Requirements
Completing the Technology & Society Ph.D. Emphasis Program
To complete the Ph.D. Emphasis in Technology and Society, students must do the following:
STEP 1. Good Standing
Be in good standing in the Ph.D. program (or Masters-Ph.D. program) of one of the participating departments.
STEP 2. Graduate Student Petition & Course Plan
Complete a Graduate Student Petition with signatures of the student’s departmental Graduate Advisor, the faculty director of the Technology & Society Emphasis, and Graduate Division. Petitions for adding the Emphasis can be made at anytime during the student’s graduate career, but typically will be made after at least one successful year of study in the home department. Work completed prior to Emphasis petition which meets requirements of the program can be counted towards completion. Students will also be asked to complete a Technology & Society Course Plan form to be submitted to the Emphasis Faculty Director. Click to download a petition and course plan form.
Completion of the Emphasis Coursework Program
Completion of the Emphasis involves curriculum requirements and a dissertation requirement.
Curriculum Requirements
The purpose of the curriculum requirement is development of working familiarity with contrasting approaches to the study of technology and society. The curriculum requirement itself has two components: participation in a Technology and Society Colloquium and completion of a set of graduate courses chosen from a stratified menu.
STEP 3. Gateway Technology and Society Colloquium Requirement
An important part of the Emphasis experience is interacting directly with the cohort of other students in the program and developing an intellectual community beyond the student's own discipline. Toward this goal, students must complete a 1-unit gateway course entitled "Technology and Society Colloquium." This course will meet one to two hours per week, and will be taught by a member of the Technology & Society Emphasis faculty. This gateway course will likely be taught twice a year.
Requirements for the course will include reading and discussing introductory works from several disciplines. Students will interact with guest faculty over the course of the quarter, and each student will be responsible for participating. The course will focus on interaction across disciplines and on exploring differences in conceptualization and approaches to knowledge-production across disciplines.
STEP 4. Graduate Course Requirement
The course requirement has two sub-goals: exposure to differing methodological and epistemological approaches to the study of technology and society, and exposure to a range of substantive subject areas, independent of method and epistemology.
The main methodological and epistemological divide we aim to bridge is that between the humanities and social sciences. While clear boundaries can not in all cases be identified, often the social sciences tend toward more positivistic approaches to theorizing and the organization of evidence, while the humanities tend away from such approaches. It is important that students seeking a multi-disciplinary understanding of technology and society be exposed to inquiry from both ends of this and other spectra that often separate the social sciences and humanities. Therefore the first consideration in our curriculum requirement is that the menu of courses be constructed in such a way as to encourage study of both the humanities and the social sciences. The main substantive concerns for the emphasis involve breadth with respect to several topics.
Much of the disparate literature on technology and society falls into one or more of two large categories: 1) study of cultures, meanings, and other human constructs; 2) study of human behavior, organizations, and social structures. The first of these topics tends to be emphasized by scholars working in humanistic traditions, though this is not exclusively the case, while the second tends to appear chiefly but not exclusively in the social sciences. The second consideration in the curriculum is that the students’ course work be organized around substantive breadth in these areas.
Therefore the curriculum is organized to accomplish both these methodological-epistemological goals and substantive goals.
The course requirement is completion of four 4-unit courses with a grade of B or better, with two courses in each of the following two areas:
*Currently Approved List of Emphasis Courses (1/2007).
Area 1: Culture and History
ANTH 255 Anthropology of Mass Media and Popular Culture (M. Yang)
ENG 236 (Course title varies, approved for technology titles with Liu, Raley, and Warner)
FM 236 Historicizing New Media
FM 241 Television and New Media Theory
FM 248 Digital Media Theory and Practices
FM 254 The Inhuman and Posthuman in Digital Culture
FM 255 Gaming Culture
FM 264 Media Geographies
FM 265 Race and Gender in Cyberculture
FM 593TS Technology and Society
HIST 201HS (Course title varies, approved for technology titles with McCray and Osborne)
MAT 200A Arts and Technology
MAT 200B Music and Technology
MAT 200C Digital Media Technology and Engineering
MAT 251 Mixed Realities Interactive Projects
MAT 257 Network Protocols in a Social Context
MAT 258 Art and Science of Aerospace Culture
Area 2: Society and Behavior
COMM 213 Mass Communication and the Individual (Metzger)
COMM 222B Global Organizational Communication (C. Stohl)
COMM 222C Technology and Organization
SOC 224 Collective Behavior and Social Movements (Earl)
SOC 294 Internet and Social Science Research (Earl)
POLS 596 Information Technology and Politics (Bimber, when lead as a seminar; contact Emphasis Director about directed readings)
No more than one course taken in the student's home department can be used toward fulfilling the Emphasis course requirement.
*New courses may be added to the list by consent of the Technology and Society Faculty. Students may also petition for the acceptance of another graduate course in substitution for one on the approved list. Petitions are approved by the Steering Committee of the Technology and Society Faculty.
STEP 5. Dissertation Requirement
The purpose of the dissertation requirement is integration of students’ course work into their own research. For completion of the Emphasis, a student's dissertation must have relevance to at least one of the two Emphasis areas. In addition, the student’s dissertation committee should include at least one member from a department other than the student’s own, typically from the list of faculty offering Emphasis-approved courses under the two areas. In cases where students wish to include a faculty member not offering an Emphasis-approved course, written permission is required from the faculty advisory committee.
