HUMN-Humanities

Addresses the role of values in technology: Who is technology for? What could it be? How does it relate to its social and historical contexts? Students think systematically and imaginatively about how the design of different technologies assists and constrains everyday life. Course asks whether there is a "right" way to do technology, and if there is, how we might go about pursuing it. To explore this question, the course draws on cross-disciplinary materials taken from literature, history, sociology, anthropology, politics, and philosophy, and introduces students to the principles of design justice and inclusive design.

Students learn how humans and machines have interacted, become intertwined, and opposed one another throughout history, from the paleolithic era to the present. By examining a variety of texts (theory, philosophy, theater, visual art, instruction manuals, films, advertisements, podcasts), students explore how machines can enable, inhibit, and control their users in a variety of contexts. Students also apply historically grounded knowledge to propose technological solutions to contemporary problems.

Focuses on the technologies people build to record and transmit language, including both contemporary technologies like social media and machine translation and important earlier technical developments, like the printing press and writing. The course examines how different societies and cultures have reacted to the issues these technologies have introduced; topics covered may include access, economic costs, information spread, and privacy. Throughout, the focus is on the ways that culture, language, and technology interact.

Considers how racial and gendered systems interact with technological innovations (such as facial recognition, codes and algorithms, data networks, surveillance technologies, and drones) and how inequalities find their way into the code driving techno-intelligence. Foregrounds the question of who benefits and who loses through these "innovations." Assesses the holistic picture of technological development: the historical context of several technologies, how they affect the environment, who works to build the components, and who becomes the experts of how we address social problems. Students debate these issues and consider how we might propose alternative solutions or interact differently with technologies and the worlds they offer.

Explores the technologies that variously delight, extend, and command our imagination. Students explore the social and political problems they can create or amplify and collaborate on creative responses. In this iteration, the focus is on technologies for visual representation. Examines cameras, drones, apps, algorithms and other technologies that allow people to make and share images, and asks how these technologies shape how and what we see, as well as what they keep hidden and obscure. Also investigates how power operates in the making, circulation, and consumption of pre- and post-internet visual culture.