NEW Summer 2023 - Climate + Technology + Justice: Designing Nature's Futures

Instructor:
Amanda Starling Gould
780-02
Summer 1 Extended 2023
Fridays, 2-5 PM
GLS House, 2114 Campus Drive
HYBRID

Click here to view a course preview video.

In this course we’ll explore how digital technologies are altering climate and acting toward its preservation. We’ll look at human-earth-technology relations and possible planetary futures. If the earth, the human, and technology are no longer separable, or even thinkable in isolation, we need models for reflecting critically about our physically-entangled global ecological systems. 

The culminating assignment will be an interdisciplinary research project that integrates course readings and outside research to meaningfully reflect on the interrelation of climate, technology, and culture. Research and expertise come in many shapes in this class, so we’ll read across fields and formats. Projects can be individual or collaborative and can include such elements as community eco-partnerships, global social activism, multimedia reflections, speculative design projects, land-based art or performance, written reports, graphic narratives, manifestos, collective action, or digital products.

About Amanda Starling Gould
Graduate Liberal Studies

GLS Advisory Committee Term: 2022-2025

Amanda Starling Gould, PhD, is a technology scholar with a particular interest in the environmental effects of digital technologies and questions the ways technologies of connection can cause disconnect, bias, and harm. She thinks, for example, about how our technologies design us, and about how the unequal distribution of power and access are designed into the system. In her current appointment with Duke’s Graduate Liberal Studies program, she seeks to enable students to interrogate these issues and pursue critical interdisciplinary research projects of their own.

She teaches undergraduate, graduate, and adult learners on topics related to critical digital studies, public and digital humanities, designing equitable futures, and for many years taught a class called Learning to Fail for the Innovation & Entrepreneurship department at Duke.