DISCO Courses

Taught by Kevin Winstead, this class will seek to prepare the next generation of digital humanists and African-American scholars by broadening the conversation around new theories, methods, and tools to explore African-American art, labor, and migration. Through readings and various projects, the class will familiarize themselves with the concepts, tools, and debates of and within the intersection of Digital Humanities and Black Studies.

Taught by Rianna Walcott, this course explores the history of Black discourse and orality and how the unique communicative traditions of African diasporic people in the U.S. were formed in relation to technological skill. Students investigate the different mechanisms by which communication researchers can study Black users and discourse with a specific emphasis on critical cultural studies methods and digital humanities tools.

Taught by Lisa Nakamura, this class is an advanced introduction to the field of critical A.I. studies, tracing the history of A.I. through Turing Tests and chatbots to our contemporary moment.

Taught by Rianna Walcott, this course explored the history of Black discourse and orality and how the unique communicative traditions of African diasporic people in the U.S. were formed in relation to technological skill. In this process, the class discussed how the parallel development of racism and Black cultural traditions have equipped Black users to wield digital technology skills in ways that often outpace and differ from the dominant group.

Taught by Catherine Knight Steele, this course explored the history of Black discourse and orality and how the unique communicative traditions of African diasporic people in the U.S. were formed in relation to technological skill. In this process, the class discussed how the parallel development of racism and Black cultural traditions have equipped Black users to wield digital technology skills in ways that often outpace and differ from the dominant group.

Course flier on Deep Blue

Taught by Aaron Dial, this course sat with and in important and historical conversations within the field. However, and inevitably, this course left out so much more. These interdisciplinary works span a cross section of relevant themes, ideas, and concepts within Black Studies and, by proxy, American Studies as well. The predominant goal of this course was to assist students in fine tuning their interests and developing a coherent conceptual network that helped shape their current and future research agenda.

Taught by Aaron Dial, this course explored how sneakers exist as cultural talismans fomenting new understandings of modern material culture and the vulnerability and reliability of certain bodies therewithin. Over the course of a semester, students interrogated the complicated and always political of sneakers as a thing which simultaneously heralds capitalism’s demand for a specific brand of global pluralism while also representing more insular and regional identity formations.

Taught by Jeff Nagy, this class looked at digital systems not just as information technologies, but as emotional ones. It investigated how they came to serve as the habitat for age-old feelings like joy, sadness, and shame. And the class asked how they might be prompting new ones, glimpsed as we doomscroll through the news or watch the floating dots disappear in a text thread with a friend.

Taught by Lida Zeitlin-Wu, this course took 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, the class opened up a larger conversation about how technology shapes our perception of the world and ourselves.

Course syllabus on Deep Blue

Taught by André Brock, this required doctoral course for Georgia Tech’s Digital Media PhD was updated to incorporate badly needed resources on new media and digital media including method, theory, technologies, and phenomena from a critical race theory standpoint.

Taught by Catherine Knight Steele, this course provided students with an introduction to media theory from multiple perspectives. Through readings, lectures, discussions, and case studies, students understood how technical, historical, economic, social, and political forces have helped shape media content and the media themselves.

Taught by David Adelman, this course presented a theoretical survey of online environments and infrastructures, covering a wide variety of networked media-from podcasts and documentary film to social media platforms and digital zines. The quarter culminated in a collaborative project that invites our class to critically and creatively reflect on local histories of access, technology, and disability culture.

Taught by Toni Bushner, This course offered a deep dive on the fascinating intersections of race and gender with interactive media. The class began with an exploration of the queer experience of failure and its use as an interactive metaphor for passing. Next, they explored the role of representation and embodiment in interactive media: from depictions of the “other” in games like Fallout and Fable to the connections between orientalism and the foundations of game studies to the at-hand nature of colonialist narratives in games, they explored the intersection of race and interactive media. The semester ended with a discussion on game industry labor issues, gaming culture’s problem with harassment (ala Gamergate & its connections to the alt-right movement), and a brief look at game accessibility.

Taught by Huan He, this course drew from literary, artistic, and theoretical texts, to examine how technologies and technological worlds are produced through imaginative techniques, often with real-world consequences. This course examined 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.

Course flier on Deep Blue

Taught by Kevin Winstead, this course took a critical look at the ways race and gender shape the uses and design of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Beginning from the understanding that ICTs have become part of our social infrastructure, the readings for this course have been selected to encourage reflection on how information technologies are mediated by culture; that is, how everyday digital interactions are configured or approached by racial groups, with men, and with women.

Taught by André Brock, this course encouraged students to read and interpret media artifacts through a variety of theoretical lenses anchored in both the form and content of a text with a critical approach to understanding embedded meanings, motivations, and representations in networked media.

Taught by Kevin Winstead, this course engaged with conceptual and empirical understandings of the interaction between new media and social change. It explored cases from the previous twenty years - primarily focusing on African American culture and cyberactivism - using the public sphere and third spaces as a conceptual framework.

Taught by Remi Yergeau, this class examined the theory and practice of bullshit as it relates to digital rhetoric and online circulation. Among other questions, the course considered how and where manipulation, truth, and ethos mediate what we popularly describe or understand as bullshit.

Taught by Remi Yergeau, this class examined classical rhetorical concepts (such as phronesis/practical wisdom, aretê/virtue, and eunoia/goodwill) against broader formations and understandings of digital rhetoric — and with it, rhetorics of health, disability, and medicine — as a field. Their conversations worked to unpack and dismantle rhetorical studies's historical and contemporary representations of suasive discourse, technologization, and embodiment.

Taught by André Brock, this introductory course for Georgia Tech’s Computational Media Bachelor of Science degree was updated to include digital media studies resources including method, theory, and phenomena from a critical race theory standpoint.

Taught by Catherine Knight Steele, this class thought through the histories of digital technology, situating them within the cultural and social contexts in which they emerge. With this introduction, students determined which digital tools and methods were most appropriate for their research.