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Instruction Mode: In Person

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Instruction Mode: In Person
Prerequisites: 4240 or permission or instructor. Making technology means simultaneously making politics, facilitating or impeding justice, increasing or decreasing inequality and exploitation. Every product or service is created by people – be it compiler or car, teargas or vaccine – so political and social valences are “baked in” at every step. Throughout a product design lifecycle, from specification to engineering bench work, through to Series C funding and marketing campaigns, tech remakes society and reconfigures the planet. Can a technologist consciously address this responsibility while also juggling technical requirements? DTSI-Practicum builds on the central premise of INFO/STS4240: how to make arguments about and through design. Where 4240 focuses on values, criticism, ethics, and analysis of technology, dipping into new designs, Practicum aims to help a technologist practice synthesizing ethical tech considerations mindfully and creatively, as they will have to do for the rest of their career, and combining this with an organizational mindset. Through exercises, role-playing, discussions, guest lectures from activist technologists, and wide-ranging readings, students will practice connecting broader implications of their designs with technical choices. Practicum seeks to arm students with many diverse ways of reflecting on their authorial relationship to technology, drawing from art and design to political science and anthropology. Course participants will be encouraged to focus on areas of personal interest, enumerating the social, political, and economic parameters of particular technical systems: parameters that are as important as power consumption, usability, or efficiency.

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Xenophobic speech that demonizes immigrants and other foreign nationals is a powerful part of human social and political life. It has become part of the political order of the day for established democracies, such as France (the Front National France), Austria (the FPÖ), Denmark (Danish People’s Party), and the United States (Republican Party), facilitating a staggering rise of radical nationalist politics. Xenophobic speech arose as an immediate and invidious response to the Coronavirus, fueling a flood of hate crimes against people of Asian descent. In this course, we will examine the development of automation strategies to combat xenophobic speech in social media, reading recent scholarship on NLP and online hate speech, to support a new cross-disciplinary effort to develop a Xenophobia Meter. The course will involve weekly readings, discussions, and writing.

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Instruction Mode: In Person