People increasingly turn to technologies for support in understanding and managing their personal health and wellness. Although companies have responded with a vast array of apps and other technologies, many of them have been created quickly with little understanding of people’s needs or potential ethical issues. This situation has resulted in a great need for people who know how to study people’s health and wellness needs, what ethical issues are at play, and how to use that knowledge to design improved technologies that meet people’s needs and expectations
This course introduces students to the unique ethical and pragmatic challenges of studying people’s health and wellness needs as well as designing and evaluating technologies to meet those needs.
This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to thinking critically about the ways in which information technology is shaped by race and gender. This requires examining how information technologies reflect and produce human identities, experiences and biases, how they reflect the histories and values of society (past and present), and how they are implicated in ongoing socio-cultural politics. At the same time, we will also consider how information technology is being used as a powerful set of tools for reckoning, reimagining, and resistance required to create a more just and equitable present and a different future.
Our examinations focus on asking critical questions about and building deep understandings of:
The social construction of race and gender, their embeddedness in power structures, and their weaponization as tools of oppression and exclusion
The development and application of digital technologies and how they reflect and amplify racism, sexism, ableism and intersecting oppressions
Experiments, alternative-practices, and equity work in backend design and frontend interaction to utilize information technology as a means towards social justice and liberation
The aim of this course is to ground theoretical concepts in real-world scenarios and case studies, and to develop methods for critical thinking, design, and analysis. To do this work we draw on a wide range of provocations and materials ranging from scholarly and popular writing to artworks and podcasts. We will also read across several disciplines, but with a particular focus on information studies, design studies, critical data studies, media studies, intersectional feminism, gender studies, critical ethnic studies, and feminist STS.
As an active contributor to the class you will write, think, listen, discuss, feel, speculate, imagine. I see this course as an entry point, rather than an “overview” or survey of gender and race in information technology. The current global discourse on these topics is vibrant and expanding continuously. Over the course of 10 weeks, we will explore together a series of critical concepts, analytical strategies, design approaches, and case studies that help us to ask deeper questions and be more thoughtful as thinkers, designers, and critics. Through the process of exploring different critical perspectives, my goal is that you will leave the course with tools that can be applied in other aspects of your studies, professional practice, and personal lives in ways that enable to design differently and to live and imagine worlds otherwise.