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This graduate seminar will examine the political, social, and material lives of numbers and data.Ìý While discourses of scientific objectivity often present numerical representations as value-free reflections of reality, an emerging body of work in anthropology and science and technology studies focuses instead on how people do things with numbers. This course will explore the power of numbers to conjure up particular social worlds and political formations, abstract complex relations into tidy figures, and render possible futures knowable and calculable. From statistics and probability to indicators, algorithms, and big data, students will consider figures as political technologies and cultural artifacts.

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Professor Alison Cool

See the for specifics, recommendations, and prerequisites.