This list will be updated weekly. Categories are loose groupings; some works fit in multiple categories. Please also consult the syllabus for further resources.

Contents

• Class Books
• Diversity Overviews
• First & Second Industrial Revolutions
• Bodily Autonomy
• Third & Fourth Industrial Revolutions
• Race
• Language, Search & Algorithms
• Gender & Sexuality
• Sovereignty
• Socioeconomic Status

Class Books

Main books folder with Beloved (Morrison), work by James Baldwin, and the books Sister Outsider (Lorde), Dawn (Butler), The Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin), and additional reading.

BONUS! Some videos about the authors of the class books:

• A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (Alexander Street)
• I Am Not Your Negro: James Baldwin and Race in America (Kanopy)
• Remembering Octavia Butler: Black Sci-Fi Writer Shares Cautionary Tales in Unearthed 2005 Interview (Democracy Now!)
• Toni Morrison (Alexander Street)
• Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin (Kanopy)

Diversity Overviews

• Keywords for Today and Keywords for American Cultural Studies. Both of the “Keywords” books contain useful definitions of diversity and technology. If you plan on an unconventional use of the terms diversity or technology for your final, these books might be helpful.
• Civil & human rights laws/policies of NYU, New York City, New York State, and the United States
• Inclusive language and written style
  • MLA Guide to Inclusive Language (NYU login required; summary here)
  • APA Inclusive Language Guidelines
  • APA Bias-Free Language Guidelines (See the full chapter here)
  • Diversity Style Guide (NYU login required):
    • Introduction
    • Chapter 1 (“Why is Diversity So Important?”)
    • Chapter 2 (“Implicit Bias”)
• Levels of Racism: A Theoretical Framework and A Gardener’s Tale (NYU login required)
  • Aspects of this article can be broadened into the concept of “internalized oppression”
• Intersectionality & Coaltion
  • Matsuda: Beside My Sister, Facing the Enemy: Legal Theory Out of Coalition (Stanford Law Review) Focus on the concepts of multicultural coalition, anti-subordination, and the introduction of intersectionality. 
  • Crenshaw: Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Policies (also cited here)
  • Crenshaw: Why Intersectionality Can’t Wait (Washington Post)
  • Additional Intersectionality Resources are on the D&T Top Topics page.
• Ethical Research D&T page
  • In the United States, the 1978 Belmont Report (HHS.gov) is basis of institutional review boards (IRBs), the mechanism used to approve experimental research funded by the government and government-funded institutions.
  • HHS.gov videos that explain the background on the Belmont Report
    • Part 1 – Evolving Concern: Protection for Human Subjects
    • Part 3 – The Belmont Report: Basic Ethical Principles and their Application

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First & Second Industrial Revolutions

• Beloved
• Tech Overview: the Cotton Gin
  • Who Made America: Eli Whitney (overview reading)King Cotton & the Cotton Gin (5:35)
    • The Cotton Gin & Slavery (overview reading)
  • The Cotton Economy & Slavery (3:03) 
  • Sugar & Cotton (7:45; related reading here)
• New York Times: 1619 podcast, Episode 2 
  (listen to Ep.2, “The Economy That Slavery Built,” until the end of Matthew Desmond’s interview at 25:40)
• America’s First Big Business: Not the Railroads, but Slavery (Part 1) and How The West Got Rich and Modern Capitalism Was Born (Part 2)
• Railroad travel relied on wrought iron, which itself relied on rapidly evolving manufacturing technologies during the first and second Industrial Revolutions.
  • PBS: Asian Americans documentary series, Episode 1, covers Chinese railroad workers (in America) during the time period of Beloved
• Also note that the Underground Railroad was not an actual railroad; rather it was a network of secret routes and safe houses set up for enslaved people seeking freedom in “free states” (places where slavery was illegal). 
• Letterlocking as an anti-surveillance technology in the time of Beloved
• Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present

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Bodily Autonomy

• Beloved and Dawn (see class books folder)
• UN pamphlets on bodily autonomy & integrity and bodily autonomy
• Medical Apartheid by Harriet A. Washington, available in ePub and audio Note that this book was written in 2006; much of its information is (sadly) still correct; but some of its terminology is no longer in keeping with the MLA and APA guidelines on inclusive language.
• Contested Relations, a book on the origins of gynecology (see “Additional Reading” in the Class Books folder)
• Materials related to guest speaker, NYU alum and SAG-AFTRA organizer Melanie Ehrlich:
  • SAG-AFTRA strike website (mentions AI and bodily issues)
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, by Shoshanna Zuboff (Hachette, 2019). Also available in audio.
• Related to CRISPR: a resource page on issues of informed consent and “human subjects” in research and medical experiments, particularly as it pertains to racism in the United States. If you plan to use Dawn for your final paper, and/or if you want to learn more about how informed consent is practiced in research studies, consider using resources from this page.

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Third & Fourth Industrial Revolutions

• Third Industrial Revolution: work by James Baldwin and Sister Outsider
• Fourth Industrial Revolution: Dawn, The Left Hand of Darkness
• America on the Move (Smithsonian American History).
  • The Connected City (NYC in the 1920s)
  • City and Suburb (Chicago in the 1950s).
• America’s Assembly Line, Chapter 7: Discontent
• Crenshaw: Why Intersectionality Can’t Wait (Washington Post)
• “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” (film)
• Zia: “Detroit Blues: ‘Because of You Motherfuckers.'”
• Dunn et al.: Re-imagining communication in Africa and the Caribbean: Global South issues in media, culture and technology (Palgrave Macmillian)
• Ragnedda and Radkova.: Digital Inequalities in the Global South (Palgrave Macmillan)
• Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present
• We are Electric: Inside the 200-year Hunt for Our Body’s Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds. (Earlier subhead: The New Science of our Body’s Electrome.)This book, written by a science journalist at New Scientist, covers the concept of the electrome, which might be useful for folks who plan to write about brain- and gene-related technologies.
• UAW discussion of “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” — coming soon!

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Race

• Beloved, work by James Baldwin, Sister Outsider, Dawn (Class Books)
  • Karen Attiah, Washington Post: “Why race and colonialism matter in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” mentions the James Baldwin essay “An Open Letter to the Born Again“
• Benjamin: Race After Technology
• Crenshaw and Matsuda (see “Diversity Overviews”)
• Melanie Ehrlich
  • Hollywood strike and High Holy Days: L.A. Jews seek solace amid tough times (LA Times)
  • Melanie’s recent speeches from a SAG-AFTRA special picket, which “will give you an idea as to where our heads are at right now, and touches on both Jewish US labor history and the High Holy Days:”
    • Main speech (8:42): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpfe3eDNZXE
    • Melanie connects the strikes to family histories in the Jewish community (2:23): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5oFv9VMSG8
• Feng, Kim: A New Theory of Race in America (Chronicle of Higher Education)
• Who Killed Vincent Chin? (film)
• Helen Zia: “Detroit Blues: ‘Because of You Motherfuckers.'”
• PBS: Asian Americans documentary series. The filmmakers of Who Killed Vincent Chin were involved in this series!
• Grace Lee Boggs autobiography
• Benjamin: Race After Technology: The New Jim Code. Also available in audio.

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Language, Search, Algorithms

• Sister Outsider, Dawn, The Left Hand of Darkness (Class Books)
• Noble: Algorithms of Oppression
• Weil: “You Are Not a Parrot” (New York Magazine)
• Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major, Shmitchell: “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big??” (ACM)
• Baker-Bell: Linguistic Justice: Black language, literacy, identity, and pedagogy (Taylor & Francis)
• Linguistic justice on campus : pedagogy and advocacy for multilingual students (Ingraham)
  • See also: search for “linguistic justice” at NYU Library
• Benjamin: Race After Technology: The New Jim Code. Also available in audio.
• O’Neill: Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. (Crown)

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Gender & Sexuality

• Sister Outsider, Dawn, The Left Hand of Darkness (Class Books)
• Crenshaw and Matsuda (see “Diversity Overviews”)
• Zia: “Detroit Blues: ‘Because of You Motherfuckers.'”
• Gender and feminist considerations in artificial intelligence from a developing world perspective (Nature)
•  UNESCO report on Artificial Intelligence and Gender Equality,
• LGBTQ training – coming soon!

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Sovereignty

• Dawn, The Left Hand of Darkness (Class Books)
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, by Shoshanna Zuboff (Hachette, 2019). Also available in audio.
• Spiral to the Stars by Laura Harjo (University of Arizona Press, 2019). This book is about Indigenous American placemaking, space-making and map-making with traditional and modern technologies.
• Dominance by Design by Michael Ades (Harvard University Press, 2009). This book is about US government engineers and colonialist underpinnings in the development of global infrastructures.
  • Alluded to in the Introduction to Dominance by Design: the poem “White Man’s Burden” by Rudyard Kipling.
• “Whose Point Reyes? Indigenous History and Public Lands.” Making Contact podcast series, 2021. Originally broadcast on KPFA.
• ProPublica: The Repatriation Project
• Karen Attiah, Washington Post: “Why race and colonialism matter in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” mentions the James Baldwin essay “An Open Letter to the Born Again“
• Dunn et al.: Re-imagining communication in Africa and the Caribbean: Global South issues in media, culture and technology (Palgrave Macmillian)
• Ragnedda and Radkova.: Digital Inequalities in the Global South (Palgrave Macmillan)
• Harris: God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898-1902 (Oxford University Press)

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Socioeconomic Status

• Marxist Traditions (Oxford Research Encyclopedias)
• O’Neill: Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. (Crown)
• “My Brooklyn,” a documentary about the gentrification of Downtown Brooklyn, mentions FUREE (Families United for Racial and Economic Equality), the former organization of guest speaker Michael Higgins
• The Routledge Companion to Media and Class (Routledge)
• Automating Inequality (St. Martins Press)

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