Technology and Society

Semester and Year Offered: Semester 3 (Monsoon)

Course Coordinator and Team: venugopal maddipati

Email of course coordinator: vennugopal.maddipati@gmail.com

Pre-requisites: None

Course Objectives/Description:

Studies of technology, be it simple technological instruments to complex technological systems and arrangements, do not focus on its social dimensions. This course draws from the discipline of the humanities to introduce students to the following questions: Does technology influence society? If so, what are the ways in which these influences could be studied?

Course Outcomes:

On successful completion of this course students will be able to:

1. Have a critical understanding of the dialectic relation between technology and the social.
2. Become aware of the ways in which design is implicated in socio-technical processes
3. Write short analytical papers as well a longer reasoned written argument.

Brief description of modules/ Main modules:

1. Introduction to Technology and Society;
2. Technology and Social Theory;
3. Historical Perspectives on Technology;
4. Cultural Dimensions of Technological Change;
5. Social and Political constructions of Technology;
6. Anthropology and Sociology;
7. Critical Theory and Technology;
8. Globalization and technology;
9. Gender and Technology;
10. Technology and the Global South;
11. Information Technology and Society

Assessment Details with weights:

• Class participation: 20%
• Weekly response papers: 30%
• Final take-home exam: 30%
• Semester-end jury: 20%

Reading List:

1. Bradsher, Keith. High and Mighty: The Dangerous Rise of the SUV. (Public Affairs, 2003)
2. Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. (Wiley, 2009)
3. Cockburn, Cynthia and Susan Ormrod, Gender and Technology in the Making. (Sage Publications,1993)
4. Dumit, Joseph. Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity. (Princeton University Press,2004)
5. Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society (Random House, 1964). pp. 03- 60
6. Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. (Princeton UniversityPress, 1994)
7. Feenberg, Andrew. Questioning Technology (Routledge, 1999) pp. vii- xvii and 01- 17
8. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.
9. Kittler Friedrich,.Discourse Networks, 1800 / 1900. (Stanford University Press, 1992)
10. Lanier, Jaron. You Are Not A Gadget. (Penguin Books, 2011)
11. Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies In The Ideology Of Advanced Industrial Society.(Beacon Press, 1964)
12. Marx, Karl. “Theses on Feuerbach,” pp. 143-145; The German Ideoloogy, pp.146-200; “Marx on the History of His Opinions,” pp. 3-6; and Capital, Volume I, selections, pp. 319-328, pp. 392-411. In The Marx-Engels Reader.
13. Morozov, Evgeny. The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World. (Penguin Books, 2011)
14. Raj, Kapil. “British Orientalism in Early Nineteenth Century” in Relocating Modern Science.(Permanent Black 2006)
15. Scott, James: Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. (Yale University Press, 1999)
16. Uberoi, JPS. The Other Mind of Europe (Oxford University Press, 1984)
17. Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor (University of Chicago Press, 1986) pp. 03- 18

Additional Reference: