Contemporary universities combine traditions of academic freedom with traditions of expected political neutrality, of student and faculty activism with an ethos of separation from social demands, and a spirit of open scientific collaboration with actual restrictions and sanctions. In this course, we will consider the historical, philosophical, and social underpinning of these tensions.

This course explores practices of reading texts across mathematics and literature, examining how different approaches shape a reader’s understanding. Students will analyse structural patterns, formal constraints, and acts of moving between written and drawn elements, while attending to how literary reading practices (can) influence the reading of mathematical texts and vice versa.

This course teaches some fundamentals of the philosophy of translation, and applies them to translation in scientific practices and science-fiction imaginaries. Special attention is paid to how power relations affect translation processes and technologies, including LLMs. Theoretical study is complemented with a semester-long analysis of translation and power in a book of feminist science fiction.