University of London, Queen Mary

This course studies the diversity of microbial metabolisms. It looks at bacterial growth and replication, including organization and division of the chromosome, yield and responses to temperature, and nutrient availability. The course teaches photolithotrophy, photoorganotrophy, chemilithotrophy, and chemoorganotrophy; fermentation and anaerobic respiration; growth and extension metabolism of fungi; nitrogen transformations by microorganisms in free-living and mutualistic settings; microbiological standards in public health; clean water processing and waste-water treatment. Practical work covers prokaryote photosynthesis, bacterial fermentation, fungal digestion of wood and nitrogen transformations in sediments, and microbiological water quality. The course gives brief consideration to clean water processing and waste-water treatment.  

This course focuses on critical approaches to digital subjectivity to think about how human and non-human subjects have been articulated in the digital imaginary of everyday life since the first digital computers were built in the 1940s. How do we understand ourselves as digital subjects? How does the digital understand "us"? In this class we will turn to Histories of Computing, Software Studies, Cyber-Feminist and Marxist critique, Ethnographic and Anthropological studies of online culture and computer use, and Media studies and New Media Studies, to help us answer these questions. This course offers an opportunity to work with this material, as well as literary, visual, and popular culture, to trace connections between the first computers (not the machines, but rather the name given to the women who operated the first electronic digital computing machines) and our own "user" subjectivity today.