Controlling Processes

Lectures and Reflections

Controlling Processes offers a penetrating anthropological analysis of how power operates through cultural mechanisms in agrarian and modern industrial societies.

Drawing on decades of research and teaching, Laura Nader explores:

The multiple meanings and ideological frameworks embedded in dominant conceptions of science, technology, progress, energy, and the environment.
A compelling critique of groupthink, illuminated through George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, revealing how consensus can mask coercion.
The systemic oppression of women through body politics and the global diffusion of patriarchal norms.
Cultural relativism and the politics of representation, with incisive discussions of Orientalism, Islam, and the West’s positional superiority.
A model of critical pedagogy inspired by Paulo Freire, exemplified in Nader’s influential Univ