shc.northwestern.edu

The Science in Human Culture Program prepares students to confront the global impact of science, medicine, and technology on society—and on their own lives. The adjunct major and the minor welcome humanities, social science, and science majors, including premedical students, wishing to surmount modern science’s compartmentalization of knowledge. Courses bridge the sciences and the humanities and seek to foster critical thinking about the limits, authority, and impact of science, a mode of understanding and intervening that is often said to be the defining feature of modern culture.

For an up-to-date listing of courses and more information about the adjunct major and minor, consult the program website. Questions may be directed to the program administrator at shc-program@northwestern.edu.

Themes and Eligible Courses

Some of the themes adopted by students have included medicine and society; science, environment, and society; technology and social change; science and gender; religion and scientific knowledge; and philosophy of science. For example, students interested in medicine and society might explore the interaction of medical knowledge and practice, medical ethics, and the boundaries between sickness and health. Topics addressed might include the authority of the physician, the role of the hospital, the social dimensions of racial and gender differences, and the changing conception of disease and healing.

Eligible courses include (when offered) the list below. Many other eligible courses are offered periodically and appear in the online quarterly class list posted on the program website.

Anthropology 

Communication Studies

Economics

Environmental Policy and Culture

Global Health

Gender Studies

History

Humanities

Journalism

Philosophy

Political Science

Psychology

Religious Studies

Sociology

Programs of Study

Learning Objectives for the Science in Human Culture major and minor:

• Analyze how scientific explanations have come to be the principal way we understand our social and natural world, and the relationship between them.
• Investigate the processes whereby scientific knowledge has been translated into radical new technologies and medical interventions that have been applied across a variety of domains, from antisepsis to AI—along with the tremendous impact of these innovations on uneven social and economic developments around the world.
• Contextualize how different cultures around the world have contributed in distinct ways to scientific innovation and conceptual discovery, and how changing forms of global exchange have brought them into alignment—or not.
• Address the changing relationships between experts and the lay people in different cultures, as well as its practical consequences.
• Identify the religious, ethical, and social implications of the changing views of nature proposed by different scientific disciplines and then assess the moral implications of these views going into the future.
• Historicize our current local and global inequities as to who gets to be involved in the production of scientific/medical research and who is then able to gain access to new technologies, and with what effect on the future distribution of resources.

SHC Courses

This list reflects only courses listed under the SHC course code; see other parts of this catalog for other eligible courses.