What is “digital” about digital media? This course will help students understand why it is hard to define and conceptualize the “digital.” Some scholars conceptualize the digital through its traits and structures only, and treat it as though it is abstract, neutral, and outside the realms of human biases. On the other hand, some scholars treat the digital as a politicized space closely connected to offline social bias, particular cultures, and socio-political structures. This course encourages students to think critically think about the diverse experiences and contested imaginations of ‘the digital' across different groups. Students will explore complexities such as how the digital space is a site where older and newer forms of power operate – that is, where hegemony and dominant practices are both reinforced and contested. The goal is to demonstrate the constant ordering and reordering of the digital, which makes it difficult to conceptualize using a single/universal theoretical framework.

Media technologies and law play a central role in shaping norms and regulating behavior in our everyday lives. This course explores how media technologies and law are closely related and shape one another. Law and legal proceedings legitimize media technologies, but also demonstrate its limitations. On the other hand, various forms of media technologies – print, broadcast, electronic– emerge in different historical contexts to visibilize the biases and limitations of law, courtrooms, and legal procedures. Students will explore the complex relationship between media technology and law in different contexts worldwide to think critically about questions related to rights, power, and justice. 

Some broader questions throughout the course are: Is the relationship between media technology and law universal across the globe? What are the theoretical points of overlap and departure? How are these two sites/concepts tied to colonialism and race? How do modern epistemic frameworks and modern science connect law and media technologies? How does state law shape the design and use of media technology? How do tech industries in turn influence state law? How does new media impact the architecture of the courtroom, legal proceedings, and affect? How does the intersection between law and media technology reinforce power on marginalized communities and how do these communities counter dominant power?

Digital tools and techniques are now being employed to address scholarly inquiries within the humanities. For some time, various disciplines in the humanities have scrutinized the limitations of digital methods, particularly those related to statistics, analytics, data mining, and automation. This course will explore how scholars in the humanities employ digital methods in their research, while also critically evaluating the methodologies in question. What benefits do digital tools offer? What limitations persist? What are the ethical implications? Can qualitative and digital methods be effectively combined in humanities research? Students will gain a nuanced understanding of the landscape of digital humanities research, thinking with postcolonial and decolonial theories of epistemology and power.

This course is divided in three themes: 

1. Histories and Imaginations of the Internet: will explore how different actors imagined the internet during the early phases and how its rhetoric and regulation developed throughout time. Students will also learn about alternate narratives from subaltern standpoints, i.e., how marginalized groups contributed to the rise of the Internet, which are overlooked in dominant history and conversations. In addition, this course will discuss the development of the internet in the non-West to have a broader picture. Analyzing diverse debates about “values” and “regulation” of the Internet demonstrates the complexity and paradoxes of digitality. 

2. Design and Infrastructure: will study the structure of the Internet: numbers, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding. Students will learn about affordances, i.e., how database logic and algorithmic systems prescribe online interactions and influence the construct of knowledge, identities, communities, and publics, which blur boundaries between online and offline spaces. 

3. Users of the Internet: will dismantle binaries between producers and consumers of the Internet. Labor transforms in the digital age and users are part of capitalist digital economies; users traverse in transnational spaces and navigate across webs of power relations that are tied to dominant socio-politics and historical processes. The goal is to think beyond domination/resistance frameworks and focus on networks, i.e., situate positionality within the structure(s) of power in order to critically think about agency, freedom/regulation of the Internet, and “digitality.”

Media and communication studies theorists grapple with understanding the relationship between media/technologies and their audience/users. Dominant knowledge and discourse impact research objectives and methodologies, which shape our understanding of the concepts and, in turn, their relationship. This course will help students understand the abstract conceptualization and construct of “audience” and “user,” thinking critically about the influence of global and political power, pedagogy, capitalism, political economy, colonial and postcolonial structures in shaping these concepts. The aim is to challenge prevailing Euro-American ideologies, positivist and linear narratives, and notions of “media effects” that still dictate much of media/technology and communication theories today. 

 On the one hand, there are dominant and institutionalized forms of power that shape media landscape, infrastructure, and content; on the other hand, audience/users have agency, resist, and influence the design and semiotic configuration of media and technology. The goal is to go beyond top down/ bottom up narratives and focus on how interaction between diverse individuals, groups, producers, and institutions shape the concept(s) of “audiences” and “users.” 

 This course encourages students to question and problematize the notion of “audience” and “user” and rethink concepts such as “agency,” “resistance,” and “power” in media theory and communication studies. 

Law and technology play a central role in shaping norms and regulating behavior in society. This course explores the intersection between law, technology, and society to critically examine questions related to rights and justice. Law and legal proceedings legitimize technology, but also expose their limitations. On the other hand, various forms of technologies ­ such as print, broadcast, and digital visibilize the biases and limitations of law, courtrooms, and legal procedures. Exploring legal anthropology and media law scholarship, students will explore different forms of technology and legal contexts around the globe to examine the discourse of law, democracy, freedom, equality, and power.