Undergraduate Courses
The Politics of Algorithms
Media Infrastructures and Materiality
Public Speaking
The Politicis of Algorithms
Algorithms have emerged as central actors in contemporary society, with computational technologies increasingly managing publicity (e.g., recommendations, moderation), access to opportunity (e.g., assessments, credit scores), and exposure to harm (e.g., surveillance, predictive policing). Such technologies depend on informational models of people, places, communities, ideas, truth, taste, and value. In modeling the social world, these technologies simultaneously shape the world and the possibilities for acting within it, raising concerns of accuracy, bias, and fairness, and also pointing to larger cultural shifts. Bringing together theories and empirical research from communication, information science, and science and technology studies, this course explores the political and ethical challenges and opportunities created by algorithms.
Syllabus: Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Media Infrastructures and Materiality
Whether the energy consumption of data centers, the manipulation of elections on social media platforms, or platformization of cultural production, infrastructures increasingly appear at the heart of cultural, political, and environmental crises. Infrastructures are inescapably partisan, distributing information, shaping public life, and encoding values. Infrastructures are also a major locus of political practice, providing a motivation for and means of organizing. This seminar will approach media infrastructures simultaneously as a technique of governance, a means of existential support, and a site of contestation. Drawing on material approaches to communication, science and technology studies, and environmental communication, we will explore how often overlooked and seemingly mundane information and communication systems shape the very conditions for communication, knowledge, and public life.
Syllabus: Spring 2024
Public Speaking
The ability to speak clearly and persuasively in English is an increasingly important prerequisite for leadership in a variety of contexts, including the global economy, cultural production, and political movements. This course is designed to introduce the concepts and skills you need to communicate effectively in interviews, meetings, public forums, and presentations. Combining argumentation theory with the practical application of speaking skills, this course will help students become more confident and capable when speaking in English, using presentation technologies, and addressing international audiences.
Graduate Courses
The Politics of Digital Platforms
Platform Labor
The Craft of Academic Writing and Argumentation
The Politics of Digital Platforms
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The field of platform studies responds to the growing social, political, and economic centrality of digital platforms in public life. Like other large corporations, commercial platforms have the resources to conduct massive lobbying campaigns and cultural appeal that attract advertisers and consumers. However, they also have unique forms of platform power, which include the ability to set standards, form networks, employ automated agents, create information asymmetries, and operate across domains. This class provides an introduction to platform studies research, adopting a sociotechnical approach to understanding the role of platforms in society. The first part of the course examines forms of platform power expressed, for example, through the design of technical infrastructures or content moderation practices. The second part of the course examines forms of platform counterpower, or how users and intermediary actors resist platform interests by, for example, circumventing policies or reappropriating platform tools to novel ends.
Platform Labor
Digital platforms are changing how people work. These transformations include the creation of new types of work, from the highly visible careers of streamers and social media influencers to the less visible jobs of content moderation and training machine learning models, as well as new forms of algorithmic management for gig workers (e.g., Wolt, Uber) and new forms of monetization in the sharing economy (e.g., AirBnB). Social media platforms are also challenging our understanding of what counts as work, prompting scholars to debate whether the generation of content or even behavioral data should be classified as a form of labor. This course critically examines these developments, assessing how different types of platform labor create opportunities for worker empowerment and vulnerabilities to harm. This course also analyzes forms of labor organization associated with platform work, from ad-hoc strategies of resistance to algorithmic management to the formation of unions.
Syllabus: Spring 2024, Spring 2023
The Craft of Academic Writing and Argumentation
This class approaches academic writing as a craft, or a set of skills that can be honed with time and practice. Through a series of writing exercises, this class will help students recognize the importance of argumentation in academic writing, understand the types of arguments associated with different genres of academic articles, discover and develop their own arguments, and learn how to better communicate these arguments through writing at both the structural and sentence level. Although there will be a few short readings about writing, students should be prepared to practice the craft and come in with a paper that they want to work on throughout the semester.
[Fall 2023 Syllabus]