CLCS 381 - Global Scholars: Digital Futures and Human Values

Semester Offered: Spring
0.5 unit(s)

This second six-week intensive, a new initiative of the Global Collaborative for the Liberal Arts, takes up the central question of humanistic technological innovation: what does it mean to build equitable technologies for people, for the planet, and for more-than-human worlds? As artificial intelligence, machine learning systems, data infrastructures, and automation increasingly shape everyday life, this intensive examines how ethical and humanistic frameworks can inform the design, deployment, and governance of these technologies. Drawing on STS and critical technology studies students learn how ideals of innovation, progress, and future-making often obscure histories of extraction, colonialism, and inequality. The intensive foregrounds the material life of technologies as both an ethical and political concern examining how knowledge about digital technologies is produced and how larger structures of power such as race, class, caste, gender, sexuality, disability, and geopolitics shape technological systems and their effects. Students create a collaborative ‘ethical prototyping’ project, that envisions a technology or practice grounded in humanistic values of care, equity, justice, and sustainability. This intensive culminates in a 10-day site visit to Rwanda, where we learn collaboratively with students and faculty from our partners in the Global Collaborative for the Liberal Arts: the University of Global Health Equity in Rwanda, the University of Edinburgh, and Ahmedabad University. Anubha Singh.

Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.

Second six-week course.

One 2-hour period with additional workshops.

Course Format: INT