Communication and the Quantification of Social Identity

1 Course Unit

While social identity has historically been more of a concern for the qualitative and critical branches of communication research than for quantitative researchers, recent scholarly and political developments have raised its profile among the latter group. This course will examine the past, present, and future of how social identities–including race, ethnicity, gender, class, political ideology, religion, sexual orientation, neurodiversity, and others–have been quantified in communication research and other social sciences. Among other questions, we will read about and discuss how racial categories have evolved over the centuries and in different countries, the emergence and institutionalization of gender categories beyond the male/female binary, how available options for religious affiliation on closed-ended forms has privileged some faiths at the expense of others, and how effective AI has been at automatically detecting different social identities based on given names and physical appearances. The overall goal is to point the way toward more thoughtful and inclusive methods of reducing the rich complexity of various social identities into analytically useful categories. 1 Course Unit