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Rethinking Pedagogy

Innovative syllabi for un-siloed education and scholarship

Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines

Carl T. Bergstrom, Jevin D. West
Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines is a humanities course about a computer science subject: how to learn and thrive in an ChatGPT / generative AI world. After talking with literally hundreds of educators, administrators, employers, and others about education in the LLM age, we spending eight months developing the class that think every college freshman needs to take to get the most out of their college experience and start preparing in appropriate ways for a world where AI will be ubiquitous but by no means a replacement for human thought, writing, curiosity, and authenticity. The approach is dialectical: in some ways LLMs appear to be oracles; in other ways, they seem like bullshit machines. Of course, they have elements of both, and we want students to engage in the process of figuring out how this can be — and when one frame might be more appropriate than another.
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Theorizing the Anthropocene: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Challenge of “The Anthropocene”

Naomi Oreskes
In this graduate seminar, students will learn to read, think, and write about the Anthropocene. We will read articles and books from a wide range of methodological approaches and thematic perspectives, including fiction, with the aim of understanding how diverse writers theorize our time and place called the Anthropocene.
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Computing Fantasy: Imagination, Invention, Radical Pedagogy

Jeffrey Schnapp
The course is experimental in character and combines the study of literary theory and history, literary works such as folktales, and computer-assisted creation employing both textual and visual generative AI tools. By the end of the semester, the class will result in the creation of a well-crafted, curated, and edited volume of illustrated AI folktales. Its central aim is to explore structural, combinatory, and generative thinking about storytelling from Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folk Tale to chatGPT in a manner that combines theory, history, and practice.
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Ways of Knowing

Shadi Bartsch, Tal Arbel
This seminar introduces students to the conditions and processes of knowledge formation that shape our understanding of truth, our theories of social life, and our projections of possible futures. It examines how claims to knowledge emerge out of disciplinary, historical, and political contexts, as well as local cultural factors, both explicit and unspoken: how do institutions, technologies, and other normative structures produce, stabilize, or disrupt knowledge? How do scientists and artists examine and represent the world differently? What makes expertise and why do we trust certain ways of knowing over others?
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Burning Books, Fighting Facts:How and Why Individuals and Institutions Resist, Reject, and Destroy Knowledge

Naomi Oreskes
Alternative facts, fake news, disinformation, propaganda. We live in a world where basic factual claims—from the reality of climate change to who won the 2020 Presidential election—are disputed, conspiracy theories thrive on the internet, and classic books are being banned. But while this state of affairs may seem shocking, it is not entirely new: there is a long history of scientific (and other factual) claims coming under attack for political, social, economic, and ideological reasons.
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Bubbles: Data Science for Human Minds

Simon DeDeo
No one is an island: from the casual interactions of day-to-day life to the global markets that supply the fruits of our technologies, the fabric of experience is woven out of interaction with other people. This course will introduce you to basic ideas in psychology, economics, and the social sciences that help us understand how this happens.
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Life and Death in the Anthropocene

Naomi Oreskes
In 2019, geologists voted to make the Anthropocene a unit in the Geological Time scale. For scientists, this means that future geologists will be able to see the effects of human activities in the stratigraphic record and distinguish this epoch from the ones that came before. These effects are defined primarily in terms of disruption to non-human systems, such as species extinctions, changes in the make-up of forests, damage to (or death of) coral reefs, and alterations of ocean and atmospheric chemistry. Ironically, while the Anthropocene is by definition the age of humans, most of its effects are defined by scientists in non-human terms. But what does the Anthropocene mean for us?
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Graduate Seminar in Theoretical Computational Social Science

Douglas Guilbeault
This graduate seminar investigates the theory of social computation underlying the interdisciplinary field of computational social science (CSS), with an emphasis on exploring the intersection of analytic sociology, cognitive science, and theoretical economics. It aims to identify not only how computational theory can provide new ways of understanding social systems as computational systems, but also how social systems can provide new ways of understanding the structure and nature of computation itself, with potential relevance across the natural and social sciences.
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Bibliography

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Bouterse, Jeroen and Bart. 2015. “A Diversity of Divisions: Tracing the History of the Demarcation between the Sciences and the Humanities.” Isis 106: 341-352.

Boyd, R. 1993. “Metaphor and theory change.” In ed. A. Ortony, Metaphor and Thought, 481-532. Cambridge University Press.

Gleiser, Marcelo, ed. Great Minds Don’t Think Alike.

Graff, H.J. 2017. Undisciplining Knowledge: Interdisciplinarity in the Twentieth Century. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Hammond, R. 1986. The modern Frankenstein: Fiction becomes fact. Poole, England: Blandford Press.

Horwich, P., ed. 1993. World Changes. Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science, Cambridge MA.

Joad, CEM. 1993. “Plato’s Theory of Forms and Modern Physics.” Philosophy 8:142-154.

Kagan, Jerome. 2009. The Three Cultures: Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the 21st Century: Revisiting CP Snow, Cambridge UP.

Klein, Julie Thompson. 1996. Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities. Charlottesville, VA.

Krauss, A. 2024. “Science’s greatest discoverers: a shift towards greater interdisciplinarity, top universities and older age.” Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11: 272.

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Kuhn, T. S. 1979. “Metaphor in Science”, in Metaphor and Thought, edited by A. Ortony, 409–19. Cambridge.

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McCarthy, J. A. 2006. Remapping reality: Chaos and creativity in science and literature. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi.

Messer-Davidow, Ellen, David R. Shumway, and David J. Sylvan, edds. 1993. Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity. Charlottesville, VA.

Pickering, Andrew. 1995. The Mangle of Practice. Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago.

Reynolds, Andrew S. 2022. Understanding Metaphors in the Life Sciences. Cambridge, UK.

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Utz, Richard. 2022. “Integrating STEM and the Humanities,” Inside Higher Ed, March 30, 2022.

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