Social & Cultural Studies

Related Faculty

Morgan Ames

Assistant Adjunct Professor
Alumni (MIMS 2006)

Science and technology studies; education; anthropology; youth technocultures; ideology and inequity; critical data science

Jenna Burrell

Associate Professor

technology appropriation in non-Western societies, technology and socio-economic development, qualitative research methods

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.

Geoffrey Nunberg

Adjunct Professor

The theory, history and social role of "information."

Recent Publications

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.

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.

Mind-Reading and Telepathy for Beginners and Intermediates: What People Think Machines Can Know About the Mind, and Why Their Beliefs Matter

Dec 15, 2018

What can machines know about the mind? This dissertation seeks to understand people’s beliefs about this question: how these beliefs affect and arise from interactions with digital sensors, from prior beliefs about the mind and the body; and how these beliefs may shape the design of technical systems in the future.

The purpose of this dissertation is twofold. First, it surfaces that the boundary between sensing bodies and sensing minds is unstable, deeply entangled with social context and beliefs about the body and mind. Second, it proposes the porousness of this boundary as a site for studying the role that biosensing devices will play in near future. As biosensors creep into smart watches, bands, and ingestibles, their ability to divine not just what these bodies do, but what they think and feel, presents an under-explored avenue for understanding and imagining how thesetechnologies will come to matter in the course of life.

Differential Vulnerabilities and a Diversity of Tactics: What Toolkits Teach Us about Cybersecurity

Nov 8, 2018

We investigate cybersecurity toolkits, collections of public facing materials intended to help users achieve security online. We look at design dimensions of these toolkits, and investigate how the toolkits construct security as a value and how they construct people as (in)secure users.

Speculative Design in HCI: From Corporate Imaginations to Critical Orientations

Jun 28, 2018

When BCIs have APIs: Design Fictions of Everyday Brain-Computer Interface Adoption

Jun 13, 2018

Privacy, Disclosure, and Social Exchange Theory

May 11, 2018

Eliciting Values Reflections by Engaging Privacy Futures Using Design Workbooks

Nov 30, 2017

Social & Cultural Studies news

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

Morgan Ames’ The Charisma Machine: A Deep Dive into One Laptop per Child

Oct 15, 2019

Morgan G. Ames explores the rise and fall of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project in her new book, The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child.

Steve Fadden Speaks Design at UXINDIA 2019

Sep 12, 2019

Geoffrey Nunberg on Gender Pronouns and Sam Smith

Sep 13, 2019

Watch danah boyd on the Spread of Conspiracies and Hate Online

Aug 5, 2019

Geoff Nunberg Discusses AI on Fresh Air

Jun 28, 2019

Bloomberg Cites AnnaLee Saxenian’s Research on the Benefits of High-Skill Immigration

May 10, 2019

A Conversation with Geoff Nunberg on The Hidden Consequences of Being a Jerk Online

Apr 24, 2019

Shazeda Ahmed on the Messy Truth About Social Credit

Apr 23, 2019

Ph.D. student Shazeda Ahmed writes that foreign media has painted a dystopian portrait of China’s social credit system. The reality is both less coherent and more complex.

Alumna Jennifer King’s Dissertation Honored by iSchools Organization

Jan 30, 2019

School of Information alumna Jennifer King was honored by the iSchools organization for her doctoral dissertation, “Privacy, Disclosure, and Social Exchange Theory.”

I School Team Reimagines “Privacy by Design,” and Wins Best Paper Award

Dec 6, 2018

Instead of looking for design solutions to fix existing problems in privacy, I School researchers used speculative design fictions to explore the potential privacy issues that may arise in future uses and adoptions of emerging biosensing technologies.