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

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.

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.

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.

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

Social & Cultural Studies news

Shazeda Ahmed Explains the Chinese Social Credit System

Jan 15, 2020

A real life Black Mirror? Ph.D. student Shazeda Ahmed explains the Chinese Social Credit System.

Deirdre Mulligan Wary of “Unknown Fund” and Blockchains

Nov 14, 2019

“Data for Good” Fellowship Awardee Fights Climate Change with Data Science Communications

Nov 6, 2019

MIDS student Ben Arnoldy has been awarded the Fall 2019 Jack Larson Data Science for Good Fellowship for his work involving the use of data science to educate the public on climate change and pollution.

Morgan Ames on Silicon Valley’s Obsession with Tech-Free Schools

Sep 20, 2019

Bloc by Bloc. Image courtesy of Harvard University Press.

Steven Weber Deconstructs the Future, Bloc by Bloc

Oct 22, 2019

In his newly published book, Bloc by Bloc, Professor Steven Weber explores the future of the global enterprise as international tensions reach new heights.

Interview with Morgan Ames on “The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child”

Oct 7, 2019

Alumna Krista Mar Seeks Fair Representation in the 2020 Census

Oct 4, 2019

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