes? How have people managed, transformed, and valued different lightscapes over time? This course draws primarily from the history of science and technology, STS, and environmental history with forays into anthropology, environmental humanities, geography, media studies, and more. We will examine texts and images, and engage with lightscapes at Cornell and in Ithaca. The seminar culminates in a class project centered on student-selected lightscapes.
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2020  
BSOC 4634 - Curating the British Empire (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with STS 4634, ARTH 4720, HIST 4634  
During Europe's colonial era, the modern museum emerged as a site of cultural and scientific authority. This course investigates the history of imperial collections and collectors, with a focus on Britain and the East India Company in the nineteenth century. Examples of topics include: the supply chain for artifacts and knowledge resources; changing conceptions of intellectual property, ownership and access; household versus public versus for-profit collections; museums and the narration of social values and cultural identities; debates over the function or aims of museums and related institutions; the collections and the administration of the empire; the collections and the growth of the sciences; the postcolonial legacies of colonial collections.
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, HA-AG), (GLC-AS, HST-AS)  
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2022, Spring 2022, Spring 2019  
BSOC 4650 - Advanced Topics in Clinical Ethics (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with STS 4650  
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2022, Spring 2021  
BSOC 4682 - Medicine and Healing in Africa (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with ANTHR 4682, ASRC 4682  
Therapeutic knowledge and practice in Africa have changed dynamically over the past century. Yet, questions about healing continue to be questions about the intimate ways that power works on bodies. Accounts of healing and medicine on the continent describe ongoing struggles over what counts as knowledge and who has the authority to intervene in social and physical threats. This class will discuss the expansion of biomedicine in Africa, the continuities and changes embodied in traditional medicine, and the shifting relationship between medicine, science and law. Our readings with trace how colonialism, post-independence nationalism, international development, environmental change and globalization have shaped the experience of illness, debility and misfortune today, as well as the possibilities for life, the context of care, and the meaning of death.
Prerequisites: at least one course in Social Sciences or Humanities.  
Distribution Requirements: (CA-AG, SBA-AG), (GLC-AS, SSC-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (AFAREA)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2020, Spring 2011  
BSOC 4691 - Food, Agriculture, and Society (3 Credits)  
Crosslisted with BIOEE 4690, STS 4691  
Multidisciplinary course dealing with the social and environmental impact of food production in the United States and developing countries. Agroecosystems of various kinds are analyzed from biological, economic, and social perspectives. The impacts of traditional, conventional, and alternative agricultural technologies are critically examined in the context of developed and developing economies. Specific topics include biodiversity and ecosystem services in agriculture, transgenic crops, land use for energy production, urban agriculture, and sustainable development.
Prerequisites: introductory ecology course or permission of instructor.  
Distribution Requirements: (AFS-AG, CA-AG, OPHLS-AG, SCH-AG), (BIO-AS, GLC-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-SBY)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021  
Learning Outcomes:
  • Use conceptual and analytical knowledge to understand the complexity of food systems.
  • Identify biological, environmental, and social processes that influence agricultural systems.
  • Improve ability to develop and articulate a position on a controversial agricultural topic.
  • Participate actively in debate and appraisal of agricultural issues with peers.
  • Analyze, synthesize, and write about diverse disciplinary perspectives on agricultural issues.
  
BSOC 4911 - Vitality and Power in China (4 Credits)  
Chinese discourses have long linked the circulation of cosmic energies, political power, and bodily vitalities. In these models political order, spiritual cultivation, and health are achieved and enhanced through harmonizing these flows across the levels of Heaven-and-Earth, state, and humankind. It is when these movements are blocked or out of synchrony that we find disordered climates, societies, and illness. In this course, we will examine the historical emergence and development of these models of politically resonant persons and bodily centered polities, reading across primary texts in translation from these otherwise often separated fields. For alternate frameworks of analysis as well as for comparative perspectives, we will also examine theories of power and embodiment from other cultures, including recent scholarship in anthropology and critical theory.
Distribution Requirements: (HST-AS, SCD-AS)  
Exploratory Studies: (EAAREA)
BSOC 4991 - Honors Project I (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with STS 4991  
Students must register for 4 credits each semester (4991-4992) for a total of 8 credits. After the first semester, students receive a letter grade of R; a letter grade for both semesters is submitted at the end of the second semester whether or not the student completes a thesis or is recommended for honors. Minimally, an honors thesis outline and bibliography should be completed during the first semester. In consultation with the advisors, the director of undergraduate studies will evaluate whether the student should continue working on an honors project. Students should note that these courses are to be taken in addition to those courses that meet the regular major requirements. If students do not complete the second semester of the honors project, they must change the first semester to independent study to clear the R and receive a grade. Otherwise, the R will remain on their record and prevent them from graduating.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: senior Biology and Society majors with overall GPA of 3.3.  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-UG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021  
BSOC 4992 - Honors Project II (4 Credits)  
Crosslisted with STS 4992  
Students must register for the 4 credits each semester (BSOC 4991-BSOC 4992) for a total of 8 credits. After the first semester, students receive a letter grade of R; a letter grade for both semesters is submitted at the end of the second semester whether or not the student completes a thesis or is recommended for honors. Minimally, an honors thesis outline and bibliography should be completed during the first semester. In consultation with the advisors, the director of undergraduate studies will evaluate whether the student should continue working on an honors project. Students should note that these courses are to be taken in addition to those courses that meet the regular major requirements. If students do not complete the second semester of the honors project, they must change the first semester to independent study to clear the R and receive a grade. Otherwise, the R will remain on their record and prevent them from graduating.
Enrollment Information: Enrollment limited to: senior Biology and Society majors with overall GPA of 3.3.  
Exploratory Studies: (CU-UG)
Last Four Terms Offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023