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

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

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

May 1, 2020

Professor Josh Blumenstock is leading a team that has received a grant to investigate and address eviction spikes and displacement risks related to COVID-19.