Teaching Tech Justice

Affiliated Courses:

HONR 399: Technological Justice

Spring Semester 2022

Instructor: Dr. Lindsay Weinberg

*Open to all students. Students with a GPA below 3.0 will need to contact Lweinber@purdue.edu to register*

In this course, students will study interdisciplinary approaches to technology ethics for responding to today’s pressing technological dilemmas in a range of contexts, from healthcare, mass incarceration, and airport security, to social media, smart cities, and space travel. Students will grapple with how historical and present-day inequalities, institutional environments, decision-making cultures, and regulatory systems impact the technological design process and distribution of technology’s risks and rewards in society. We will ask ourselves how relations of power inform the ways technologies are designed and experienced, as well as how power shapes dominant and insurgent approaches to achieving technological justice.

HONR 399: Surveillance and Society

Fall Semester 2022

Instructor: Dr. Lindsay Weinberg

*Open to all students. Students with a GPA below 3.0 will need to contact Lweinber@purdue.edu to register*

This course introduces students to critical approaches to the study of surveillance in the United States in a global context. Students will consider historical, feminist, and critical race approaches to the study of surveillance, and examine the use of surveillance by government and commercial entities. Students will also study the ways that popular discourse, literature, film, and art critically engage with the practice of surveillance. Ultimately, students will be able to articulate how surveillance is enacted through various technologies in difference spaces, under varying conditions, and in ways that enable regimes of capital accumulation and state control.