Communication 797TE - ST-Tech Ethics & Media Justice

This course examines the political and moral ramifications of technological and data-driven innovations, with a particular concern on the digital harms experienced by minority populations and vulnerable communities. The course invites reflection on diverse normative ideals that should guide tech platforms, regulators, and workers toward social arrangements based on care, hospitality, and responsibility. We engage with normative theory in communication and media studies (i.e., Chouliaraki, Peters, Silverstone) and current debates about data justice and AI ethics (i.e., Couldry, Crawford, Dencik). Adopting a global approach, we review harms of new technologies in social context: from algorithmic injustice against ethnic minorities to the cold solutionism of humanitarian technologies to the deliberative decay caused by "troll armies" and "fake news". Finally, we consider the challenges we face as researchers in our fractious political moment: what are the risks of designing collaborative interventions and socially engaged research about digital technology? What are the ethics of representing perpetrators and social media "bad actors"? How do we write about and examine our own complicity?

This class is open to students at either the Master's or Doctoral academic levels only This class is open to graduate students in Communication and other departments, particularly those with backgrounds in moral philosophy, internet policy, and the anthropology of humanitarianism.