A Transnational Information Syllabus
Also, the CITAP affiliate call is open until June 5. Apply now!
We’re wrapping the academic year with another new release from the Bulletin of Technology and Public Life. This week, we released a syllabus by Rachel Kuo, Rachel Moran, Pranav Malhotra, and Sarah Nguyễn that digs into understanding politics and information through “historical and contemporary formations of power and state violence, including imperialism, colonialism, and militarism and how these legacies impact current modalities of technological and institutional governance.”
The syllabus is divided into three sections:
Part 1: Imperialism and Empire - Weeks 1 - 4 offer an introduction to how histories of imperialism, colonialism, and empire inform media and communication systems.
Part 2: Transnational Platforms and Politics - Weeks 5 - 9 apply understandings of different geopolitical contexts and imperial histories to transnational information platforms, networks, and infrastructures.
Part 3: Methodological Frameworks and Approaches - With a focus on mis- and disinformation research, Weeks 10 - 14 present challenges in doing transnational research, including translation, interpretation, and data access, and offer different approaches, practices, and frameworks in response to these challenges.
If you’re looking to understand how information and communication systems span national borders and draw on localized memory, this syllabus provides a wealth of new readings, multimedia resources, and case studies to use.
And as an external supplement, Rachel Kuo gave a talk at the Nobel Prize Summit on misinformation that serves as an excellent vision statement for the syllabus.t
Join CITAP as an affiliate
Want to be part of the CITAP affiliate community for the 2023-24 academic year? We’d love to have you! We welcome researchers whose subject matter and normative commitments align with our own. The affiliate community is open to graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, faculty, and professional researchers across a broad range of institutions, especially within North Carolina.
For this coming year, we have three goals for our affiliate program:
Promoting public scholarship and research translation efforts that help policymakers, civil society groups, and others better understand the impact of technology on our public lives.
Supporting graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early-career researchers navigating the challenges of doing interdisciplinary and publicly-engaged work.
Providing a community for researchers who could benefit from a broader network.
These goals inform our affiliate programming and are not intended to limit who should apply! (We also welcome well-connected senior researchers interested in sharing their time and talents, for example).
Publications and appearances
“When multilingual language models fail, their problems are hard to identify, diagnose, and fix.” Affiliate Gabriel Nichols co-authored “Lost in Translation: Large Language Models in Non-English Content Analysis” with Aliya Bhatia. They dig into the challenges of using large language models to support content moderation in this exceptionally useful report.
Coming soon
May 25-29: We’re out in force at the ICA conference in Toronto! We hope to see some of you at our joint UNC reception tonight.
May 30: Release date for Alice Marwick’s The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media. We’ve already spotted copies in the wild!
June 5: Deadline to apply to join the CITAP 2023-24 affiliate community.
Correction
In last week’s newsletter, I misnamed one of our CITAP affiliates in our congratulatory section. Felix Simon won the Hans Bausch Media Prize for research on journalism and AI. Felix Salmon may or may not exist and is not a CITAP affiliate. I regret the error (thank you to the eagle-eyed Dave Karpf for alerting me to the mistake).