Digital media technologies often seem to make the world a smaller place. But the capacity for many of us to chat, Skype, or share media with friends who are thousands of miles away can sometimes hide the ways that digital experience differs with gender, race, class, and location. This course explores the differential production of digital cultures through race, gender, and their intersections with other structures of identity and power. We’ll learn about the ways in which practices of media consumption, design, production, and critique connect privileged and disprivileged users in the US and elsewhere. We’ll look at our own position within global circuits of labor and as participants in the ways race, gender, disability, and class are represented and experienced online. And we’ll discover and experiment with the practices that critical artists, thinkers, hackers, and media makers use as they work to creatively transform this unequal landscape.
There are no required texts to purchase for this course; readings will be available online.