Dr. Tracy Teslow
This course examines the way scientific concepts and practices have defined racial difference in the United States.
Spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, the course seeks to better understand the multiple, shifting meanings and uses of race and the participation of the biological, medical, and social sciences in constructing them.
The course asks how race has been defined, by whom, and to what end. In looking for answers to these questions, our study will include Chinese-American residents of San Francisco and the politics of public health practices, eugenics and the construction of whiteness, IQ debates, UNESCO statements on race, and the Human Genome Diversity Project.
