Critical Conversations: bridging pathways forward to greater understanding and creative solutions.

SS-254TP Technology and Culture

3 Credits

Do you want to understand how science and technology shape the world in which we live? Have you ever wondered how they influence art, religion, and politics or have been shaped by race, gender, and class? Are you curious about how we decide what counts as science and what doesn't? What about what technoscience actually looks like in practice? In this course, we will explore science and technology not as forces beyond human control, but as activities engaged in by people across time and space. We'll talk about everything from the history of human dissection to questions of justice in the design of machine learning systems to contemporary debates about climate change, analyzing these practices through new critical lenses. We will also spend time discussing why it is important for us as designers, artists, scholars, and citizens to ask these big question and explore how answering them might help us change the future of science and engineering.