TEACHING

I teach a variety of undergraduate and graduate classes in social media and communication technologies. I get many requests for my syllabi and teaching materials, so I have made the most recent versions available here.

My general philosophy of undergraduate assignments is: don’t assign anything you don’t want to read. I am tired of reading response papers, compare-n-contrast, etc. and I like coming up with new assignments that use new technologies, require undergrads to use social media they might encounter in a job or internship, allow students with different skill sets to shine (e.g. a student who isn’t a great writer might be an awesome video creator or podcaster). Such assignments require a lot of scaffolding; they often require you to act as tech support; and sometimes they fail spectacularly, but they are memorable and (when they work) very effective.

Undergraduate Classes

Networked Societies (The Amazon Class, first-year undergraduate)

Description

The “network” is the 21st century’s most popular metaphor, used to describe relationships, economies, the movement of people and goods around the globe, technological infrastructures, and politics. In this class, we will delve into the relationship between networked digital technologies (social media, video games, server farms, gig economy apps like Uber, etc.); networked logistics, finances, and labor; and the ways we think about ourselves, our communities, our careers, our possessions and our futures. Specifically, this semester we will be using amazon.com, the world’s biggest retailer (and most valuable US company), to examine the impact of digital and communication technologies on labor, supply chains, publishing, retail, urban planning, web hosting, infrastructures, and gaming, to name but a few. The goal of this seminar is to provide participants with a set of critical and theoretical tools to interpret the complexity of everyday life—from algorithms to big data to the internet of things. We will do a lot of reading, try out a variety of new networked technologies, and debate their ethical ramifications in class, culminating in a series of podcasts on technology and society. This class is a great fit for sci-fi nerds, Black Mirror fans, social media gurus, gamers, tech enthusiasts, or anyone who likes thinking deeply about the impacts of technology locally and globally.

Social Media (300 level undergraduate)

Description

This class examines the relationship between society and the current crop of computer-mediated communication technologies known as “social media,” including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and more. These technologies are often regarded with fear or awe; the purpose of this class is to break down the mythologies of social media and develop methods of analysis and critical understanding. To do this, we will draw from a broad range of social theory including science and technology studies (STS), communication theory, linguistics, cultural studies, and media anthropology to critically evaluate the impact of social media on relationships, activism, branding, politics, news media, and identity. We will focus on the “sociotechnical,” the relationship between the technical affordances of a website/technology and the social norms of a user community, and how to use this to understand emerging technologies (and social media that doesn’t exist yet!). Students will also gain basic practical social media skills: understanding the landscape, learning “best practices,” and using different social media technologies throughout the class to create and propagate content.

Please note: I have pitched this class up and down depending on the composition. My first semester at UNC, the class had a lot of freshmen and sophomores, so the syllabus reflects that. My Fordham classes were primarily upper-classmen, so the syllabus reflects that too.

The Selfie Class (undergraduate, modular, modifiable for all levels)

Description

The Selfie Class is a collaborative project between 12 academics from around the world. It is a six-week class (including syllabus and teaching exercises) for university students studying selfies, rooted in critical theory, media studies, feminist theory, post-colonial theory and science & technology studies. The class is designed for teachers, students, or anyone on the internet wishing to think critically about the use of “selfies” in popular culture. Full Description

Digital Media & Cyberculture (200 level undergrad)

Description

With the exponential global growth of the internet, all forms of digital media– apps, websites, social media, mobile telephony, video games– have increased and multiplied. This class looks at the cultures of this new digital landscape, using cultural theory, sociology, and ethnographic methods to examine and analyze popular internet culture, self-expression, relationships, social practices, and emerging technological forms. Students will learn the basics of digital ethnography, and be able to competently leverage cultural analysis to understand digital artifacts.

  • What types of online culture exist, and what are some patterns or themes we see appearing and reappearing in discussions of digital culture?
  • How do we study online culture? What is “ethnography,” and what does it look like online?
  • What is the relationship between the digital and other forms of cultural expression?

The final assignment for this class was to create a YouTube video based on their ethnographic explorations in class- they could work as a team. It was really fun and the results were fantastic.

Down the Rabbit Hole: Combating Far-Right Radicalization and Disinformation on US Social Platforms (Advanced undergraduate seminar or MA-level class)

Description

The last half-decade has been characterized by great public concern over the wider uptake of formerly-fringe ideas, such as conspiracy theories, violent racism, male supremacy, and anti-vaccination mythologies, and their correspondence with the popularity of social media platforms. Such ideas decrease institutional trust, undermine public health, and even result in horrific incidents of political violence, such as those in Buffalo, El Paso, Christchurch, and Charleston (among others). The primary frame used to understand the uptake of these ideas is radicalization, a concept born of the post-9/11 focus on Jihadi political violence, which is not always useful in contemporary contexts. This class situates online radicalization in the United States context and asks students to consider how Trust & Safety teams at social media platforms and US government regulators should tackle this problem. We will review scholarship from sociology, history, anthropology, communication, terrorism studies, and political science to critique “radicalization” and understand how people are socialized into viewpoints via social media. We will examine current social platform policies, global countering violent extremism (CVE) efforts, and US, Canada, UK, and EU policies around political violence to formulate possible recommendations and best practices.

I taught this class at Princeton as an advanced seminar in their School of Public and International Affairs.

Graduate Classes

Critical Disinformation Studies

Description

In the aftermath of Trump’s election and the UK’s exit from the European Union, journalists, academics, and political elites espoused enormous concerns about “fake news,” disinformation, and the “post-truth era.” This, in turn, gave rise to a primarily philanthropy-funded apparatus of “Big Disinformation” research. Half a decade later, we are no closer to solving this thorny set of problems, but we are better informed about them—or are we? This class examines disinformation and related topics from a critical perspective that emphasizes history, power, and politics. Rather than seeing disinformation as something novel that emerged alongside social media and contemporary populist movements, we will contextualize it within a long history of propaganda, public relations, and media campaigns used to maintain dominant power relations. Focusing on disinformation as a primary way in which whiteness, heteropatriarchy, and empire have been established and reinforced, we will position today’s media ecosystem on a timeline and discover what we can learn from the lessons of the past. Conceptualizing disinformation as a form of knowledge, we will examine how it is constructed, how it spreads, and why certain disinformation narratives are taken up so widely. Drawing from scholarship in communication, media studies, computational social science, science and technology studies, sociology, HCI, and related disciplines, the class provides a strong foundation in the sociotechnical approach to understanding disinformation.

Communication and the Social (core PhD seminar, co-taught with Aaron Shapiro)

Description

Communication and the Social is one of three core classes in the Communication PhD program. Along with Communication and the Political and Communication and the Discursive, these classes are designed to introduce students to the rich, varied history of Communication as a discipline. Survey classes have strengths and weaknesses; no class can represent the entirety of the discipline, but we have conceptualized this iteration of 705 to introduce you to perspectives and theories we consider foundational.  Society is constituted through communication. The field of Communication has interrogated and theorized virtually every social form, including the self, interpersonal relationships, the creation and maintenance of culture, organizations, groups, and publics. Both your professors are trained in media and technology studies, and so we consider the mediation of such forms and relationships through broadcast media, social media, and other technologies of mediation, broadly conceived. Social science disciplines such as sociology and anthropology have historically neglected, or at least undertheorized, these aspects of society (the nascent subfields of media sociology and media anthropology are fairly minor). As a result, communication scholars are strongly positioned to understand the impact of communication on culture and society, analyze the social aspects of communication, and, especially, interrogate the complex relationship between sociality and mediated technologies.  Thus, this seminar brings together readings from communication and media studies with other disciplines to ask: What is the relationship between “communication” and the social? How does communication, as a discipline, conceptualize the relationship between communication and society? How do we know what we do about the social? How do we imagine the social? How have other fields and disciplines thought about these concepts?

Feminism & Technology

Description

This class will examine feminist theories of technology and read a number of example studies that use feminist principles, methodologies, and praxis. While “technology” is writ large, the class will generally focus on media and digital technologies. We will take an intersectional approach to feminism, using gender not as a primary lens but as one alongside race, class, and sexuality (among others) to examine how technology researchers de-center hegemonic perspectives when investigating technology. To that end, we will read ethnographic and historical accounts of various technologies and discuss a variety of projects—some successful, others less so—that involve queer, postcolonial and feminist approaches to design and deployment.  This class draws from feminist philosophy of technology, science and technology studies (STS), human-computer interaction (HCI), feminist technology studies (FTS), material culture studies, the social history of technology (SHOT), and internet studies, among others. I invite students to keep an open mind about the interdisciplinarity of the works we will discuss.

Note: This was my first graduate seminar and I would probably assign more books and fewer journal articles next time. I would add Wacjman’s Feminism Confronts Technology right after the Harding. I would assign the entire Harding. I have more Thoughts. If you’re teaching a similar class and want to hear them, email me.