Race, Gender, and Technology in Everyday Life

Catalog description

Using examples from everyday life, this course investigates how preferences for certain technologies are shaped by social arrangements that reflect power relations. By considering the origins, materiality, and practices of use for a diverse range of technologies, from the digital to the reproductive, this course will interrogate the socio-political and ethical fallout of consumer, infrastructural, personal, legal, and medical technologies. Reading about the history and anthropology of technology, watching films that engage the reception and making of science and technology, and imagining the future of technological solutions, this course analyzes how technologies are used to create and maintain boundaries around social categories of race, nation, sex, gender, and ability.