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Humanizing Technology Certificate

The Humanizing Technology Certificate Program (HTCP) encourages students to explore the impacts of new and existing technologies in our everyday lives. At the same time, it helps students develop their critical thinking about social and cultural systems that inform these technologies, and provides them with tools for becoming socially responsible professionals. The HTCP offers students interested in technology a pathway to fulfill General Education (GE) requirements with courses that have a direct relevance to their majors and career interests, and it gives students an opportunity to develop community in smaller learning environments.

To earn the certificate, students are required to complete three of six designated courses below. These classes have no prerequisites, and can be taken in any order. Intended for first-year and second-year students but open to all, the HTCP enables students to fulfill GE requirements with a set of courses that focus on the intersection of technology and issues of race, power, ethics, language, and representation. The certificate introduces students to humanistic methods and approaches to studying technology and its ramifications, enabling them to contextualize the social, cultural, and historical contexts of new technologies. Courses are small and designed to foster discussion, collaboration, and community. Students are encouraged to develop their own viewpoints on the sources and impacts of technological systems, and to convey those viewpoints clearly and confidently. Above all, the courses help students learn how to grapple with difficult societal questions that lack clear “right” answers and become socially responsible agents of positive change in their professional and personal lives.

The Humanizing Technology Certificate is awarded on completion of three of the six designated courses. The HTCP program will contact students upon completion of this requirement. Students are encouraged to contact HTCP advising at humadvising@ucsc.edu to discuss their plans. Students are encouraged to list the HTCP Certificate in their resumes, in addition to articulating the skills they’ve developed through program courses. The HTCP Certificate will not appear on students’ transcripts.

Students who successfully complete a minimum of three of the following courses will be awarded the Humanizing Technology Certificate. Students can choose any combination of the classes in order to qualify.

  • HUMN 15, Ethics and Technology (Perspectives on Technology Gen Ed). This course explores ethical, social, and political issues raised by existing and emerging technologies.

  • HUMN 25, Humans and Machines (Textual Analysis Gen Ed). This course explores the tension between humans and machines, between people and objects increasingly resembling them.

  • HUMN 35, Language Technology (Cross-Cultural Analysis Gen Ed). This course provides a comparative, historical framing of the development of communication technologies and practices, considering a variety of cultures and societies across human history.

  • HUMN 45, Race and Technology (Ethnicity and Race Gen Ed). This course examines how the construction of race connects with constructs in science and technology.

  • HUMN 55, Technologies of Representation (Interpreting Arts and Media Gen Ed). Focusing on technologies of representation like photographs, selfies, and surveillance data, this course explores how viewers and makers derive meaning from images and how power operates in their creation and circulation.

  • LIT 126H, Artificial Intelligence and Human Imagination (Cross-Cultural Analysis Gen Ed). This course uses a humanistic framework to study the promises and perils of artificial intelligence technosystems (AI). It studies cultural depictions of AI, co-creates cultural artifacts using AI, and analyzes the "anatomy" of specific AIs.