Humanity and Technology: Toward a Just and Sustainable Socio-technical World

Catalog description

This course explores the social and ethical ramifications that arise from the interactions of humanity and technology. Drawing on scholarly publications as well as works from popular culture, students interrogate how technologies offer new possibilities for humans to connect with each other, oppress each other, and imagine social relationships. We will focus especially on questions of how humans can harness technology to create more just and sustainable social structures; a major focus, therefore, will be on the ethical implications of technology and the uses to which humans put it. For majors and prospective majors, this course provides an essential upper-level investigation of the ethical and social ramifications that arise from the interactions of humanity and technology. The course trains students to be critical and ethical thinkers and to reflect on the questions of sustainability, justice, and ethics that are expected to drive their capstone project. As an elective for non-majors, this course provides the same training, which may be applied productively to their work in other programs. Counts as a Moral & Ethical Reasoning course.