Social & Cultural Studies

Related Faculty

Morgan Ames

Assistant Adjunct Professor
Alumni (MIMS 2006)

Science and technology studies; computer-supported cooperative work and social computing; education; anthropology; youth technocultures; ideology and inequity; critical data science

Jenna Burrell

Professor

how marginalized communities adapt technology, algorithmic fairness and opacity, human control over algorithms, ethnography

Coye Cheshire

Professor

Trust, social exchange, social psychology, and information exchange

Paul Duguid

Adjunct Professor

The concept of information; the history of information; the history of "technocracy"; critical information studies.

Recent Publications

Information: A Historical Companion

Jan 26, 2021

A landmark history that traces the creation, management, and sharing of information through six centuries.

Ideology and Libraries: California, Diplomacy, and Occupied Japan, 1945–1952

Nov 15, 2020

Values by Design Imaginaries: Exploring Values Work in UX Practice

Jul 30, 2020

Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds

Apr 1, 2020

This paper introduces "infrastructural speculations," an orientation towards speculation that aims to interrogate and ask questions about the broader lifeworld within which speculative artifacts sit, placing the lifeworld (rather than an individual artifact) at the center of a designer's concern.

The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child

Nov 12, 2019

In The Charisma Machine, Morgan Ames chronicles the life and legacy of the One Laptop per Child project and explains why — despite its failures — the same utopian visions that inspired OLPC still motivate other projects trying to use technology to “disrupt” education and development.

When Users Control the Algorithms: values expressed in practices on Twitter.

Nov 1, 2019

Early marks: American trademarks before US trademark law

Oct 31, 2019

A Terrifying Journey to the Centre of Politics: Political Centrism as an Effect of Mortality Salience and a Need for Closure

Aug 19, 2019

Vivewell: Speculating Near-Future Menstrual Tracking through Current Data Practices

Jun 23, 2019

Friction, snake oil, and weird countries: Cybersecurity systems could deepen global inequality through regional blocking

Mar 15, 2019

Professionals tasked with preserving online security hope to use new machine-learning based techniques to develop a “fairer” system to determine patterns of “good” and “bad” usage, moving beyond regional blocking. However, we argue that these systems may continue to embed unequal treatments, and troublingly may further disguise such discrimination behind more complex and less transparent automated assessment.

Social & Cultural Studies news

Coye Cheshire on How the Gamification of the Stock Market Can Hurt Inexperienced Traders

Feb 1, 2021

‘Our Muslim Voices’ Scholars Receive Facebook Research Award

Jul 20, 2020

Prof. Salehi was awarded $100K from Facebook Research to study how Muslim Americans adopt counter-narratives online, empowering and giving voice to an often denigrated population.

COVID Shines a Light on Virtual Education

Jul 7, 2020

The sudden need for distance education relates to ongoing research by Prof. Jenna Burrell, Anne Jonas, Prof. Morgan G. Ames, who explore inequality and digitization in educational spaces.

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More Than A Number: How Users Interpret Neighborhood ‘Scores’

Jun 22, 2020

Associate Professor Jenna Burrell and Ph.D. student Elizabeth Resor Receive Google Faculty Award.

Hany Farid: Google Is Not Cracking Down on the Most Dangerous Drug in America

Jun 11, 2020

Xiao Qiang on the Chinese Response to George Floyd Protests

Jun 3, 2020

All’s Clear for Deepfakes? Think Again.

May 11, 2020

Despite growing sentiments that deepfakes are the “dog that never barked,” Hany Farid believes the worst is yet to come.

Aditya Parameswaran Builds App to Track the Impact of Distancing Measures

May 1, 2020

Hany Farid Fights Back Against Coronavirus Misinformation

Apr 16, 2020

Prof. Farid: “Coronavirus misinformation is going to get a lot of people killed.”

Joshua Blumenstock Addresses Housing Insecurity in the Wake of COVID-19