COURSES

ARCHY 570: HISTORIES OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL THEORY AND PRACTICE - Fall 2008
Histories of archaeology can help you get your bearings within established research traditions, tracing the formation of pivotal ideas and forms of practice that are now taken for granted; they can also contribute to the design of new research, disrupt settled interpretive conventions, resituate evidence that we thought we understood. The goal of this course is to cultivate an historically grounded understanding of archaeological theory and to explore the possibilities for putting this understanding to work in contexts of research design and research practice. Core texts are Patterson’s Social History of Archaeology in the United States (1996) and Trigger’s History of Archaeological Thought (2006), and we will consider a number of more specialized histories: of formative research programs and problems; biographies that documen tthe influence of key figures and the less widely recognized contributions of women and minority practitioners; studies of regional research traditions; and critical histories of archaeology’s entanglement with race politics and colonial agendas; and histories that articulate the possibilities embodied in alternative archaeologies.
Course website

HUM 596: GRADUATE MICROSEMINARS

2008-2009 Science Studies Network microseminars on "Democratizing Science": a bi-weekly seminar run in conjunction with the year-long SSNet facutly/graduate colloquium on "Science in Democracy" (Fall 2008); "Democracy and Diversity in Science" (Winter 2009); "Normative Claims for a Democratic Science" (Spring 2009).
Course website

Winter 2008: Presuppositions of Practice: Philosophical Issues in the Social Sciences: a bi-weekly (C/NC) seminar linked to the 10th Annual Philosophy of Social Science Roundtable (hosted by the Simpson Center at the University of Washington, March 7-9, 2008), intended for graduate students in any area of the social sciences or humanities who share in interest in questions about the presuppositions of social inquiry. The seminar will provide an interdisciplinary forum for discussion of work by keynote speakers and participants in the 2008 Roundtable. Focal questions include: foundational issues in social theory; models of explanation and canons of evidence characteristic of the social sciences; and ethical and political problems that are distinctive of research involving human, social subject.
Course website

PHILOSOPHIES OF FEMINISM – Fall 2006
Philosophy 206 / Political Science 212 / Women's Studies 206
This course is organized around three focal themes that have been central philosophical concerns for feminists: concepts of identity, theories of knowledge, and questions of justice. These provide a framework for learning about the diverse, sometimes complementary and sometimes antagonistic, philosophical positions that feminists have developed.  Focal questions include:  why does philosophy (or more generally, theory)
matter to feminists?; why does (or should) feminism matter to philosophical inquiry?; and what is it that makes a philosophical position or theory feminist? Readings include selections from Fricker and Hornsby, The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy (2000); Jakobsen, Working Alliances (1998); Moya and Hames-Garcia, Reclaiming Identity (2000); as well as articles by authors such as Judith Butler, Patricia Hill Collins, Marilyn Frye, Donna Haraway, Nancy Hartsock, Uma Narayan, and Iris Young, among others.
Course website


PHIL 566: PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE – Fall 2006
A graduate seminar on naturalism and the interpretive social sciences. The focus is a pivotal question in philosophical debates about the social sciences: can human, social subjects can be studied scientifically or do they require, instead, a distinctively interpretive methodology? The anti-naturalist accounts we consider include Winch's Wittgensteinian position (The Idea of a Social Science); debates about the nature and status of translational practice (principles of charity and humanity; Henderson’s argument for treating interpretation as a form of explanation); Risjord’s pragmatic (erotetic) account of ethnographic interpretation; and Hacking’s analysis of “looping effects” and the processes by which social kinds are constructed.
Course website


PHIL 456: PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY – Winter 2007
An honors capstone seminar that will focus on ideals of objectivity and constructivist challenges in history. If history is, as many claim, “rewritten by every generation of historians,” what sort of understanding does it provide of the past? Novick’s history of objectivist ideals, That Noble Dream, and Trouillot’s Silencing the Past, are the point of departure for exploration of this question, which has been as much a concern for practicing historians as for philosophers. Essays drawn from Hacking’s Historical Ontology, and from The Social Construction of What?, provide a philosophical rationale for reframing the stark oppositions that have dominated debate about the status of historical knowledge, and Tucker’s recent philosophy of historiography, Our Knowledge of the Past, offers a model of reasoning from evidence of the past that extends well beyond human, social history to the life sciences (evolutionary bioloy), and geological sciences.
Course website


ARCHY 574/PHIL 574: PHILOSOPHY OF ARCHAEOLOGY – Spring 2007

A seminar designed to provide graduate students in archaeology and anthropology intensive cross-disciplinary training in the philosophical analyses of scientific reasoning that have played an influential role in internal debates about the status of the archaeology as a science, its orienting goals, and its standards of practice. Topics include: models of explanation; analyses of evidential reasoning (hypothesis testing; hermeneutic and interpretive strategies); strategies of model building and model evaluation; and broader questions about the methodological unity of science, ideals of objectivity, and the role of contextual values and interests in science.
Course website