DISCO Courses
The DISCO Network isn’t just a research group. It’s also a collective of teachers who use their research as a critical lens through which students learn about the past and present of digital technology to brainstorm more equitable futures. DISCO courses are interdisciplinary and multimodal: they span five university campuses and are cross-listed with departments as wide-ranging as Communication, English, Film and Media Studies, Art and Design, and American Studies. Because of their extensive reach, our classes draw students from across the humanities, social sciences, arts, and STEM fields at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, many of whom are eager to take what they’re learning and put it into practice within and beyond academia. From trolling and disinformation; how users perform and experience disability online; light-skin bias in color technologies; and the historical entanglements of sneakers and Black bodies, DISCO classes explore how racism, ableism, and sexism are built into the digital infrastructures and discourses that surround us and invite students to imagine alternative possibilities.
DISCO courses also stand out not just for what subjects they tackle, but for how they’re taught. Our faculty make anti-racist pedagogy and accessibility a priority in both virtual and physical classroom spaces. In doing so, we model to our students what a more equitable and accessible classroom community can look like. Many of our assignments are creative or break the mold of the traditional essay format. Whether students are designing a parody of Pantone’s Color of the Year that offers a critique of a cultural phenomenon, writing a love letter to a media object, or keeping a “BS-log” of obfuscating rhetoric they encounter online, these endeavors push them to think differently about the world through experimentation, critical media literacy, and play.
DISCO courses make it clear that race, disability, and sexuality are not “special topics” added on to a larger syllabus structure. Questions of ethics, justice, and power are at the core of how digital technology has shaped our understanding of the world and ourselves—and in turn, who gets to be considered “human.”
Black Discourse and Digital Communication
Taught by Catherine Knight Steele at the University of Maryland - Winter 2023
In this course we walk through the long history of Black folks use of technology—starting with oral cultures and landing on social media. We’ll consider how digital media can serve as a site of oppression and freedom.
Studying Digital Humanities
Taught by Rianna Walcott at the University of Maryland - Spring 2024
How we study something can be just as important as what we study. This course introduces a variety of methods and approaches to collecting and interpreting digital materials. By drawing on different case studies and platforms – from hashtag mapping on audiovisual platforms such as TikTok or Instagram, to narrative analysis on YouTube, to discourse analysis on X – this course challenges students to think critically about forming research questions, issues of access and ethics in data collection, and organising and presenting research.
This course takes a hands-on approach to research methods. Expect to experiment with methods and digital tools through workshops and group projects, and to apply materials from class to your own interests!
Bullshit & Digital Rhetoric
Taught by Remi Yergeau at the University of Michigan - Fall 2023
Trolling. Disinformation campaigns. Ad hominem attacks. Gaslighting. Obfuscation and pedantry. These things, and more, are modes of address that have come to typify popular representations of social media discourse. In this class, we’ll examine the theory and practice of bullshit as it relates to digital rhetoric and online circulation. Among other questions, we’ll consider how and where manipulation, truth, and ethos mediate what we popularly describe or understand as bullshit. We’ll think together about how complex appeals to lived experience and alternative data circulate among certain communities of practice online, with particular attention paid to anti-vaccination discourse. We’ll not only examine what it means to argue on the interwebs, but we’ll also ask what it means to imagine digital rhetorical practices that center on questions of ethics, justice, and power.
Science, Technology, & Race
Taught by Kevin Winstead at Georgia Tech
What is the role of race in science and technology? How does race shape the design and social impact of scientific inquiry and technological innovation, such as AI-based facial recognition, black-box credit models in credit and finance, and applicant tracking systems in recruitment and hiring? Can the deployment of computerized technology transcend and address racial inequalities in areas such as public health, migration, labor, and reproductive rights? Our course will analyze these questions from an interdisciplinary perspective, emphasizing the legacies and realities of racism and colonialism within scientific inquiry and technological development that continue to expand and inhibit life chances. We will engage with a wide range of intellectual and creative works, such as “Ex Machina” and “Gattaca”.
Race and the Technological Imagination
Taught by Huan He at the University of Michigan
In our digital world, we are constantly engaging in acts of the imagination—from the gamer we assume to be on the other side of the screen, to the personification of AI algorithms, to myths of innovation progress and technological benevolence, to who is included in utopic and dystopic visions of technological futures. Through literature, art, and theory, this course explores how technologies and technological worlds are produced through imaginative techniques, usually with real-world consequences. We will look at how ideas of race and social difference (including gender, sexuality, and disability) reflect how we imagine information technologies, shaping how technical systems are embedded within human worlds.
Feeling Digital
Taught by Jeff Nagy at the University of Michigan
We’re used to thinking about digital technologies in terms of data and information. But digital systems also measure, police, and monetize our feelings and how we give them voice. In this class, we’ll look at digital technologies not just as information systems but as emotional ones. We’ll investigate how they became a home for age-old feelings like joy, sadness, and shame — and we’ll explore how they might be prompting new ones.
From Prisms to Pantone: Color, Race, and Technology
Taught by Lida Zeitlin-Wu at the University of Michigan
In this class, we will take a deep dive into the rich, fascinating, and sometimes overwhelming topic of color as it is mediated by technology, culture, and politics. By doing so, we’ll open up a larger conversation about how technology shapes our perception of the world and ourselves. A major conceptual thread running throughout the course will be around the complex relationship between color and race. Throughout the semester, we’ll look critically at the ways in which color technologies from photography to biometrics have historically been calibrated in a way that privileges whiteness and perpetuates racial bias.
Black Social Movements, The Internet, & Social Media
Taught by Kevin Winstead at Georgia Tech
The objective of this course is to engage with conceptual and empirical understandings of the interaction between new media and social change. We will explore cases from the last twenty years - primarily focusing on African American culture and cyberactivism - using the public sphere and third spaces as a conceptual framework. We will explore the integration of new media tools within these movements and governmental and institutional responses to these developments.
Networked Disability Cultures
Taught by David Adelman at the University of Michigan
What is disability culture online? Who gets to produce it? How does it get produced? What are its impacts across culture and technology? This course presents a theoretical survey of disability culture online—alongside a breadth of theoretical scholarship ranging from critical accessibility studies to media studies, feminist histories of care and beyond, and we will cover a wide variety of networked media—from podcasts and documentary film to social media platforms and digital zines.