Below are some of the classes I’ve taught recently, along with PDFs of example syllabi. Please ask before reusing. Happy to share prompts and rubrics as well.
Futures of Work This class is designed to give graduate students interested in system design or sociotechnical research an introduction to different potential futures of work. Are robots taking our jobs? Are there any jobs even worth taking? What other futures of work might we build? This course examines these big questions by focusing on the details of the labor process of computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW), in domains ranging from transportation to software development to sex work. To better understand what’s actually changing, we will ground contemporary CSCW themes in historical and theoretical frameworks from labor economics, organizational studies, the sociology of work, and histories of business and technology. Design-focused students will be pushed to identify the technical foundations of the labor process in different domains (e.g., taskflow analyses, user experience journeys), and to propose alternative designs that increase not just productivity but cooperation, autonomy, fulfillment, and sustainability. Research-focused students will be pushed to distinguish between the abstract content of the labor process and its concrete appearance in different workplaces, and to identify the social forces changing these workplaces. All students will be required to observe actually-existing workplaces and document novel technical developments in industries of their choosing. Emphasis is placed throughout on the interaction between changing labor processes and the recomposition of the working class in different places, at different scales; not just a shift in the race, gender, sexuality, nationality, or class of particular workers, but fundamental changes in the nature of those social relations. Syllabus. Designing Fair Systems This class, part of our College’s new Information Design major, reviews how specific values are built into different automated decision making systems as an inevitable result of constructing mechanisms meant to produce specific outcomes. These values create differential outcomes for the different people enmeshed in these systems, but both these values and these systems can be changed to support different values and different outcomes. In this way, the class serves as an introduction to the emerging field of algorithmic bias that bridges the disciplines of information science, computer science, law, policy, philosophy, sociology, urban planning, and others. Researchers and advocates in this field are currently leading investigations of the opaque, machine-learning driven systems that distribute rides, jobs, bail, loans and more in nonprofits, governments, and corporations. Following the leadership of such academic conferences as FAccT, this class is built around three specific values and corresponding case studies of automated decision making: Fairness and policing, accountability and self-driving cars, and transparency and social media moderation. We will spend one of our class sessions each week discussing technical and political issues in algorithmic bias, and the other in a ‘lab’ that applies those ideas to real-world examples. Readings bridge news coverage of algorithmic bias, philosophical consideration of the values in question, applied studies of these systems, artwork that communicates the danger to the public, and briefs from activists and wonks trying to change the system. Students will try out various means of auditing these systems and various methods of communicating their critiques to both the lay public and powerful decision makers. The differential impact of these systems across race, class, ability, and gender will be a priority throughout. Because these problems are new and of great importance, we will inevitably be pushed out of our comfort zones: Students strong in writing and reading will have to do more math than they’re used to, while students strong in programming will be pushed to engage in heady philosophical debates without clear benchmarks for success. Syllabus. The Engaged Intellectual This seminar prepares first-year PhD students for graduate work and a career after it. Our goals for the semester are to help students identify their individual goals for graduate study and for the class as a whole to uncover the unwritten rules of higher education more generally, what education researchers call “the hidden curriculum”, so as to set students of all backgrounds and goals up for short-, medium-, and long-term career success. Students will explore a series of issues and topics that confront academic and professional life during and after the PhD. process, including (but not limited to) research, teaching, service, and public engagement. Students will also learn the process of acquiring knowledge and experiences to navigate various topics including mentoring, collaborating, networking, and building relationships with scholars, practitioners, and policy makers. We approach academic life as a job in a unique kind of long-lived institution, while recognizing that what brings us to this job and what we take from it is intimately linked to our own identity, goals, community, and interests. By the end of the semester, students will have a better understanding of how the university functions and why, what paths are available after the PhD., and how to navigate that institution and those paths with your own goals and values in mind. Students will also be able to reflect on their own interests and construct a future map of their professional trajectory as workers, thinkers, colleagues, researchers, teachers, designers, and public intellectuals. Syllabus. Technology, Culture, and Society This is an upper-level seminar that trains Information Science majors in socio-technical realities of race, class, gender, and disability, while also satisfying a general education requirement for ‘cultural competency’ that draws in a variety of other majors. There’s a lot of Technology and Society courses out there–I’ve taught one elsewhere–so I wanted to make this a class specifically for my student population. I did that by focusing on their role as technologists and designers, and shaping the readings and activities to cater to that perspective. A ‘values in design’ framework grounds the entire class, and we focus on problems that are certainly of interest to other fields but are of special import to information studies (e.g., the politics of classification, accessibility and Web design). We explore that perspective through three different month-long themes: Classification, Design, and Politics. As an upper-level seminar, I’m trusting students to grapple with some weighty texts, practice those ideas in class ‘labs’ (e.g., exploring how Census racial categories change over time), producing original research on the politics of historical classification systems, and reflecting on the politics of their future jobs as we design policies and ethical principles for dangerous technologies that do not yet exist. I’ve taught a lot of classes that introduce students to, say, what race is and how it works, but I’ve never done it in this particular context. It’s exciting. Syllabus. Internet of Evil This is a small Honors seminar in the Design Cultures & Creativity program at Maryland. It’s supposed to support critical thinking about digital cultural production, with a creative hands-on component. Inspired by colleagues like Joan Donovan and Jessie Daniels, I’m trying to think through what the field of STS–especially one informed by feminist scholarship, critical ethnic studies, and histories of reaction–can say to current debates about cybersecurity, fake news, and more. And I loved participating in the 2016 4S Evil Infrastructure panel series organized by Chris Kelty, really taught me a different way to think about our digital keywords like breakage, repair, participation, hack, etc. So I used this as an opportunity to make a class about evil. Internet of Evil examines the antagonists trying to exploit, break, trick, and brick modern information systems: trolls, spammers, viruses, hackers, dictators, and more. We explore the technical and historical background of internet evildoers, how the meaning of ‘evil’ varies between systems and cultures, and how complex networks and the techniques to support them co-evolve with their evil adversaries. Students develop practical and theoretical skills in threat assessment, design methods, and social research. Evil Syllabus Introduction to Information Science This is a large lecture course that introduces majors to the field of Information Science, and also satisfies a general education requirement for social science courses. I introduce students to core concepts in information theory, and then explore pressing issues and thorny research problems in three core areas: Privacy and Information Boundaries, Building Community, and Technology for Collaboration. I want to make sure students understand the human decisions behind technological changes, like why the Web runs on a surveillance economy, and the human consequences behind seemingly mundane aspects of information organization, like what name you have to use on Facebook. We put these ideas into practice with a bunch of hands-on assignments: tracking how our data is processed and sold online in a diary, role-playing as content moderators, studying the back-end activity of a controversial Wikipedia page, and more. This is my first large lecture and it’s been exciting to revise my pedagogy for 100 (!) students. Syllabus. Valuing Data This is a seminar series that I organized for my interdisciplinary colleagues at Microsoft Research—computer scientists, economists, historians, sociologists, and media and communication scholars—on social theoretical approaches to the value of data. It is a sequel to an earlier group that reviewed classics of economic theory. They share the same goals: Figuring out what kind of commodities data are, how their commodification compares to historical dynamics associated we associate with, say, land or unpaid domestic labor, and how we might imagine other value systems for data beyond the exploitative and wasteful conditions of the present day. Here, we take different theoretical and thematic approaches each week to the problem of valuing data, which also helps introduce foundational social theoretical concepts and ways of thinking to folks who are brilliant researchers but who may not have a lot of social theory experience. The value of value and the value of theory The value of ‘fictitious commodities’ The value of unpaid labor and ‘natural’ biological processes The value of surveillance The value of classification The value of metrics The value of bodies The value of privacy The value of networks The value of ground truth The value of humanism The value of markets Introduction to American Studies This is the introductory course for the American Studies major and a popular elective course for humanities general education requirements. I have students practice the basic methods of cultural studies research (textual analysis, material culture, ethnography, archival research) and pick one to focus on for a semester-length empirical research project, learn the often-intimidating vocabulary of cultural studies theory by engaging with a variety of classic and contemporary research as well as artistic and journalistic supplements, and debate how these ideas relate their everyday lives in a variety of in-class learning exercises. I have centered the research project more and more in successive iterations of the class, making it the focus of blogs and adding deliverables throughout the semester. It led to great work like an interview series about body image, masculinity and wrestling and a political economy of the Brazilian beauty industries. The course has also been revised for an online, three-week winter semester. 15-week syllabus. Winter syllabus. American Culture in the Information Age This course is designed to take some of the classic questions of American cultural studies (‘what’s actually new?’, ‘who’s actually affected and how?’, and ‘how do epochal historical shifts bear out at the everyday level?’) and apply them to the various literatures of the Information Age. It focuses that broad rubric on issues of labor, surveillance, and bodies. I have students produce a series of short empirical research reports that take ethnography online and map surveillance systems across their daily routines; create or curate media related to the week’s readings; blog and tweet to engage the material, find other examples related to it, and reflect on their use of these technologies; and present on the historical and social development of a particular technology. The last project led to some great moments like students building a totally anonymous IRC channel (even IP-tracking was impossible) that the class used during the presentation and a history of the keyboard by way of gendered office labor. Syllabus Popular Culture in America Digital Media and Cultural Politics in a Global World This summer elective (which, unfortunately, was fully designed but never taught) explores how globalization happens. It starts from the premise that globalization does not wash over us as a series of unstoppable social waves. Rather, a variety of different globalizations are made, remade, and unmade through everyday actions. We focus on how using, buying, making, displaying, seeking, and censoring digital media such as smartphones, the Web, PC’s, and videogames crosses some cultural borders and firms up others. These technologies become key sites for the adoption or refusal of global trends in politics, economics, and society. Our course opens with a grounding in globalization studies and digital media studies before transitioning to focused weeks on popular, subcultural, and political digital networks. Throughout, we focus on the historical roots of these trends and communities, their actions online and offline, and how the smallest acts of watching porn alone or leveling up in World of Warcraft can in fact involve many people crossing many different cultural borders. We take advantage of the online setting of the course to practice a number of different kinds of writing (blogging and blog comments, collaborative note-taking, summaries, field notes, research papers, and editing) and engage in ‘virtual ethnographies’ of online communities, where participant-observation and interviewing is largely carried out on the internet. Syllabus American Studies Pedagogy Mentoring Teaching cultural studies and theory to undergraduate students is very different from learning it in graduate seminars. But quality teaching is not a matter of natural gifts. There are proven methods, principles, and resources on which all novice teachers can rely. AMST 878 is designed to give first-year graduate teaching assistants an introduction to some of the methods and theories of teaching and learning in higher education, with a focus on issues specific to American Studies. The course was put together in response to graduate student requests for some training in ‘the fundamentals’ as they began working with undergraduates. This seminar is more of a workshop and it takes the ‘mentoring’ title seriously. So while there will be assigned readings, the focus is on explaining your methods, developing plans, and, most importantly, giving and receiving feedback from your peers. 878 is a two-course sequence that combines a spring seminar on theory and preparation for those who will teach the next semester with a fall seminar on practice for those currently beginning to teach. Syllabus
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3092282
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2928741.pdf
http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Haraway-CyborgManifesto-1.pdf
This is a popular course for general education humanities electives, and I design it to first introduce scholarly rigor and systemic perspectives to the pop cultural criticism in which students are usually already quite skilled; as well as to provoke some critical self-reflection on media consumption and production, fanhoods, and what’s be ‘popular.’ Course materials introduce popular culture as texts, performances, and games. Students blog and tweet about course materials and journal about the process; create and curate media related to the week’s readings; produce short empirical research reports using cultural criticism, ethnographic, and software studies approaches; and create and present a piece of popular culture that could teach outsiders about class themes. The last project was something I was gung-ho about intellectually but still a little nervous about when the rubber hit the road. It ended up with great projects like a multi-lingual blog comparing sex industries across countries and a Gramscian Sim City where students tried to establish and manipulate popular culture to keep citizens in check. Syllabus
