By studying critical computing and data literacy, students will be able to discern when and where certain computing systems do and do not work, and how stakeholders can take sociopolitical or long-term human/societal factors into consideration when designing and assessing such systems. This understanding will be based on case studies of societal harms, environmental impacts, and hegemonic stakes, and will particularly examine instances when computing practices may have contributed to complex social issues. Examples include the disastrous automation of Indiana’s welfare system examined in Eubanks’s Automating Inequality and the UK labor policies that suppressed female participation in the CS workforce described in Hicks’s Programmed Inequality.
We will use critical fields of inquiry to guide the process of drawing conceptual and practical lessons out of these case studies, such as the discriminatory findings and fairness recommendations in Buolamwini and Gerbu’s Gender Shades facial recognition research. Such fields include, but are not limited to, critical race theory and anti-racism, feminism and gender studies, queer theory, postcolonial and decolonial studies, ethnic studies, migration studies, critical international relations theory, science and technology studies, platform studies, environmental and energy humanities, surveillance studies, critical criminology, social movement studies, critical geography, and critical legal studies.
The variety of courses in Yale College that situate computing within these broader social contexts have been growing significantly. However, there is no overarching pedagogical structure for students interested in humanistic inquiry into structural inequity, historical contingency, and the military-industrial interests that have influenced computing research and its deployment in the wider world. Our initiative means to provide this structure, and root it in an interdisciplinary setting between Yale’s Computer Science and humanities and humanistic social sciences departments, and professional schools.