MAIS 752: Special Topics Graduate Seminar: Critical Computations: Understanding and Unsettling Digital Technologies and Algorithmic Cultures Report a Broken Link
The entanglement of human lives in digital systems touches on virtually every dimension of our waking and sleeping lives. Who we are and who we can become are increasingly inseparable from the hardware and software that make up digital cultures in the twenty-first century. But what are these systems, how do they work, and what are the implications for politics and human rights? What does it mean for identity, livelihoods, and well-being to be inseparable from computational technologies? This course will introduce the foundations of digital technologies—what they are and how they work—and examine a range of tensions that reveal both challenges and potentials in algorithmic societies. Topics covered include the datafication of identities, the mechanics and politics of programming and code, digital materialities, the problems of bias and distortion in data and algorithms, artificial intelligence—what it is and its limitations—and emerging strategies for challenging racist, sexist, homophobic, and colonial conventions embedded in computational systems through feminist data interventions, critical technology practices, models for Indigenous data sovereignty, critical making, and more.
Unit 1—Introduction: A Critical Approach to Computational Discourse
| Ali, S. M. (2016) ‘A brief introduction to decolonial computing’, XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students, 22(4), pp. 16–21. |
Unit 2—The Datafication of Identity: Subject Formation in a Digital Society
Unit 3—The Discourses of Computation: Surveillance and Prediction
Unit 4—Understanding “Digital” as Infrastructure
Unit 5—Digital Materialities: Getting to Know the Machine
Unit 6—Code Studies, Part I: Analyzing the Discourse of Programming Languages
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First section of article only: Code |