First-Year Seminars 110PK - Pharmocracy: Humans, Animals, Power and Knowledge in the Pharmaceutical Era

Since the 1950s, the pharmaceutical industry, one of the world's largest economic sectors and a core constituent of globalized corporate power today, has built a transnational empire that affects not only health and food chains, science, politics, stock markets, and the private/public distinction, but has completely changed what it means to be human or animal. We will study several key examples of these transformations, and how pharma produces knowledge on the backs of impoverished humans and animals as trial subjects. This course will also help students develop their composition skills which, through content and form, can decompose the structures that sustain corporate power.

Mount Holyoke first-year students only, by placement.