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

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.

Ph.D. Student Honored for Research on Internet Use in Rural China

Mar 27, 2013

Elisa Oreglia honored for the best graduate student paper on China and inner Asia at the Association for Asian Studies annual conference.

The Grass-Mud Horse, Online Censorship, and China's National Identity

Dec 5, 2012

Adjunct professor Xiao Qiang documents the spread of subversive online wordplay and its implications for China’s sense of national identity and political future.

Elisa Oreglia Profiles Rural Chinese Internet Users

May 24, 2012

New research by Ph.D. student Elisa Oreglia looks under the surface of rural Chinese Internet use and reveals a rich nuanced relationship between older, less-educated Chinese villagers, computers, and the Internet.

Ghana, Online Scamming, and the Internet’s Broken Promises

Apr 27, 2012

New research by Jenna Burrell looks under the surface of Internet culture in Ghana, exploring why many Ghanaians have struggled to form connections with foreigners and to share in the prosperity of the information age.

I School Scholars Present at Computer-Supported Cooperative Work Conference

Feb 9, 2012

Two I School Articles Featured in Daedalus Journal

Nov 9, 2011