General Note: Everything on syllabus is subject to change. The official readings for each class will be determined by Tuesday Evening at 20:00 the week before the relevant class.
Introduction
[1]
16 Oct
No Required reading
supplemental:
Ted Chiang: Liking What you See: A Documentary
Bill D'Alessandro: Is it bad to prefer attractive partners?
Andrew Altman: Discrimination
Martha Nussbaum: Objectification
SOCIAL STRUCTURAL EXPLANATION
[2]
23 Oct
Fred Pincus: From Individual to Structural Discrimination
Sally Haslanger: What is a (social) structural explanation?
Lauren Ross: What is social structural explanation?: a causal account
Supplemental:
Doug Massey (1998): America's Apartheid and the urban underclass
Atoosa Kasirzadeh: Algorithmic fairness and structural injustice: Insights from feminist political philosophy
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM
[3]
30 Oct
Michael Root: How we divide the world
Ron Mallon: Passing, traveling, and reality: Social constructivism and the metaphysics of race
Supplemental:
Ian Hacking: The Social Construction of What? (Chapter 1)
Ron Mallon: Naturalistic Approaches to social construction
Sally Haslanger: Gender and Race: (What) are they? (What) do we want them to be?
Further Reading:
Ian Hacking: Madness: Biological or Constructed
Quayshawn Spencer: A radical solution to the race problem
Bonus:
Occam's Razor: A This American Life segment relevant to the experiential account of race
[4]
6 Nov
Kareem Khalifa and Richard Lauer: Do the social sciences vindicate race's reality?
Maya Sen and Omar Wasow: Race as a bundle of sticks
Supplemental:
Ron Mallon and Dan Kelly: Making race out of nothing: psychologically constrained social roles
Bonus:
Ned Block: Race, genes and IQ
THE CAUSAL STATUS OF RACE
[5]
13 Nov
Issa Kohler-Hausmann: Eddie Murphy and the dangers of counterfactual causal thinking
[6]
20 Nov
Judea Pearl: Direct and indirect effects (Read sections 1 and 2 and as much as you can of the rest)
Lily Hu: Direct effects
Naftali Weinberger: Signal Manipulation and the causal analysis of racial discrimination
Supplemental:
Bertrand and Mullainathan: ARE EMILY AND GREG MORE EMPLOYABLE THAN LAKISHA AND JAMAL?
Issa Kohler-Hausmann and Robin Dembroff: Supreme Confusion About Causality at the Supreme Court
Dembroff, Kohler-Hausmann, and Sugarman: What Taylor Swift and Beyonce Teach us About Sex and Causes
Idealization
[7]
27 Nov
Robert Sugden: Credible worlds: the status of theoretical models in economics
Zeynep Pamuk: Rationalizing Discrimination (access to course members only)
Supplemental:
Doug Massey (1998): America's Apartheid and the urban underclass
Anna Alexandrova and Robert Northcott: It's just a feeling: Why economic models do not explain
EMPIRICAL METHODS
[8]
4 Dec
Barocas et al.: Fair ML Book "Causality"
Liam Bright, Dan Malinsky, and Morgan Thompson: Causally interpreting intersectionality theory
Supplemental:
[9]
11 Dec
Neil and Chris Winship: Methodological challenges and opportunities in testing for racial discrimination in policing
Naftali Weinberger: The insufficiency of statistics for testing discrimination by police
Supplemental:
Mummolo and Dean Knox: Toward a general causal framework for the study of racial bias in policing
Mummolo, Will Lowe, and Dean Knox: Administrative Record Mask Racially Biased Policing
Sprenger and Weinberger: Simpson's Paradox
Ross et al: Resolution of apparent paradoxes in the race-specific frequency of use-of-force by police
[10]
18 Dec [Cancelled due to illness]
Barocas and Selbst: Big data's disparate impact
Supplemental:
DISCRIMINATION IN THE LAW
[11]
8 Jan
Barocas and Selbst: Big data's disparate impact
Supplemental:
Kate Crawford: Anatomy of AI (video)
[12]
15 Jan
Noah Zatz: Disparate impact and the unity of equality law
Supplemental:
Greiner and Rubin: Causal effects of perceived immutable characteristics
[13]
22 Jan
Issa Kohler-Hausmann and Robin Dembroff: Supreme Confusion About Causality at the Supreme Court (pp. 57-68)
Ben Eidelson: Dimensional disparate treatment (pp. 785-819)
Supplemental:
Deborah Hellman: Defining disparate treatment
Berman and Krishnamurthi: Bostock was Bogus: Textualism, Pluralism, and Title VII
ALGORITHMIC FAIRNESS
[14]
29 Jan
Grimmelmann and Westreich: "Incomprehensible Discrimination"
Katie Creel and Deborah Hellman: The Algorithmic Leviathan: Arbitrariness, Fairness, and Opportunity in Algorithmic Decision-Making Systems
Supplemental:
Barocas et al.: "Testing discrimination in practice"
Prince and Schwarcz: Proxy Discrimination in the age of artificial intelligence and big data
Kasper Lippert-Rasumussen: "We are all different": Statistical discrimination and the right to be treated as an individual"
[15]
5 Feb