PhD Designated Emphasis in STS

The list below is currently being updated. For more information about current courses, please contact Prof. Colin Milburn (cnmilburn@ucdavis.edu).

Fall 2019

This course traces the relationship of technological inventions such as the camera, the gramophone, and the Turing machine to human perception. It explores how emerging media disrupt sense perceptions, creating doubles, forms of re-animation of the dead, memories, or historical events, and specters and ghosts in the machine. We will analyze the impact of the ghostly on the social imaginary and modes of communication. Course assignments require students to analyze audiovisual media and make critical arguments about them. Readings from Plato, Freud, Mettrie, Kittler, Derrida, Irani, Canales, and Chun.

Winter 2020

Spring 2020

The course will be a deep dive into contemporary media theories emphasizing computational and algorithmic media, media materiality, and the construction of the posthuman situation. Co-evolving with economic globalization and the financialization of more and more human activities, media in increasingly myriad forms saturate our lives. Digital media are becoming all-pervasive and indeed invasive. In numerous areas of our daily activities, we are witnessing a drive toward a fusion of digital and physical reality; a new playing field of ubiquitous computing in which wearable computers, independent computational agent-artifacts, and material objects are all part of the landscape. From social media to data-mining to new sensor technologies, twenty-first century media work largely outside the realm of perceptual consciousness, yet at the same time inflect our every sensation. We live in an environment where machines talk to machines before talking to us. The sensibilities inherent in such regimes of software cultures are indeed beyond the normal accounted for 5 senses that media theory has traditionally recognized; our new media call into play elements of sensibility that greatly affect human selfhood without in any way belonging to the human. We will examine the work of contemporary media theorists who draw on the speculative empiricism of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, process philosophy, and the new materialism in developing concepts for understanding and addressing the posthuman condition in new media culture. The course will be based on readings from Alfred North Whitehead, William James, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Gilbert Simondon, Brian Massumi, Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Jussi Parikka, Mark Hansen, Steven Shaviro, Luciana Parisi, Rosi Braidotti, and Wendy Chun.

W 2:10 - 5:00 PM, SSH 1246, CRN: 82509

This graduate seminar will examine the history and culture of data practices, sharing, and infrastructure in both research and civic domains. In studying ethnographies of various scientific and civic communities, we will investigate the epistemologies of data work and how the emergence data-based infrastructures has reshaped how expertise operates, how evidence is trusted, how collaboration is valued, and how communities cope with uncertainty in diverse domains. Institutions and policies seeking to advance cross-domain data sharing will also be studied, along with various forms of advocacy for and resistance to data standards.  Literature at the intersection of critical data studies, information infrastructure studies, and STS will be surveyed. The seminar will also introduce techniques in data management planning and stewardship in preparation for sharing data across diverse data cultures.