Course Offerings

Explore common data collection, management, and sharing practices around information technology and emerging technologies such as AI. Students will gain hands on experiences with collecting, analyzing, and managing user data in ethical and responsible manners. Students will design data-driven systems that are centered around user consent, transparency, and social responsibilities.

Critical exploration of the intersection between digital technologies and information access in emerging economies. Investigate the historical, socio-economic, and ethical dimensions of digital adoption in the Global South, analyzing its impact on governance, economies, cultures, and societal dynamics. Emphasis on critical thinking, ethical considerations, and collaborative approaches to address challenges such as the digital divide(s), data sovereignty, and technology-driven inequality. Through case studies and practical exercises, students will develop skills in digital research, global cultures, policy analysis, and technology innovation with a focus on promoting inclusive and sustainable digital transformation in Global South contexts.

This class explores how to make arguments about and through design. The first half focuses on values, criticism, ethics, and analysis of technology, the latter portion aims to help a soon-to-graduate technologist envision positive social impact in a mission-driven enterprise. Students will practice synthesizing ethical tech considerations – as they will have to do for the rest of their careers – and combining this with an organizational mindset. Through exercises, role-playing, discussions, guest lectures from activist technologists, and wide-ranging readings, students will practice connecting broader implications of their designs with technical choices. Design for Social Impact seeks to arm students with diverse ways of reflecting on their authorial relationship to technology, drawing from art and design to political science and anthropology. Course participants will be encouraged to focus on areas of personal interest, enumerating the social, political, and economic parameters of particular technical systems: parameters that are as important as power consumption, usability, or efficiency.

This class explores how to make arguments about and through design. The first half focuses on values, criticism, ethics, and analysis of technology, the latter portion aims to help a soon-to-graduate technologist envision positive social impact in a mission-driven enterprise. Students will practice synthesizing ethical tech considerations – as they will have to do for the rest of their careers – and combining this with an organizational mindset. Through exercises, role-playing, discussions, guest lectures from activist technologists, and wide-ranging readings, students will practice connecting broader implications of their designs with technical choices. Design for Social Impact seeks to arm students with diverse ways of reflecting on their authorial relationship to technology, drawing from art and design to political science and anthropology. Course participants will be encouraged to focus on areas of personal interest, enumerating the social, political, and economic parameters of particular technical systems: parameters that are as important as power consumption, usability, or efficiency.

Deception is a fundamental feature of human interaction, and contemporary technologies have reshaped how it is produced, spread, and detected. This course examines that shift. We begin by reviewing theories and concepts from psychology and interpersonal communication (e.g., Truth-Default Theory) on how deception works and how people decide what and whom to trust. We then turn to how the affordances of contemporary technologies alter or sustain these dynamics, drawing on cases such as scams, manipulated media, and deceptive online self-presentation. Throughout, the course considers populations that may be especially vulnerable and what can be done to build resilience. Students apply these concepts through in-depth case studies in class and complete an original case study of a form of technologically mediated deception in a domain of their interest.