3 credits
Spring 2026 Lecture HonorsUpper DivisionScience
In this course, students will study interdisciplinary approaches to technology ethics for responding to today's pressing technological dilemmas in a range of contexts, from healthcare, mass incarceration, and airport security to social media, smart cities, and space travel. Students will grapple with how historical and present-day inequalities, institutional environments, decision-making cultures, and regulatory systems impact the technological design process and distribution of technology's risks and rewards in society. We will ask ourselves how relations of power inform the ways technologies are designed and experienced, as well as how power shapes dominant and insurgent approaches to achieving technological justice. The primary deliverable in this class is for you to conceive of and carry out your own "Technological Justice" Project, based on your interests, passions, and personal and/or professional goals.
Learning Outcomes1Gain an interdisciplinary understanding of critical interventions into tech ethics from both scholarly and popular culture perspectives.
2Recognize and critically analyze how values, goals, assumptions, and ideas of social differences are embedded in technological designs and shape ethics discourse (with particularly attention to race, gender, class, and ability).
3Analyze and reflect critically on the societal impacts of technologies in a variety of contexts.
4Conceive, conduct, and present an original interdisciplinary research project that demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of the relationship between technology, social issues, and justice.
Prerequisites
made by Purdue students.