Course Introduction

• Course Syllabus.

Land Extractions

• Crawford, K. (2021). Earth, The Atlas of AI.
  • Important to note here the missing citations in Crawford's work from several Data & Society lab members who researched and brought up ideas from the book prior to Crawford's writing. Read some details here.

Human Extractions

• The Story of Stuff Project (2010). The Story of Electronics, The Story of Stuff Project.
• Adjei, A. (2014). Life in Sodom and Gomorrah: the world's largest digital dump, The Guardian.
• Ojewale, O. (2022). Mining and illicit trading of coltan in the Democratic Republic of Congo, ENACT.
  • This video is a brief summary of a larger report on the topic. You can check out the full report here.

Do Artifacts Have Politics?

• Winner, L. (1980). Do Artifacts Have Politics?, Daedalus.
  • Feel free to watch this video as a primer (but not substitute!) to the article

Un/Intentionality

• Parvin, N. & Pollock, A. (2020). Unintended by Design: On the Political Uses of “Unintended Consequences”, Engaging Science,Technology, and Society.
• Brashear, R. (2013). Fixed: The Science/Fiction of Human Enhancement (Documentary Film), New Day Films.

• Chávez, V. C. (2022). Early thoughts on today’s violence, Med.
• Forlano, L. (2023). When Things Go Beep in the Night: The AI system that is keeping me alive is ruining my life, Data & Society: Points.
• Garrett, N. (2020). Natalie Garrett on Ethical Debt and Ethics Education, All Tech Is Human.
• Jiang, A. (2019). Voice-based Communities and Why It’s So Hard To Moderate Them, Medium.
• Notopoulos, K. (2019). Google Drive Has A Loophole That Allows Harassment, Buzzfeed News.
• Weise, J. (2018). Common Cyborg, Granta.

Tech Ethics & Moral Philosophy

• Vallor, S., Green, B., & Raicu, I. (2018). Overview of Ethics in Tech Practice, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.
• Bietti, E. (2021). From Ethics Washing to Ethics Bashing: A View on Tech Ethics from Within Moral Philosophy, SSRN Electronic Journal (Paper) | Centre for Ethics (Video).
  • You may choose to read the paper or watch the author's lecture on it.
• Williams, R., Smarr, S., Prioleau, D., & Gilbert, J. E. (2022). Oh No, Not Another Trolley! On the Need for a Co-Liberative Consciousness in CS Pedagogy, IEEE Journals & Magazine.
  • To access reading, click "PDF" and then "Access through your institution". Once you find Northwestern, you should be redirected to logging in and should be able to access the reading.

Tech for/in War

• Davies, H., McKernan, B., & Sabbagh, D. (2023). ‘The Gospel’: how Israel uses AI to select bombing targets in Gaza, The Guardian.
• SenGupta, S. (2017). Killer App, Hulu.
  • We recognize not everyone may have access to Netflix and as such have uploaded a version to Canvas.

Race as a Construct

• Gannon, M (2016). Race Is a Social Construct, Scientists Argue, Scientific American.
• Keaton, T (2018). Race, NYU Press.

• Au, W. (2007). Chapter Two - Inheriting Inequality: Standardized Testing and The Rationality of Social Control, Unequal by design: High-stakes testing and the standardization of inequality.
• Hannah-Jones, N. (2019). Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true., New York Times.
• Hurwitz, L. & Bourque, S. (2014). Settler Colonialism Primer, Unsettling America: Decolonization in Theory & Practice.
• National Museum of African American History and Culture (n.d.). Historical Foundations of Race, Smithsonian.
• Roth, W., van Stee, E., & Regla-Vargas, A. (2023). Conceptualizations of Race: Essentialism and Constructivism, Annual Review of Sociology.
  • Text available in HTML format or as a PDF.

Race Critical Code Studies: The New Jim Code

• Benjamin, R. (2019). Introduction, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code.
  • Log in with Northwestern to access readings: You can download a PDF version or read it online.
• McIlwain, C. (2020). Of course technology perpetuates racism. It was designed that way., MIT Technology Review.
• Buolamwini, J. (2018). AI, Ain't I a Woman?, YouTube.
• Vox (2015). Color film was built for white people. Here's what it did to dark skin., YouTube.

Race Critical Code Studies: The Power of Algorithms

• Noble, S. U. (2018). Introduction, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism.
  • Log in with Northwestern to access reading.
• Kantayya, S. (2020). Coded Bias, Netflix.
  • Content warning: Techno-Orientalism. We recognize not everyone may have access to Netflix and as such have uploaded a version to Canvas.

• Keyes, O. (2019). Counting the Countless: Why data science is a profound threat for queer people, Real Life Magazine.
• Mehrotra, D. (2024). Cops Used DNA to Predict a Suspect’s Face—and Tried to Run Facial Recognition on It, Wired.

Racial & Data Capitalism

Choose at least ONE of the following to complete before the end of the week

• Hannah-Jones, N. (2023). (Racial) Capitalism (Episode 4), The 1619 Project (Hulu Series).
  • We recognize not everyone may have access to Hulu and as such have uploaded a version to Canvas.
• Milner, Y., & Traub, A. (2020). Data Capitalism, Data for Black Lives.
• Takahashi, A., Wang, S., & Li, C. (2020). Oh, the Places Your Data Will Go!, Free Radicals.

Critical Hope

Choose at least TWO of the following to complete before the end of the week

• Bailey, M. (2021). An Ethical Internet?, Just Tech.
• Jones, S. T. & melo, n. a. (2021). We Tell These Stories to Survive: Towards Abolition in Computer Science Education, Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education.
  • Text available in HTML format or as a PDF.
• Kimmerer, R. W. (2015). The Sacred and the Superfund, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.
  • Log in with Northwestern to access reading.
• Research Data Alliance International Indigenous Data Sovereignty Interest Group (2019). CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance, The Global Indigenous Data Alliance.

No New Material