Social & Cultural Studies

Related Faculty

Morgan Ames

Assistant Professor of Practice
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

Adjunct Professor

how systematically excluded communities adapt technology, algorithmic fairness and transparency, human control over algorithms, ethnography

Coye Cheshire

Professor

Trust, social exchange, social psychology, and information exchange

Recent Publications

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.

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

Social & Cultural Studies news

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.

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.