Block 1 Featured Course / Department: Anthropology / Professor: Dr. Allison Formanack
What makes someone “toxic” or “trashy?” This course examines human bodies as symbolic, material, and biological objects in the context of modern industrial societies. Beyond foundational “rubbish” theories in the social sciences, topics explored in this course include: toxic towns, radioactive decay, human cyborgs, and the possibilities of extraterrestrial life. Understanding ourselves as complex ecosystems that exist with and alongside other living organisms challenges basic mind/body dualisms and offers a hopeful perspective against the existential threat of environmental destruction and climate change.
From Prof. Formanack:
I’ve conducted anthropological research on manufactured housing—also known as “mobile homes” or “trailers”—across the US, including Colorado, since 2011. The residents I work with experience firsthand the social, cultural, and physical consequences of being identified as “trailer trash,” a symbolic status with material outcomes. This course explores this socio-physical dynamic of being identified with “trash” or “toxicity,” including the radioactive legacy of the Rocky Flats nuclear production site in Aurora, Colorado, to possible futures for our species on Earth and beyond. Whether students are more attuned to the sciences or the humanities, this course invites critical self-reflection of our very selves right down to the atoms that make up who we are.
Reading List
Required texts:
- The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2015)
- Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Mary Douglas (1966)
- “I am a radioactive mutant”: Emergent biological subjectivities at Kazakhstan’s Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site, Magdalena E. Stawkowski (2016)
- Another Angle on Pollution Experience: Toward an Anthropology of the Emotional Ecology of Risk Mitigation, Peter C. Little (2012)
- Down Cancer Alley: The Lived Experience of Health and Environmental Suffering in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor, Merrill Singer (2011)