HLVK03883U Modern Culture/Visual Culture: Feminist Digital Humanities

‘Has the Internet destroyed the world or made it a better place?’ As Wendy Chun notes in the preface to her book Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media public and academic debate often engage with the Internet in dichotomies of destruction vs development, “good” vs “bad”. However, as Chun continues, we need to move beyond this way of thinking towards a more nuanced approach to the Internet and its wider cultural implications. 

In the course Feminist Digital Humanities we will focus on ways to achieve that by engaging critically with the cultural implications of digital culture at large. While our contemporary digital culture poses new conceptual and methodological challenges it also sustains problems that precedes the field by hundreds of years, such as questions on gender, race, representation, and diversity.  

The course will incorporate cultural theory to engage with recent implications of digital technologies, focusing on the ethics of AI (i.e. Artificial Intelligence), affect in socio-technical systems, pattern discrimination, face recognition, algorithmic bias, non-human agency, and digital aesthetics, amongst other things. 

Drawing on thinkers such as N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Sara Ahmed, and Safiya Umoja Noble, we will engage with the ways in which sexism and racism is reinforced in digital culture by reproduction of outdated (but still very much alive) stereotypes, discuss how the allocation of knowledge production (and decision making) to AI systems does not remove human bias, but rather permits for a ‘neutralisation’ of prejudice, and explore the potential promises of digital technologies while considering possible vulnerabilities. 

We will provide ample opportunity for the participants to bring cases and examples of their own to work on.

The course will be conducted in English, but exams will be in Danish or English as preferred.