-NEW COURSE , Spring 2020
MEM 4931 Special Topics: Imagineering the Technosphere.
section 36GB, class number 21091,
Tuesdays 1:55 to 4:55 p.m. (7th, 8th, and 9th periods) in MSL L136,
How have technologies shaped our lives, and how can we draw on them to meet 21st century challenges?
This team-taught multidisciplinary course attempts to answer this question by exploring the intersection
of time, place, space, and ourselves in an increasingly technological but imperiled planet. It aims to get
not just to the objects, products, and ends commonly associated with the word “technology,” but to the
active process of making, shaping, building, and indeed (manu) facturing our world—the very places we
inhabit, our bodies, other beings, and our relations with others. The objective is to recover the process of
making; to reveal the scaffolding, materials, and the skill sets and practices that led and lead to the
making of the “technosphere,” the world that has been shaped by humans; and second, to reclaim that
knowledge in order to empower ourselves to fashion, design, reconstruct and indeed “imagineer” our
world. Writ large, our goals are to make visible the complex process of making; to rethink it, reimagine
it, but especially to reclaim it for ourselves, so that we may find the means to solve pressing problems
facing humanity on a planetary scale.
FACULTY TEACHING TEAM:
ANGELOS BARMPOUTIS, ELENI BOZIA, WILL HASTY, MORRIS
HYLTON III, KEN SASSAMAN, VASSILIKI BETTY SMOCOVITIS,
(COURSE COORDINATOR) AND YING XIAO. FOR MEMS INFORMATION
CONTACT HASTY@UFL .EDU