Courses

This course introduces students to a variety of mediated numerical practices employed by a variety of actors and institutions in the US to make legible individuals and coteries both at home and abroad in the 20th and 21st centuries. Attention is given to how statistical innovations and infrastructures were used to measure and justify social claims about race, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class, and how these practices changed the very definitions of the social phenomena they purported to describe. While emphasis is on the US after 1945, the course begins at the outset of the 20th century in which a variety of statistical practices were developed to facilitate decision making under uncertainty. Topics include eugenics, the US census, public health, citizenship, histories of computing, Cold War rationality, history of the social sciences, criminal justice, civil rights, advertising, modernization theory, the military-industrial complex, artificial intelligence, machine learning, free press, and censorship. No prerequisites are required.