ENGL 375 and ENGL 561 are now real, existing courses (scroll down for the original posts and proposals). The process of designing new courses and bringing them into existence is an exciting collaboration. Each of these new courses comes into being because of a leap of faith by students, who bring a willingness to think and create an experimental intellectual space together. Thank you to everyone who made these courses real! I’m revising and updating these for a Fall 2022 re-rerun.

Meanwhile, I’m planning for 2023-24. Media studies scholar Richard Cavell has been working for a long time to bring into existence the Centre for Media Research. Looking forward to its launching next year, I’m proposing a graduate class (cross-listed between the iSchool and English): Media & Misinformation: The History of Truth from Pseudoscience to Propaganda.

Here’s a plan (co-authored with Richard Cavell):

The course draws on topics and sub-fields that have gained compelling relevance in the last decade:

• New Media Studies and Network Cultures
• Media Archeology and Infrastructure Studies
• Science and Technology Studies
• Digital Geographies
• Informatics
• Feminist, Indigenous, and Decolonial Media Studies

Our global future increasingly depends on our ability to acknowledge the democratization of information while asserting the need for ethical cross-cultural commitments to evaluating that information. The new Media Studies that we propose to elaborate is central to this new space of educational innovation.

The course that we seek to develop asks the central question: In what ways does the digital “disrupt” former modes of representation and communication, and how should we address the global crisis in communication? Examining the rise of digital media and its consequences, we examine the ways in which the late twentieth century’s global, near-instantaneous circulation of popular interventions brought past issues of race, gender, Orientalism, and post-colonial geopolitics into newly immediate political configurations. How do new circulations of digital media disrupt, resist, and rewrite earlier forms of media theory? To understand the broader social meanings of mediated forms of political practice, our case studies will not remain at the purely theoretical level, but will put media studies into conversation with Indigenous studies, Feminist informatics, anti-racist technical practice, and decolonial politics.

Do you work in this field, and would you like to be a collaborator? Comments and reading recommendations are welcome.

ENGL 375 Global South Connections

New course, Winter 2021 Term 1

This course investigates the global connections between politics, development and literature sparked by the wave of decolonization that occurred in the middle of the twentieth century.  Taking up South Asian decolonization as an exemplary case study, we will read speculative fiction from the region, paired with essays on Global South histories of decolonization, development, and political radicalism. What did decolonization mean, politically and culturally? What kinds of literary and cultural movements did it inspire? How did dreams of political freedom influence theories of utopia and experiments in fiction? We will read texts by Nalo Hopkinson, Uppinder Mehan, Amitav Ghosh, Mimi Mondal, Vandana Singh, Sami Shah, Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Robin D. G. Kelley, and others.

Are there speculative fiction writers you’d like to see included? Is there a particular political movement you’d like to learn more about? I’m reviewing several candidates for assigned reading including unusual books from small presses like Maia Ramnath’s Decolonizing Anarchism (AK Press, 2011) and well known transnational studies like Robeson Taj Frazier’s The East is Black (Duke Univ Press, 2014). There’s space for requests until 1 August 2021.

The History and Politics of Information  — LIBR 569B Cross-listed with ENGL 561B, Fall 2021

We understand ourselves to be living in the Age of Information. How do scholars, activists, and artists understand the nature of the “revolution” that brought this Age into being? How has it reconstituted subjectivity, society, economics, and geopolitics? What changes has this brought to the arts, humanities, and culture? Examining the rise of digital information and its consequences, we ask whether the information revolution has drawn historical patterns of inequality (including race, gender, Orientalism, and post-colonial geopolitics) into new political configurations. This course is an introduction to the transnational politics of information. We pursue a long historical view, a global political perspective, and a cultural analysis.

These are some of the texts we are likely to engage with:

1. Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity, 2019.
2. Brock, André L. Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures. 2020. NYU Press.
3. Broussard, Meredith Artificial Unintelligence, 2018
4. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong 2021. Discriminating data: correlation, neighborhoods, and the new politics of recognition.
5. Crawford, Kate. 2021. Atlas of AI: power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence.
6. Hicks, Mar. 2018. Programmed inequality: how Britain discarded women technologists and lost its edge in computing. MIT Press
7. Irani, Lilly. Chasing Innovation. Princeton University Press, 2019
8. McIlwain, Charlton D. Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice from the Afronet to Black Lives Matter, Oxford University Press, 2020.
9. Mullaney, Thomas S., Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, and Kavita Philip. 2021. Your computer is on fire. MIT Press
10. O’Neil, Cathy. 2017. Weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. Great Britain: Penguin Books.
11. Oldenziel, Ruth. Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014
12. Roberts, Sarah T. Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.
13. Turner, Fred. 2015. The democratic surround: multimedia and American liberalism from World War II to the psychedelic sixties. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press

Professor Kavita Philip is President’s Excellence Chair in Network Cultures at The University of British Columbia, Professor of English Language and Literatures, and a Faculty Associate in Geography.

Dr. Philip does research and writes on various aspects of science, technology, and society. Recently she has explored the networks of connection between colonial history, postcolonial studies, histories of environment and technology, and science fiction studies. She has a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell, an M.S. in Physics from the University of Iowa, and a B.Sc. in Physics (with Chemistry and Mathematics minors) from Stella Maris College, India. She comes to UBC via the University of California, Irvine, where she was Professor of History, and affiliated Professor of Informatics. She began her teaching career at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she founded the group Science, Technology, and Race, and taught in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture’s undergraduate major in Science, Technology and Culture. You can find more at http://kavitaphilip.info/

Follow this blog for upcoming courses and other student-oriented news. You can reach Dr. Philip at kavita.philip@ubc.ca

Draft course descriptions below (please note that courses are subject to change depending on the circumstances):

Approaches to Media Studies : Digital Disruptions

The digital revolution seemed to alter global media production and consumption in some fundamental ways – but what are those? To better understand the media changes we are living through, this class will put “new” digital media into dialogue with “older” mediated technologies including eighteenth-century automata, the nineteenth-century telegraph, and twentieth-century television. Further interrogating the rise of digital media and its consequences, we ask whether the late twentieth century’s global, near-instantaneous circulation of media brought issues of race, gender, orientalism, and post-colonial geopolitics into new political configurations. Do new circulations of digital media disrupt, resist, and rewrite earlier forms of media theory? To understand the broader social meanings of mediated forms of political practice, we put media studies into conversation with feminist informatics, anti-racist technical practice, and postcolonial theory. Readings will include authors such as Stuart Hall on race and media cultures, Jeffrey Sconce on haunted media histories, Lucy Suchman on militarist games,  Lisa Parks on media infrastructure, Irani and Silberman on Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Approaches to STS:   Decolonizing Technoscience

Structural relations between colonial power and scientific knowledge production have shaped political and cultural life since the nineteenth century. Objectivity, facts, experiment, and the scientific method gained global authority and political power at a time when European powers dominated much of the non-western world. Even as decolonization, anti-imperial movements, and neoliberalism variously shifted global political relations over the next two centuries, scientific objectivity was often believed to be neutral, and held up as aspirational for developing nations. Today, activist and scholarly calls to decolonize knowledge force us to rethink the relationship between technoscientific practice and political power. Histories of empire, decolonization, and development have been drawn into conversation with the history, philosophy, and anthropology of science and technology. This course offers a graduate-level introduction to these fraught but urgent conversations. Readings include writing in colonial history, development studies, informatics, feminist science studies, and science fiction, via the work of STS scholars such as Donna Haraway and Warwick Anderson, historians of science Marwa Elshakry, Gabrielle Hecht, Lorraine Daston, and Thomas Kuhn; geographers Gillian Hart and Neil Smith; and many writers whose names may be less widely known for reasons connected to the failures of decolonial politics. Through widely interdisciplinary reading, we will seek to understand the significance of the “decolonizing turn” in technical practice and scientific knowledge production. Students from all disciplinary backgrounds are welcome to bring a critical, open, engaged perspective.