Gender, Race and Computing

3 Credits

Race and gender have shaped computing from its earliest histories to contemporary debates over bias in search algorithms, surveillance, and AI. As computational processes shape ever more dimensions of everyday life from the personal to the global scale, understanding how they operate and how power operates within them grows ever more important. Combating racism and sexism is not as simple as ensuring the pool of programmers and engineers is more diverse; structures of power are embedded in digital technologies as they are in all aspects of our society, and we must learn to perceive their operation if we hope to transform them. We will examine how racism and sexism operate in the field of computer science and in everyday uses of digital technologies, while studying how feminist and racial justice movements have created alternative approaches. This class is for anyone who wishes to better understand the relationships between digital technology, structural power, and social justice.