Gender, Sexuality, and Digital Technologies (374-0-20)
Topic
Imagining the Internet
Instructors
Jillana B Enteen
847/491-4337
Crowe 1-113
Office Hours: by appointment
Meeting Info
Fisk Hall 114: Mon, Wed 12:30PM - 1:50PM
Overview of class
Much recent fiction, film and theory are concerned with representing the internet and the World Wide Web. Sometimes cyberspace is depicted as a continuation of previous media such as television, cinema or telephone, but often it is envisioned as a new frontier. This course will examine the ways in which virtual media appears in cultural discourses. We consider how technological objects and tools participate in shaping elements of our culture that may appear natural, logical, or timeless. We will look examine films predicting the internet, cyberpunk fiction predating the www, and early websites from many sources. In addition, this quarter we will consider various generative AI programs, assessing their strengths and weaknesses. Our guiding questions will include the following: In what ways are these narratives shaping collective perceptions of the internet? How have virtual technologies challenged experiences of language, gender, community and identity? Following a Cultural Studies model for inquiry, this course will be project-based and experiential. Your attendance and participation are mandatory. No experience needed, only a willingness to take risks and share work.
Learning Objectives
This class fulfills the Ethics and Evaluative Thinking Foundational Discipline, the Global Perspectives Overlay on power, justice, and equity, and the Advanced Expressions Overlay.
The Ethics and Evaluative Thinking Foundational Courses are designed to foster the intellectual autonomy students will need to thrive as thinkers and agents in an increasingly complex world.
Students will:
• Attain the conceptual tools needed to recognize and understand prescriptive issues, questions, and claims, and to distinguish them from descriptive issues, questions, and claims • Identify the values presupposed by an outlook or discourse
• Recognize the complexity of many ethical issues and consider a variety of alternative resolutions and the reasons for holding them
• Appreciate the insights available in one or more intellectual or cultural traditions
• Reflect upon one's own answers to evaluative questions, the presuppositions informing them, and the reasons for supporting them
• Engage in respectful, rigorous and constructive dialogue concerning evaluative issues and communicate thoughtfully and clearly about them For the Global Perspectives Overlay, this course will address the geographic and environmental conditions, historical and present social and political structures, linguistic and cultural formations of groups and individuals primarily outside the United States, focusing on the interaction among cultures. Students will:
• Engage with scholarship describing the historical and contemporary structures, processes, human-environment relationships, and practices that shape global intercultural relations among groups, cultural traditions, and/or nations, focusing primarily on those outside the United States.
• Explore the social, political, environmental, and cultural bases of these groups, traditions, and/or nations, and how they constitute themselves and are constituted by others.
• Generate the knowledge and develop the skills necessary to grapple with key issues. The following list of possible issues is not intended to be exhaustive but illustrative: appropriation, art, borders, colonialism, diaspora, diplomacy, education, empire, the environment, ethnicity, exploration, health, indigeneity, immigration, migration, nationality, refugees, cultural reception, sustainability, statelessness, travel, and war. • Analyze how these and other terms intersect and overlap, with attention to the dynamism and variety of experiences and expressions. For the Advanced Expressions Overlay, students will:
• Understand and emulate field-specific conventions and protocols for communicating findings to a range of audiences
• Develop the relationship between their voice and field-specific norms of expression, aiming to achieve control over persuasive rhetoric.
Teaching Method
Class Participation, Case studies, writing assignments, data visualization presentations, a final analysis using the Axes of course objectives.
Evaluation Method
Attendance, class participations, midterm presentation, peer assessment, final research presentation and paper
Class Attributes
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area