Memory work as a method

Description: This course offers the concept of memory work as a critical method for exploring how marginalized communities engage in self-documentation, storytelling, and media practices to preserve, make meaning and contribute insights into personal and collective experiences. Memory work as a method explores how memory-based methodological interventions and innovations can work to trace invisibilized and devalued people, places, things and relations, reframing spaces of erasure as sites of meaningful social and cultural practices. In this course, students will read from a wide range of research on memory work and critical archiving practices, largely though not exclusively from a Chicanx/Latinx studies perspective. Students will also engage with communities of practice, analyzing how acts of media-making (from informal and everyday to more formal and institutional) can function as world-making interventions that challenge dominant narratives, institutional exclusions, and showcase alternative ways of being in the world. Alongside readings, students can expect to engage with real-world memory work projects and learn from practitioners to consider how the production, collection, management and circulation of artifacts and metadata are not incidental or happenstance occurrences but intentional and socially conditioned practices where identity, culture and values are put on display. Students currently working on memory work projects are highly encouraged to enroll, though this is not a requirement. This course emphasizes research approaches that honor the liberatory potential of grassroots memory work while resisting the extractive logics of traditional archival systems or fetishistic approaches to datafication.

technofuturos: chicanxs/latinxs in society & the future (Critical latinx media & technology studies)

Description:

“Part of the challenge of understanding algorithmic oppression is to understand that the mathematical formulations which drive automated decisions are made by human beings.” 

-Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression (2018)

What does it mean to live, move, or exist “sin papeles” (without papers) in a world where data is power? This course examines how documentation and datafication and mediated technologies shape Latinx immigrant life, tracing how statistical, biometric, and algorithmic systems have become central to regimes of governance, surveillance, and control. Drawing from critical data studies, science and technology studies, and Latinx theory, students will analyze the racial, colonial, and gendered logics embedded in technologies ranging from passports and the census to predictive policing and biometric tracking. Through foundational and contemporary texts, the course investigates how data is mobilized to enforce borders, produce racial classifications, and naturalize inequality. We will also explore how Latinxs and other marginalized communities negotiate, contest, refuse, retool and reimagine these systems. Case studies will address topics such as the U.S. census, Silicon Valley’s datafication of migration, and the global export of surveillance technologies. By the end of the semester, students will gain a better understanding about the ways that technologies function not as neutral or deterministic artifacts, but as contested terrain where struggles over identity, culture, values and justice unfold.