HCRT-380: Race, Technology, & the Human

With the recent rise of predictive policing and algorithmic racism in the United States, the relationship between race and technology has come to the fore. Yet, technological development, forms of racialization, and related speculations on what defines the human have been central to the development of modernity since plantation slavery and European colonization. The course will ask students to think about the ways that technological development is never neutral and has always been connected to economics and labor, histories of race, gender, and colonialism, as well as hierarchical conceptions of what it means to be human and who is included in that term. In doing so we will look at a wide array of historical documents, art works, films, and literature and consider the role of art making and aesthetic practices in both conceptualizing those histories and imagining worlds otherwise to them.