NEW Spring 2022 - Critical Digital Knowledge: Seeing Data Bodies and Practicing the Future

LS 780-93
Spring 2022
Mondays, 2-5 PM
GLS House, 2114 Campus Drive, and online

CLICK HERE TO WATCH A COURSE PREVIEW VIDEO

Through conversation, practice, and engagement with critical makers and thinkers, we’ll investigate how digital tools create knowledge, produce relations, and build worlds. We’ll look at how our digital tools, techniques, algorithms, search, and research are situated within and alongside systems of oppression (racism, sexism, ableism), both by design and by virtue of their being designed with/in those systems. We’ll interrogate how our tools are governing our actions and interactions as researchers, and how they are guiding our digital research insofar they are quietly influencing our projects. 

We’ll think together about how to tell the stories of our research and projects knowing they are co-authored by the tools we use, and we’ll think through methods for how those tools might be hacked, or refused, to manifest more just systems. At its core, this class-qua-learning-lab is really about how we experience the world. If you are already using a digital tool for your research project, you’ll be invited to do a self-study of that tool with the goal of producing a short statement about how the tool is participating in and co-authoring your project.