Social & Cultural Studies

Related Faculty

Jenna Burrell

Associate Professor

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

Coye Cheshire

Associate Professor

Trust, social exchange, social psychology, and information exchange

Paul Duguid

Adjunct Professor

The concept of information; the history of information; the history of trademarks and their informational role; critical information studies.

Geoffrey Nunberg

Adjunct Professor

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

Recent Publications

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

Information and Society

Mar 2, 2017

These Aren't the Autonomous Drones You're Looking for: Investigating Privacy Concerns Through Concept Videos

Dec 5, 2016

Philosophy of Computational Social Science

Oct 1, 2016

Social & Cultural Studies news

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.

Information and Society, by Michael Buckland

Buckland’s Information and Society Wins Book of the Year Award

Aug 28, 2018

Information and Society, by emeritus professor Michael Buckland wins ASIS&T’s 2018 Best Information Science Book Award.

Nancy Van House: Periscope, Congress and the aliveness of video

Jun 29, 2016

New Center to Fund Research on Technology, Society, and Policy

Sep 15, 2015

Is technology affecting our mental health? Can technology support free speech and still protect against harassment? How do we embed our biases in big data algorithms? The Center for Technology, Society & Policy wants to explore these questions and more.

New Professor David Bamman is a Scholar of Computational Humanities and Social Sciences

Sep 1, 2015

Bamman’s work applies natural language processing and machine learning techniques to empirical questions in the humanities and social sciences.

Xiao Qiang Named to Foreign Policy Magazine’s Pacific Power Index

Jan 27, 2015

Professor Xiao was named to the list for “for taking on China’s Great Firewall of censorship.”

How Government Documents Enable Transparency and Accountability

Feb 6, 2014

New research presents case studies from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; Rajasthan, India, at the turn of the 20th century; and a present-day Indian welfare system.

Can Open Government Initiatives Combat Corruption?

Oct 8, 2013

Ph.D. student Rajesh Veeraraghavan is analyzing the effects of an Indian “open government” initiative, which uses information transparency to fight corruption in the distribution of government benefits.