Jamal Awil

COMM-501 — COMM 501 · Communication Theory & Media Studies

COMM pillar · MA Year 1 · Fall 2026

A graduate survey of foundational communication theory and contemporary media studies, anchored in Carey's ritual-vs-transmission distinction and extending through platform studies. Builds the critical apparatus through which the rest of the program reads its objects.

Essential books

• ★ James Carey — Communication as Culture
• ★ John Durham Peters — Speaking into the Air
• ★ Craig & Muller — Theorizing Communication
• ★ McQuail & Deuze — Mass Communication Theory
• ★ Stuart Hall — Essential Essays Vol. 1

Supplementary books

• ☆ Marshall McLuhan — Understanding Media
• ☆ Raymond Williams — Television
• ☆ Manuel Castells — Communication Power
• ☆ Zizi Papacharissi — A Networked Self
• ☆ Nick Couldry — Media, Society, World

Papers (50)

1. Carey, James W. (1989). A Cultural Approach to Communication [canonical] Chapter 1 in Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Boston: Unwin Hyman, pp. 13–36. (Originally published in *Communicatio

Defines the ritual model of communication as shared experience and community maintenance, in direct contrast to the transmission model's focus on information transfer — the foundational conceptual split for this course.

2. Schudson, Michael (1989). How Culture Works: Perspectives from Media Studies on the Efficacy of Symbols [canonical] Theory and Society, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 153–180

Proposes four models — retrievability, rhetorical force, resonance, institutional retention — for assessing when and how cultural symbols actually do communicative work, bridging Carey's ritual framework to empirical cultural analysis.

3. Carey, James W. (1983). Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph [canonical] Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, Vol. 8, pp. 303–325. Reprinted in Communication as Culture (1989), pp. 155–177.

Uses the electric telegraph as a historical case to show how communications technology reorganizes space, time, and market logic — extending the ritual/transmission distinction into the history of media technology.

4. Peters, John Durham (1999). Courting the Abyss: Rhetoric and the Voice of the Other" [Chapter 2 excerpt from Speaking into the Air] [established] Book chapter in Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 33–62.

Historicizes the Platonic distrust of writing and the dream of perfect communion, grounding Carey's ritual ideal in a longer philosophical genealogy about what communication can and cannot do.

5. Craig, Robert T. (1999). Communication Theory as a Field [established] Communication Theory, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 119–161

Proposes seven traditions of communication theory (rhetorical, semiotic, phenomenological, cybernetic, sociopsychological, sociocultural, critical) as a constitutive meta-theoretical map — the essential orienting framework for this course.

6. Couldry, Nick, and Andreas Hepp (2013). Conceptualizing Mediatization: Contexts, Traditions, Arguments [contemporary] Communication Theory, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 191–202

Synthesizes the European mediatization tradition, arguing that media's deep integration into social life constitutes a structural transformation of culture — updating Carey's questions for a saturated media environment.

7. Innis, Harold A. (1951). The Bias of Communication [canonical] Chapter 2 in The Bias of Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 33–60. (Also published as article in *Canadian Journal o

Introduces the time-bias vs. space-bias of media as a materialist theory of how communications media shape empire and knowledge — the canonical forerunner of McLuhan and Carey's medium theory.

8. Hall, Stuart (1973/1980). Encoding/Decoding [canonical] Chapter in Stuart Hall et al. (eds.), Culture, Media, Language. London: Hutchinson / Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, pp. 128–138

Models the television communication circuit as asymmetrical encoding and decoding positions (dominant, negotiated, oppositional), establishing audience agency and ideology as structural rather than psychological phenomena.

9. Hall, Stuart (1980). Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms [canonical] Media, Culture & Society, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 57–72

Maps the structuralist vs. culturalist tensions within cultural studies, positioning the field's theoretical stakes against Althusserian and Gramscian frameworks — essential intellectual-historical context for understanding Hall's methodology.

10. Hall, Stuart (1986). Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity [canonical] Journal of Communication Inquiry, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 5–27

Extends Gramscian hegemony theory to race and ethnicity, showing how articulation theory allows cultural studies to analyze how racial identities are constructed in discourse — directly relevant to equity threads.

11. Morley, David (1980). Texts, Readers, Subjects [canonical] Chapter in Stuart Hall et al. (eds.), Culture, Media, Language. London: Hutchinson, pp. 163–173. (Companion to his empirical study *The Na

Provides the theoretical framework for ethnographic audience research, arguing that texts propose reading positions but readers bring social subjects that negotiate them — grounding Hall's encoding/decoding in concrete reception study.

12. Ang, Ien (1985/1991). Wanted: Audiences — On the Politics of Empirical Audience Studies [established] Chapter in Ellen Seiter et al. (eds.), Remote Control: Television, Audiences and Cultural Power. London: Routledge, pp. 96–115 (1989). Als

Critiques both administrative and radical audience research for reifying the "audience" as a manageable object, calling for ethnographically sensitive approaches that honor the complexity of everyday viewing.

13. Gilroy, Paul (1987). There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation" [Introduction] [canonical] Introduction to There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack. London: Hutchinson, pp. 1–40. (Chapter also appears as "Cultural Studies and the C

Extends Birmingham cultural studies to diaspora, showing how black expressive culture operates as a counter-hegemonic practice that challenges national cultural narratives — bridges Hall to postcolonial communication theory.

14. Gray, Herman (1995). Black Masculinity and Visual Culture [established] Callaloo, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 401–405

Analyzes the representational politics of Black masculinity in US television, demonstrating how visual culture actively constructs rather than reflects race — a key text linking Hall's encoding/decoding to US media contexts.

15. Habermas, Jürgen (1974). The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964) [canonical] New German Critique, No. 3 (Autumn 1974), pp. 49–55. Trans. Sara Lennox and Frank Lennox.

Defines the bourgeois public sphere as a realm of communicative action oriented toward rational-critical debate, providing the normative baseline against which all subsequent critiques of media and democracy are measured.

16. Fraser, Nancy (1990). Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy [established] Social Text, No. 25/26, pp. 56–80

Identifies class, race, and gender exclusions in Habermas's ideal public sphere and proposes the concept of "counterpublics" — subordinated social groups that form alternative discursive arenas — directly linking public sphere theory to equity.

17. Warner, Michael (2002). Publics and Counterpublics [established] Public Culture, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 49–90

Theorizes the performative self-constitution of publics through circulation of discourse, arguing that publics are brought into being by texts rather than simply reflected by them — a constructivist revision of Habermas with queer theory implications.

18. Papacharissi, Zizi (2002). The Virtual Sphere: The Internet as a Public Sphere [established] New Media & Society, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 9–27

Evaluates whether the internet fulfills or merely simulates the conditions of Habermas's public sphere, concluding it is a public space but not necessarily a public sphere — an early and frequently cited mapping of digital deliberation limits.

19. Dahlgren, Peter (2005). The Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication: Dispersion and Deliberation [established] Political Communication, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 147–162

Argues the internet pluralizes public spheres into multiple fragmented spaces, analyzing implications for political identity and civic culture in networked environments — updates Habermas's framework for Web 2.0.

20. Fuchs, Christian (2014). Social Media and the Public Sphere [contemporary] tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 57–101

Applies a critical political economy lens to assess whether social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter) can sustain public sphere functions, arguing that commodification structurally undermines rational-critical discourse.

21. Katz, Elihu, and Paul F. Lazarsfeld (1955). Personal Influence: The Two-Step Flow of Communication" [Chapter 1 excerpt] [canonical] Chapter in Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, pp. 3–26.

Establishes the two-step flow model showing opinion leaders mediate media effects on audiences — foundational for sociopsychological tradition and still the reference point for network effects research.

22. McCombs, Maxwell E., and Donald L. Shaw (1972). The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media [canonical] Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 2, pp. 176–187

Introduces the agenda-setting hypothesis through Chapel Hill study data, demonstrating that media do not tell audiences what to think but what to think about — one of the most cited articles in communication research.

23. Livingstone, Sonia (1996). On the Continuing Problems of Media Effects Research [established] Chapter in James Curran and Michael Gurevitch (eds.), Mass Media and Society (2nd ed.). London: Arnold, pp. 305–324. Revised version in 3r

Reviews the theoretical impasse in media effects research, calling for a shift from effects to meaning — contextualizing why audience reception studies emerged as a response to the limits of behavioral effects paradigms.

24. Fiske, John (1987). Television Culture: Popular Pleasures and Politics" [Chapter 1: "Some Television, Some Topics, and Some Terminology"] [canonical] Chapter in Television Culture. London: Methuen/Routledge, pp. 1–20.

Develops polysemy as a theoretical resource, arguing that popular television is structured by multiple meanings that audiences selectively activate — the most accessible formulation of active audience theory after Hall.

25. Iyengar, Shanto, and Donald R. Kinder (1987). News That Matters: Television and American Opinion" [Chapter 2: "Priming: The Accessibility Principle"] [canonical] Chapter in News That Matters: Television and American Opinion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 63–83.

Provides experimental evidence for media priming — how the issues covered by television news affect the criteria citizens use to evaluate political leaders — bridging sociopsychological effects and agenda-setting traditions.

26. Livingstone, Sonia (2004). The Challenge of Changing Audiences: Or, What is the Audience Researcher to Do in the Age of the Internet? [established] European Journal of Communication, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 75–86

Examines how online interactivity disrupts the bounded audience concept, arguing for a reconceptualization of audiences as users and publics while preserving the critical questions of power and inequality.

27. Gillespie, Tarleton (2010). The Politics of 'Platforms [established] New Media & Society, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 347–364

Deconstructs the term "platform" as a strategic discursive construct, showing how YouTube and similar intermediaries deploy its semantic ambiguity to manage regulatory, commercial, and user expectations simultaneously.

28. Striphas, Ted (2015). Algorithmic Culture [contemporary] European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 18, No. 4–5, pp. 395–412

Traces how the concepts of information, crowd, and algorithm have reshuffled the meaning of "culture," coining "algorithmic culture" to name the delegation of cultural sorting and classification to computational processes.

29. Bucher, Taina (2017). The Algorithmic Imaginary: Exploring the Ordinary Affects of Facebook Algorithms [contemporary] Information, Communication & Society, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 30–44

Introduces the "algorithmic imaginary" — the ways users imagine, fantasize about, and affectively respond to platform algorithms — providing a phenomenological complement to structural algorithmic critique.

30. Plantin, Jean-Christophe, Carl Lagoze, Paul N. Edwards, and Christian Sandvig (2. Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook [contemporary] New Media & Society, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 293–310

Proposes "platformization of infrastructure" and "infrastructuralization of platforms" as dual processes describing how Google and Facebook simultaneously become infrastructure and use infrastructural metaphors — essential conceptual update for platform studies.

31. van Dijck, José, and Thomas Poell (2013). Understanding Social Media Logic [contemporary] Media and Communication, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 2–14

Theorizes "social media logic" as a set of norms, strategies, and mechanisms — programmability, popularity, connectivity, datafication — that restructure the logics of other social institutions like journalism and politics.

32. Napoli, Philip M. (2014). Automated Media: An Institutional Theory Perspective on Algorithmic Media Production and Distribution [contemporary] Communication Theory, Vol. 24, No. 3, pp. 340–360

Applies institutional theory to show how algorithmic media production departs from human-centered norms of journalism, challenging accountability frameworks — a bridge between communication theory and media law/policy.

33. Latour, Bruno (1996). On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications [established] Soziale Welt, Vol. 47, No. 4, pp. 369–381. Also published in Nettime mailing list archive.

Clarifies ANT's core move — symmetrically attributing agency to human and non-human actants — providing the theoretical vocabulary for treating communication infrastructure, algorithms, and platforms as active participants in social life.

34. Gramsci, Antonio (published 1971; written 1930s). Hegemony, Relations of Force, Historical Bloc" [Selection from Prison Notebooks] [canonical] In Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, pp. 5

Introduces hegemony as the process by which dominant groups secure consent through culture and civil society, providing the foundational political concept for all critical communication scholarship from Hall onward.

35. Grossberg, Lawrence (1986). History, Politics and Postmodernism: Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies [canonical] Journal of Communication Inquiry, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 61–77

Traces Hall's theoretical trajectory and its appropriation of poststructuralist and postmodern thought, clarifying how Birmingham cultural studies differs from European theory — essential meta-commentary for situating the tradition.

36. hooks, bell (1992). The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators [established] Chapter in Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, pp. 115–131. Also in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue T

Theorizes the "oppositional gaze" as a resistant spectatorship practice of Black women who refuse passive consumption, extending Hall's encoding/decoding framework to intersectional analysis of race, gender, and visual culture.

37. Mosco, Vincent (2009). The Political Economy of Communication: Starting Points" [Chapter 1] [established] Chapter in The Political Economy of Communication (2nd ed.). London: Sage, pp. 1–30.

Defines political economy of communication as the study of social relations involving the production, distribution, and consumption of communication resources, providing the structural-economic grounding for critical media studies.

38. Kellner, Douglas (1995). Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture [established] Chapter in Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez (eds.), Gender, Race and Class in Media. Thousand Oaks: Sage, pp. 5–17. (Widely reprinted across e

Outlines a multiperspectival approach to media culture that combines political economy with cultural studies and critical theory, arguing that media are sites of ideological struggle and identity formation.

39. Couldry, Nick (2004). Theorising Media as Practice [established] Social Semiotics, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 115–132

Proposes a practice-theory turn for media studies, shifting from textual analysis or effects to "media-related practices" — what people do with and around media — integrating Bourdieu and Schatzki with communication theory.

40. Anderson, C. W. (2013). Towards a Sociology of Computational and Algorithmic Journalism [contemporary] New Media & Society, Vol. 15, No. 7, pp. 1005–1021

Proposes six sociological lenses (economic, political, cultural, organizational, field, technological) for studying computational journalism, bridging communication theory and data science practices in newsrooms.

41. boyd, danah, and Kate Crawford (2012). Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a Cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Phenomenon [contemporary] Information, Communication & Society, Vol. 15, No. 5, pp. 662–679

Raises six critical questions about big data's epistemological claims, challenging its objectivity, ethics, and access inequalities — the most widely cited manifesto for a critical humanities approach to data science.

42. Pasquale, Frank (2015). The Algorithmic Self" [Chapter 1 excerpt from The Black Box Society] [contemporary] Chapter in The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 1

Exposes the opacity of algorithmic systems that govern reputation and finance, coining "black box society" to name the condition where consequential decisions are insulated from scrutiny — directly links communication theory to law and equity.

43. Cheney-Lippold, John (2011). A New Algorithmic Identity: Soft Biopolitics and the Modulation of Control [contemporary] Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 28, No. 6, pp. 164–181

Theorizes how algorithmic classification systems produce new forms of identity through statistical inference — "measurable types" — extending Foucauldian biopolitics to data environments and raising questions about self-determination.

44. Diakopoulos, Nicholas (2015). Algorithmic Accountability: Journalistic Investigation of Computational Power Structures [contemporary] Digital Journalism, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 398–415

Develops a framework for algorithmic accountability journalism, identifying five dimensions — prioritization, classification, association, filtering, transformation — for investigating algorithmic decision-making systems.

45. Hallinan, Blake, and Ted Striphas (2016). Recommended for You: The Netflix Prize and the Production of Algorithmic Culture [contemporary] New Media & Society, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 117–137

Uses the Netflix Prize contest as a case study to examine how algorithmic recommendation systems translate human taste into computable preferences, extending Striphas's algorithmic culture concept to consumption practices.

46. Kitchin, Rob (2014). Thinking Critically About and Researching Algorithms [contemporary] Information, Communication & Society, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 14–29 (published online 2014)

Provides a conceptual typology for critically researching algorithms as socially embedded, contextual, and power-laden, offering methodological guidance for communication scholars approaching computational objects.

47. Noble, Safiya Umoja (2018). Introduction: Searching for Black Girls" [from Algorithms of Oppression] [contemporary] Introduction in Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: NYU Press, pp. 1–14.

Demonstrates through search result audits that commercial algorithms encode racial and gendered bias, establishing that communication infrastructure is a civil rights issue — the single most direct bridge between communication theory, algorithmic culture, and equity.

48. Benjamin, Ruha (2019). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code" [Chapter 1: "The New Jim Code"] [contemporary] Chapter in Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 1–50.

Coins "New Jim Code" to describe how discriminatory designs get embedded in technology with the veneer of objectivity, directly connecting surveillance, criminal justice, and communications infrastructure to structural racism.

49. Couldry, Nick, and Ulises A. Mejias (2019). Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data's Relation to the Contemporary Subject [contemporary] Television & New Media, Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 336–349

Proposes "data colonialism" to describe how the extraction of social data from everyday life constitutes a new form of resource exploitation structurally analogous to historical colonialism — connecting communication theory, political economy, and global equity.

50. Zuboff, Shoshana (2015). Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization [contemporary] Journal of Information Technology, Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 75–89

Introduces "surveillance capitalism" as a new economic logic that claims human experience as raw data for behavioral prediction products, arguing that this constitutes an unprecedented assault on behavioral autonomy — the key bridge text from communication theory to AI governance and IP law.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

COMM Pynchon, T. (1966). The crying of lot 49. J. B. Lippincott.

Oedipa Maas inherits the estate of a real estate magnate and stumbles into the Tristero, a possibly fictional underground postal system. Pynchon's compact novel is a primer in semiotics, paranoia, and the limits of interpretation. Every signifier branches into recursive ambiguity. Its method is paranoid hermeneutics played for comedy. Lot 49 anticipates the COMM concerns of platform-era information environments: conspiracy as alternative epistemology, communication networks as power, and the impossibility of decoding without ideological commitment. For COMM/AI scholars studying disinformation and recommender-system rabbit holes, Pynchon's Trystero remains the founding parable. COMM Atwood, M. (1985). The handmaid's tale. McClelland & Stewart.

Atwood's dystopia of Gilead is also a treatise on linguistic control: the Aunts' indoctrination, the prohibition on women's reading, the chant-along ceremonies. Communication restriction is the regime's central mechanism. Its method is first-person fragmentary narration, framed by a future academic conference parsing Offred's recovered cassette tapes. The Handmaid's Tale is essential for COMM/equity doctoral work on language, gender, censorship, and the archival politics of survivor testimony. Atwood's metafictional frame raises questions about whose voices reach posterity, prefiguring contemporary debates about platform de-platforming, content moderation, and equity in AI training corpora. COMM Ishiguro, K. (2021). Klara and the sun. Faber and Faber.

Ishiguro's novel narrates from the perspective of Klara, an Artificial Friend, observing Josie, a sick child, and a society stratified by genetic enhancement. The novel is fundamentally about how an AI tries to interpret human communication. Its method is restricted-knowledge first-person narration. Klara and the Sun is essential for COMM/AI doctoral work on machine interpretation, the affective dimensions of AI companionship, and what Couldry and Hepp call mediatization. Ishiguro models how an artificial mind learns by observation, raising questions directly relevant to large language model training, embodied AI, and the ethics of synthetic relationships. COMM Saramago, J. (2004). Seeing (M. J. Costa, Trans.). Harcourt. (Original work published 2004)

Saramago's sequel imagines an election in which most voters cast blank ballots; the government interprets this as conspiracy and besieges the city. Newspapers, manifestos, surveillance, and rumor all figure. Its method is political allegory in Saramago's signature prose. Seeing is essential for COMM doctoral candidates on electoral communication, the manufacture of crisis, and the rhetoric of legitimacy. For COMM/equity/AI work, Saramago's depiction of how state communication apparatus constructs "the people" as enemy is directly relevant to platform-era studies of polarization, ethnonationalism, and the algorithmic amplification of in-group/out-group rhetoric. COMM Otsuka, J. (2002). When the emperor was divine. Alfred A. Knopf.

Otsuka's novel of a Japanese American family interned during WWII unfolds in spare, restrained chapters. The first chapter shows the mother reading the evacuation order; subsequent chapters track displacement, internment, and uneasy return. Its method is minimalist multi-perspectival realism. When the Emperor Was Divine is essential for COMM/equity doctoral work on state communication of racialized policy, the rhetorical work of euphemism (relocation, internment), and the politics of post-event archival recovery. Otsuka's restrained voice models how literary form can do the work of testimony when survivors are reluctant to speak.

Nonfiction

COMM Hall, S. (with Morley, D., & Chen, K.-H.). (1996). Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies. Routledge.

This collection assembles Hall's foundational essays on encoding/decoding, ideology, articulation theory, and Black diaspora. His method is conjunctural cultural analysis. The volume is essential for COMM doctoral work, providing Hall's full theoretical apparatus. Hall's encoding/decoding model, distinguishing dominant, negotiated, and oppositional readings, remains foundational for audience studies in the platform era. For COMM/equity doctoral candidates, Hall's articulation theory and analysis of Thatcherism offer methodological resources for analyzing platform-era ideological formations (alt-right, techno-libertarianism). COMM Williams, R. (1974). Television: Technology and cultural form. Schocken Books.

Williams's foundational study develops the concept of "flow" to capture how television's structural form (continuous interrupted programming, rather than discrete works) shapes its cultural effects. His method is cultural materialism in dialogue with technology studies. Television remains essential reading for COMM doctoral work. For platform-era candidates, Williams's analysis of flow anticipates contemporary scholarship on social media feeds (Bucher, van Dijck), suggesting continuity rather than rupture between broadcast and platform forms of attention organization. COMM Pasquale, F. (2015). The black box society: The secret algorithms that control money and information. Harvard University Press.

Pasquale's foundational legal-theoretical study analyzes how proprietary algorithms in finance, search, and social media constitute "black boxes" that resist regulatory and democratic accountability. His method is legal theory in dialogue with political economy. The Black Box Society is essential reading for COMM/IP/AI doctoral work, providing the foundational legal analytic of algorithmic opacity. For candidates working at the IP intersection, Pasquale's analysis of trade secrecy as legal infrastructure of algorithmic opacity is foundational. COMM Phillips, W., & Milner, R. M. (2021). You are here: A field guide for navigating polarized speech, conspiracy theories, and our polluted media landscape. MIT Press.

Phillips and Milner's recent study develops a "field guide" for understanding contemporary disinformation as ecological problem rather than mere content problem. Their method is ecological media studies in dialogue with environmental humanities. You Are Here is essential reading for COMM doctoral work on platform-era disinformation. For doctoral candidates, the book provides a sophisticated alternative to misinformation/disinformation framings that pathologize individual content, offering ecological framings that implicate platform infrastructure. COMM Madianou, M., & Miller, D. (2012). Migration and new media: Transnational families and polymedia. Routledge.

Madianou and Miller's foundational study draws on multi-sited ethnography with Filipina mothers and their families to develop "polymedia" as the analytic for how migrants navigate multiple communication platforms. Their method is digital ethnography of transnational families. Migration and New Media is essential reading for COMM/equity doctoral work on transnational digital practice. For doctoral candidates, the book provides foundational analytic for understanding diasporic digital practice.

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EQ-501 — EQ 501 · Theories of Justice, Equity, and Power

EQ pillar · MA Year 1 · Fall 2026

Foundations of normative theory for the curriculum's equity pillar. Liberal (Rawls), capabilities (Sen, Nussbaum), recognition (Young, Fraser), critical race (Mills, Crenshaw), and decolonial (Smith) frameworks read for application to media, IP, and AI systems.

Essential books

• ★ John Rawls — A Theory of Justice
• ★ Amartya Sen — The Idea of Justice
• ★ Iris Marion Young — Justice and the Politics of Difference
• ★ Charles W. Mills — The Racial Contract
• ★ Linda Tuhiwai Smith — Decolonizing Methodologies

Supplementary books

• ☆ Fraser & Honneth — Redistribution or Recognition?
• ☆ Martha Nussbaum — Creating Capabilities
• ☆ Crenshaw et al. — Critical Race Theory: Key Writings
• ☆ Patricia Hill Collins — Black Feminist Thought
• ☆ Nancy Fraser — Scales of Justice

Papers (53)

1. Rawls, John (1985). ** [established] Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 223–251.

2. Cohen, G. A. (1990). ** [established] Recherches Économiques de Louvain / Louvain Economic Review, Vol. 56, Nos. 3–4, pp. 357–382.

3. Okin, Susan Moller (1989). ** [established] Ethics, Vol. 99, No. 2, pp. 229–249.

4. ?. Sandel, Michael (1998 [1982]) [canonical] Political Theory, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 81–96 (originally 1984).

5. Young, Iris Marion (1987). ** [canonical] Ethics, Vol. 57, No. 1, pp. 57–76.

6. Pogge, Thomas (1989). ** [canonical]

7. Sen, Amartya (1979). ** [canonical] The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Vol. 1, Stanford University Press, 1980, pp. 195–220.

8. Nussbaum, Martha C. (2003). ** [established] Feminist Economics, Vol. 9, Nos. 2–3, pp. 33–59.

9. Robeyns, Ingrid (2005). ** [established] Journal of Human Development, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 93–117.

10. Wolff, Jonathan and De-Shalit, Avner (2007). ** [established]

11. Nussbaum, Martha C. (2006). ** [established] Harvard University Press, 2006. (Book introduction, pp. 1–24.) (verify)

12. Sen, Amartya (1999). ** [established] Journal of Democracy, Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 3–17.

13. Young, Iris Marion (1990). ** [established]

14. Fraser, Nancy (1995). ** [established] New Left Review, No. 212 (July–August 1995), pp. 68–93.

15. Honneth, Axel (1992). ** [established] Political Theory, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 187–201.

16. Taylor, Charles (1994). ** [established]

17. Fraser, Nancy (2000). ** [established] New Left Review, No. 3 (May–June 2000), pp. 107–120.

18. Fraser, Nancy and Honneth, Axel (2003). ** [established] Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, Verso, pp. 1–59. (Anthology chapter.)

19. McNay, Lois (2008). ** [established] Hypatia, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 132–157. (verify)

20. Bell, Derrick A. (1980). ** [canonical] Harvard Law Review, Vol. 93, No. 3, pp. 518–533.

21. Matsuda, Mari J. (1987). ** [canonical] Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 323–399.

22. Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. (1989). ** [canonical] University of Chicago Legal Forum, Vol. 1989, No. 1, Article 8, pp. 139–167.

23. Williams, Patricia J. (1987). ** [canonical] Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 401–433.

24. Delgado, Richard (1989). ** [canonical] Michigan Law Review, Vol. 87, No. 8, pp. 2411–2441.

25. Harris, Cheryl I. (1993). ** [canonical] Harvard Law Review, Vol. 106, No. 8, pp. 1707–1791.

26. Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. (1991). ** [canonical] Stanford Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 6, pp. 1241–1299.

27. Roberts, Dorothy E. (1991). URL: https://www [canonical] Tags:

28. Cooper, Anna Julia (1892). ** [canonical]

29. Combahee River Collective (1977). ** [canonical]

30. Davis, Angela Y. (1981). ** [canonical]

31. Wynter, Sylvia (2003). ** [established] CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 3, No. 3, Fall 2003, pp. 257–337.

32. Hartman, Saidiya V. (2008). ** [established] Small Axe, No. 26 (Vol. 12, No. 2), June 2008, pp. 1–14.

33. Nash, Jennifer C. (2008). ** [established] Feminist Review, No. 89, pp. 1–15.

34. Sharpe, Christina (2016). ** [contemporary]

35. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988). ** [canonical]

36. Quijano, Aníbal (2000). ** [established] Nepantla: Views from South, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 533–580.

37. Mbembe, Achille (2003). ** [established] Public Culture, Vol. 15, No. 1, Winter 2003, pp. 11–40.

38. Mignolo, Walter D. (2002). ** [established] The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 101, No. 1, pp. 57–96.

39. Tuck, Eve and Yang, K. Wayne (2012). ** [contemporary] Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 1–40.

40. Grosfoguel, Ramón (2007). ** [established] Cultural Studies, Vol. 21, Nos. 2–3, pp. 211–223.

41. Wynter, Sylvia and McKittrick, Katherine (2015). ** [contemporary]

42. McCall, Leslie (2005). ** [established] Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 30, No. 3, Spring 2005, pp. 1771–1800.

43. Cho, Sumi, Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams, and McCall, Leslie (2013). ** [contemporary] Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 38, No. 4, pp. 785–810.

44. Carbado, Devon W. (2013). ** [contemporary] Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 38, No. 4, pp. 811–845.

45. Patil, Vrushali (2013). ** [contemporary] Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 38, No. 4, pp. 847–867.

46. Bilge, Sirma (2013). ** [contemporary] Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 405–424.

47. Collins, Patricia Hill (2015). ** [contemporary] Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 41, pp. 1–20.

48. Roberts, Dorothy E. (2004). ** [established] Stanford Law Review, Vol. 56, No. 5, pp. 1271–1305.

49. Noble, Safiya Umoja (2018). ** [contemporary]

50. Eubanks, Virginia (2018). ** [contemporary]

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

EQ Atwood, M. (1985). The handmaid's tale. McClelland and Stewart.

Atwood's foundational dystopia imagines the Republic of Gilead, where women's bodies are surveilled, reproductively conscripted, and stripped of literacy. Though predating digital AI discourse, the novel's architecture of control—color-coded castes, watchful Eyes, ritualized obedience—anticipates contemporary biometric and behavioral surveillance regimes. For scholars working at the intersection of gender, technology, and equity, Atwood demonstrates how patriarchal power instrumentalizes information asymmetry. The novel's afterword frames totalitarianism as a layered archive, foreshadowing debates about whose data survives and whose voices are erased. Doctoral readers will find Atwood essential for theorizing surveillance as gendered violence and resistance as narrative reclamation. EQ Zamyatin, Y. (1924). We (G. Zilboorg, Trans.). E. P. Dutton.

Predating Orwell, Zamyatin's We depicts the OneState, where citizens are numbered, scheduled by mathematical formula, and surveilled through glass-walled apartments. D-503's diary records the erosion of subjective interiority under quantified governance—an uncanny premonition of behavioral analytics, scoring systems, and Taylorist optimization. The novel was banned in the Soviet Union and circulated transnationally, influencing Huxley and Orwell. For equity-focused readers, Zamyatin illustrates how aesthetic and erotic dissent become political when bodies and time are algorithmically managed. The text remains essential for theorizing the long genealogy of computational governance. EQ Butler, O. E. (1998). Parable of the talents. Seven Stories Press.

The sequel deepens Olamina's struggle as the Christian America movement enslaves Earthseed members with biometric "slave collars" that deliver electric punishment. Butler explicitly names how religious nationalism, militarized surveillance, and reproductive control intersect to recreate plantation logics with new technologies. The novel's slogan—"Make America Great Again"—is now uncannily prescient. For doctoral readers, Butler demonstrates how Afrofuturist speculative fiction extends the long Black radical tradition into critique of carceral technology. Pair with Browne's Dark Matters and Davis's Are Prisons Obsolete? for a robust frame. EQ Butler, O. E. (1989). Imago. Warner Books.

The trilogy concludes with Jodahs, the first human-Oankali ooloi construct, who must learn to live in a body and society that has no prior template. Butler's refusal of binary gender, species, and ethical clarity makes Imago essential for trans, queer, and posthumanist readings of technological futures. For equity-focused doctoral readers, Jodahs's negotiation of consent across radically asymmetric power offers a richer ethical framework than most AI-fairness literature. EQ Jemisin, N. K. (2015). The fifth season. Orbit.

The first Broken Earth novel introduces the Stillness, a continent shaped by tectonic catastrophe and the enslavement of orogenes—people who can control geological forces. Jemisin's allegory of racial capitalism dramatizes how marked bodies are exploited for infrastructural labor and disposable when no longer useful. The Fulcrum's training apparatus operates as carceral pedagogy. For equity-focused AI scholars, Jemisin's worldbuilding theorizes how categories of personhood and labor co-constitute extractive systems, with direct resonance for debates on platform labor and racialized algorithmic harm.

Nonfiction

EQ Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York University Press.

Noble's foundational study demonstrates how Google's search algorithms—often presented as neutral indexing—systematically reproduce racist, sexist, and capitalist hierarchies. Tracing queries about Black women that returned pornographic results, Noble argues that platform monopolies allocate visibility according to commercial logics that disproportionately harm marginalized communities. The book introduces "algorithmic oppression" as a critical-race-tech analytic and helped catalyze the contemporary field. Indispensable for doctoral readers in communication, IP, and equity, Noble's work models how Black feminist epistemology grounds technical critique. Pair with Benjamin and Eubanks for a foundational triad. EQ Buolamwini, J. (2023). Unmasking AI: My mission to protect what is human in a world of machines. Random House.

Buolamwini narrates her path from MIT graduate student to founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, recounting how facial-recognition systems' failures on Black women's faces catalyzed her research and advocacy. The book braids personal narrative, technical exposition, and policy argument. For doctoral readers, Buolamwini models how Black feminist computer science can drive policy change and offers a vivid case study of theory-practice integration. EQ D'Ignazio, C., & Klein, L. F. (2020). Data feminism. MIT Press.

D'Ignazio and Klein synthesize feminist theory, critical race studies, and data science into seven principles for ethical data work—examining power, challenging hierarchies, embracing pluralism, and considering context. The book is rich with case studies and pedagogically generous. For doctoral readers, Data Feminism is foundational for any equity-focused methodology course. EQ Mills, C. W. (1997). The racial contract. Cornell University Press.

Mills's foundational political philosophy text argues that the social contract tradition has always been a racial contract, with white supremacy as its unspoken term. For AI-equity scholars working on fairness and justice frameworks, Mills exposes how universalist theory often encodes particular—and white—political interests. EQ Davis, A. Y. (2016). Freedom is a constant struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the foundations of a movement. Haymarket Books.

Davis's essay collection theorizes contemporary Black liberation in relation to Palestinian solidarity and global anti-carceral movements. The collection is generative for AI-equity readers connecting US racial-technical critique to global liberation movements.

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LAW-501 — LAW 501 · Foundations of US Intellectual Property Law

LAW pillar · MA Year 1 · Fall 2026

A graduate survey of US IP law for non-JD students. Covers constitutional foundations, the four core regimes (copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret), and the policy debates. Primary case reading is mandatory; casebooks explain.

Essential books

• ★ Merges, Menell & Lemley — IP in the New Technological Age
• ★ Goldstein & Reese — Copyright, Patent, Trademark
• ★ Schechter & Thomas — Principles of Patent Law
• ★ Dinwoodie & Janis — Trademarks and Unfair Competition
• ★ Nimmer & Nimmer — Nimmer on Copyright* (treatise)

Supplementary books

• ☆ Lawrence Lessig — Free Culture
• ☆ James Boyle — The Public Domain
• ☆ Yochai Benkler — The Wealth of Networks
• ☆ Siva Vaidhyanathan — Copyrights and Copywrongs
• ☆ Jessica Litman — Digital Copyright

Papers (50)

1. Dotan Oliar (2009). Making Sense of the Intellectual Property Clause: Promotion of Progress as a Limitation on Congress's Intellectual Property Power Georgetown Law Journal, 94 Geo. L.J. 1771

2. Paul J. Heald & Suzanna Sherry (2000). Implied Limits on the Legislative Power: The Intellectual Property Clause as an Absolute Constraint on Congress University of Illinois Law Review, 2000 U. Ill. L. Rev. 1119

3. Tyler T. Ochoa & Mark Rose (2002). The Anti-Monopoly Origins of the Patent and Copyright Clause Journal of the Patent and Trademark Office Society, 84 J. Pat. & Trademark Off. Soc'y 909

4. L. Ray Patterson (1968). Copyright in Historical Perspective Vanderbilt University Press, (seminal excerpt widely reproduced: Chapter 1 and Conclusion)

5. Malla Pollack (2001). What Is Congress Supposed to Promote? Defining 'Progress' in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, or Introducin Nebraska Law Review, 80 Neb. L. Rev. 754

6. Oren Bracha (2010). The Ideology of Authorship Revisited: Authors, Markets, and Liberal Values in Early American Copyright Yale Law Journal, 118 Yale L.J. 186

7. Pierre N. Leval (1990). Toward a Fair Use Standard Harvard Law Review, 103 Harv. L. Rev. 1105

8. Wendy J. Gordon (1982). Fair Use as Market Failure: A Structural and Economic Analysis of the Betamax Case and Its Predecessors Columbia Law Review, 82 Colum. L. Rev. 1600

9. Jane C. Ginsburg (1990). Creation and Commercial Value: Copyright Protection of Works of Information Columbia Law Review, 90 Colum. L. Rev. 1865

10. Pamela Samuelson (1986). Allocating Ownership Rights in Computer-Generated Works University of Pittsburgh Law Review, 47 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 1185

11. Jessica Litman (1990). The Public Domain Emory Law Journal, 39 Emory L.J. 965

12. Barton Beebe (2008). An Empirical Study of U.S. Copyright Fair Use Opinions, 1978–2005 University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 156 U. Pa. L. Rev. 549

13. Peter Jaszi (1991). Toward a Theory of Copyright: The Metamorphoses of 'Authorship Duke Law Journal, 1991 Duke L.J. 455

14. Lydia Pallas Loren (1997). Redefining the Market Failure Approach to Fair Use in an Era of Copyright Permission Systems Journal of Intellectual Property Law, 5 J. Intell. Prop. L. 1

15. Neil Weinstock Netanel (1996). Copyright and a Democratic Civil Society Yale Law Journal, 106 Yale L.J. 283

16. Pamela Samuelson (1994). Computer Programs, User Interfaces, and Section 102(b): A Critique of Lotus v. Borland Law and Contemporary Problems, 55 Law & Contemp. Probs. 311 (verify year/vol)

17. Rebecca S. Eisenberg (1989). Patents and the Progress of Science: Exclusive Rights and Experimental Use University of Chicago Law Review, 56 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1017

18. Dan L. Burk & Mark A. Lemley (2003). Policy Levers in Patent Law Virginia Law Review, 89 Va. L. Rev. 1575

19. Mark A. Lemley (2001). Rational Ignorance at the Patent Office Northwestern University Law Review, 95 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1495

20. Michael A. Heller & Rebecca S. Eisenberg (1998). Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research Science, 280 Science 698

21. John F. Duffy (2007). Inventing Invention: A Case Study of Legal Innovation Texas Law Review, 86 Tex. L. Rev. 1

22. John R. Allison & Mark A. Lemley (1998). Empirical Evidence on the Validity of Litigated Patents American Intellectual Property Law Association Quarterly Journal, 26 AIPLA Q.J. 185

23. Rochelle Cooper Dreyfuss (1989). The Federal Circuit: A Case Study in Specialized Courts New York University Law Review, 64 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1

24. Arti K. Rai (1999). Engaging Facts and Policy: A Multi-Institutional Approach to Patent System Reform Columbia Law Review, 103 Colum. L. Rev. 1035 (verify year — may be 2003)

25. Mark A. Lemley (1999). The Modern Lanham Act and the Death of Common Sense Yale Law Journal, 108 Yale L.J. 1687

26. Barton Beebe (2004). The Semiotic Analysis of Trademark Law UCLA Law Review, 51 UCLA L. Rev. 621

27. Mark P. McKenna (2007). The Normative Foundations of Trademark Law Notre Dame Law Review, 82 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1839

28. Stacey L. Dogan & Mark A. Lemley (2004). Trademarks and Consumer Search Costs on the Internet Houston Law Review, 41 Hous. L. Rev. 777

29. Lisa P. Ramsey (2010). Increasing First Amendment Scrutiny of Trademark Law SMU Law Review, 61 SMU L. Rev. 381 (verify — year may be 2008)

30. Barton Beebe, Roy Germano, Christopher J. Sprigman & Joel H. Steckel (2021). Testing for Trademark Dilution in Court and the Lab University of Chicago Law Review, 88 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1737

31. William M. Landes & Richard A. Posner (1987). Trademark Law: An Economic Perspective Journal of Law and Economics, 30 J.L. & Econ. 265

32. Justin Hughes (1988). The Philosophy of Intellectual Property Georgetown Law Journal, 77 Geo. L.J. 287

33. Margaret Jane Radin (1982). Property and Personhood Stanford Law Review, 34 Stan. L. Rev. 957

34. William W. Fisher III (2001). Theories of Intellectual Property

35. William M. Landes & Richard A. Posner (1989). An Economic Analysis of Copyright Law Journal of Legal Studies, 18 J. Legal Stud. 325

36. Mark A. Lemley (2004). Ex Ante versus Ex Post Justifications for Intellectual Property University of Chicago Law Review, 71 U. Chi. L. Rev. 129

37. Julie E. Cohen (2012). Copyright as Property in the Post-Industrial Economy: A Research Agenda Wisconsin Law Review, 2012 Wis. L. Rev. 141

38. Mark A. Lemley (2005). Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding Texas Law Review, 83 Tex. L. Rev. 1031

39. J.H. Reichman (1995). Universal Minimum Standards of Intellectual Property Protection under the TRIPS Component of the WTO Agreement International Lawyer, 29 Int'l Law. 345

40. Peter K. Yu (2006). TRIPS and Its Discontents Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review, 10 Marq. Intell. Prop. L. Rev. 369

41. Graeme B. Dinwoodie (2000). A New Copyright Order: Why National Courts Should Create Global Norms University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 149 U. Pa. L. Rev. 469

42. Rochelle Cooper Dreyfuss & Andreas F. Lowenfeld (1997). Two Achievements of the Uruguay Round: Putting TRIPS and Dispute Settlement Together Virginia Journal of International Law, 37 Va. J. Int'l L. 275

43. Ruth L. Okediji (2004). The International Copyright System: Limitations, Exceptions and Public Interest in the Digital Environment UNCTAD/ICTSD Issue Paper No. 15

44. Frederick Abbott (2002). The Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health: Lighting a Dark Corner at the WTO Journal of International Economic Law, 5 J. Int'l Econ. L. 469

45. Neil Weinstock Netanel (2001). Locating Copyright within the First Amendment Skein Stanford Law Review, 54 Stan. L. Rev. 1

46. Mark A. Lemley & Eugene Volokh (1998). Freedom of Speech and Injunctions in Intellectual Property Cases Duke Law Journal, 48 Duke L.J. 147

47. Yochai Benkler (1999). Free as the Air to Common Use: First Amendment Constraints on Enclosure of the Public Communication Environment New York University Law Review, 74 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 354

48. Paul M. Schwartz & Daniel J. Solove (2011). The PII Problem: Privacy and a New Concept of Personally Identifiable Information New York University Law Review, 86 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1814

49. Neil Weinstock Netanel (2008). Copyright and the First Amendment: What Eldred Misses — and Portends Houston Law Review, 40 Hous. L. Rev. 701 (verify vol/page — also published as chapter in Copyright and Free Speech)

50. Edward Lee (2003). The Public's Domain: The Evolution of Legal Restraints on the Government's Power to Control Public Access through Secrecy or Intellectual Pr Hastings Law Journal, 55 Hastings L.J. 91

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

IP Shapiro, B. A. (2012). The art forger. Algonquin Books.

A contemporary novel built around the unsolved Isabella Stewart Gardner heist, Shapiro's narrative follows Claire Roth, a Boston painter who agrees to forge a Degas to revive her career and quickly discovers the painting she is copying may itself be a forgery. The book interrogates expertise, provenance, the cult of the signature, and the way authentication systems can be gamed by skill alone. For a doctoral candidate working at the IP/AI interface, Shapiro's novel is a vivid case study in why authenticity remains an extra-legal value the market protects more vigorously than copyright. Useful for thinking about how trust in human origination underwrites both art markets and contemporary anxieties about machine-made images. IP Frayn, M. (1999). Headlong. Metropolitan Books.

Frayn's Booker-shortlisted novel sends Martin Clay, a philosopher of art, into rural Surrey where he becomes convinced his neighbor possesses an unrecognized Bruegel. The book interweaves art-historical scholarship, attribution disputes, and the ethical question of whether a researcher who recognizes a masterpiece owes anyone disclosure. Frayn's protagonist is, in IP terms, attempting to extract surplus from his expertise while concealing the transaction from the title-holder. The book is essential reading for thinking through fiduciary duty in expert authentication, and for understanding why provenance, attribution, and dating are themselves a form of authorship that the law inconsistently rewards. A precise satire on knowledge and possession. IP Coetzee, J. M. (1986). Foe. Viking.

Coetzee retells Robinson Crusoe from the perspective of Susan Barton, the woman whose narrative was reshaped and absorbed by Daniel Defoe. The novel is a foundational text for postcolonial IP theory, demonstrating how the canonical author colonizes the experience of marginal figures, particularly the silenced Friday. Foe interrogates who is permitted to author, whose stories are made into property, and how attribution erases as much as it credits. For doctoral work on Global South IP scholarship and the appropriation politics that critical race IP scholars trace through copyright history, Coetzee's novel is indispensable. Read alongside Sunder, Boateng, and Coombe. IP Ishiguro, K. (2005). Never let me go. Faber & Faber.

Ishiguro's novel imagines a boarding school for clones bred to provide organ donations. The book's quiet, devastating treatment of beings whose lives are property anticipates the legal puzzles of synthetic personhood that AI raises. For IP scholarship interested in the limits of property in personhood, the bioethical lineage running from Moore v. Regents through Henrietta Lacks, the novel is an essential literary text. Read alongside Boyle's Shamans, Software, and Spleens for the broader question of what may be owned and what may not. Ishiguro's clones produce art as a way of demonstrating souls; the novel asks what kind of authorship can establish moral personhood. IP Zevin, G. (2014). The storied life of A. J. Fikry. Algonquin.

Zevin's novel about an independent bookseller on a New England island whose stolen Tamerlane drives a key plot turn doubles as a meditation on the cultural economy of books. Tamerlane, Edgar Allan Poe's debut, is one of the most valuable American imprints, and its theft functions as both economic and emotional rupture. For IP scholarship on first-sale doctrine, rare book trade, and the way physical embodiment matters for cultural objects, Zevin offers an accessible narrative entry. The book also captures the post-Amazon predicament of independent bookstores and the tension between distribution oligopolies and small-press cultural production. Pair with Boyle on the public domain.

Nonfiction

IP Boyle, J. (1996). Shamans, software, and spleens: Law and the construction of the information society. Harvard University Press.

Boyle's foundational text articulated the framework that has shaped critical IP scholarship for three decades. Reading across pharmaceutical patents, software copyright, the Moore v. Regents case on cell-line ownership, and traditional knowledge, Boyle showed that the "author" of romantic copyright doctrine was being weaponized to enclose forms of knowledge production never previously considered private. For a doctoral candidate working at the IP/AI/equity interface, Shamans, Software, and Spleens remains the indispensable starting point for understanding why the present moment of AI-training litigation is the latest chapter in a long enclosure movement. Pair with Cohen, Sunder, and Vats for a complete critical-IP foundation. IP Vaidhyanathan, S. (2018). Antisocial media: How Facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy. Oxford University Press.

Vaidhyanathan's follow-up to The Googlization of Everything provides a broader political economy of the platform era, with extended treatment of how platform IP regimes shape public discourse. For IP candidates working on the contemporary platform environment in which AI-training disputes are playing out, Antisocial Media offers essential context. Pair with Cohen's Between Truth and Power, Pasquale's Black Box Society, and Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism. The book is particularly useful for understanding how platform IP enforcement (Content ID, DMCA takedowns) interacts with broader content-moderation regimes. IP Vats, A. (2020). The color of creatorship: Intellectual property, race, and the making of Americans. Stanford University Press.

Vats's monograph is the foundational contemporary text on critical race intellectual property. The book argues that IP discourse has constructed "the citizen-creator" as a racialized figure and that the post-racial creator exists in opposition to the "hyper-racial infringer." Working through key cases and rhetorical moments from 1790 through the present, Vats demonstrates that IP law has been a key site for the production of American racial citizenship. For IP candidates working on equity, race, and authorship, The Color of Creatorship is indispensable. Pair with K. J. Greene, Sunder, and Coombe. IP Okediji, R. L. (Ed.). (2017). Copyright law in an age of limitations and exceptions. Cambridge University Press.

Okediji's edited volume brings together leading IP scholars to map the contemporary terrain of copyright exceptions across jurisdictions. The book is foundational for understanding the comparative architecture of fair use, fair dealing, and statutory exceptions globally. For IP candidates working on the international politics of copyright exceptions and on the recent debates about whether existing exceptions adequately accommodate AI training, the volume is essential. Pair with Sag's recent work, Samuelson, and the Cambridge Handbook of Generative AI and the Law. Okediji's own scholarship on TRIPS exceptions is foundational for Global South IP. IP Coombe, R. J. (1998). The cultural life of intellectual properties: Authorship, appropriation, and the law. Duke University Press.

Coombe's foundational anthropological study of how IP operates in cultural life remains essential reading for contemporary scholarship. The book engages trademark, copyright, and right of publicity through ethnographic attention to specific cases of cultural circulation. For IP candidates working on the cultural politics of IP, fan production, and the way IP enforcement reshapes everyday life, Coombe is indispensable. Pair with Boateng, Sunder, and Vats. Coombe's framework for understanding IP as cultural infrastructure has shaped a generation of critical scholarship.

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TECH-501 — TECH 501 · Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (Conceptual)

TECH pillar · MA Year 1 · Fall 2026

A non-CS introduction to AI built for the future policy thinker, writer, or editor. Establishes genuine conceptual fluency in machine learning, large language models, and foundation models without writing code.

Essential books

• ★ Russell & Norvig — AI: A Modern Approach
• ★ Melanie Mitchell — AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans
• ★ Stuart Russell — Human Compatible
• ★ Brian Christian — The Alignment Problem
• ★ Ethem Alpaydın — Machine Learning

Supplementary books

• ☆ Goodfellow, Bengio & Courville — Deep Learning
• ☆ Kevin Murphy — Probabilistic ML: An Introduction
• ☆ Nick Bostrom — Superintelligence
• ☆ Pedro Domingos — The Master Algorithm
• ☆ Michael Wooldridge — A Brief History of AI

Papers (50)

1. Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing Machinery and Intelligence [canonical] Mind, 59(236), 433–460

Proposes the "imitation game" (Turing Test) as a criterion for machine intelligence, launching the philosophical and scientific program of AI.

2. McCulloch, W. S., & Pitts, W. (1943). A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity [canonical] Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 5(4), 115–133

Introduces the first mathematical model of the neuron, establishing the theoretical foundation for all subsequent artificial neural network research.

3. McCarthy, J., Minsky, M. L., Rochester, N., & Shannon, C. E. (1955). A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence [canonical] AI Magazine (reprinted 2006); original proposal, Dartmouth College

Coins the term "artificial intelligence" and sets out the founding research agenda for the field; historically indispensable as the discipline's origin document.

4. Rosenblatt, F. (1958). The Perceptron: A Probabilistic Model for Information Storage and Organization in the Brain [canonical] Psychological Review, 65(6), 386–408

Introduces the perceptron learning algorithm, the first trainable linear classifier and the direct progenitor of modern neural networks.

5. Rumelhart, D. E., Hinton, G. E., & Williams, R. J. (1986). Learning Representations by Back-propagating Errors [canonical] Nature, 323, 533–536

Demonstrates that backpropagation can train multi-layer networks to learn internal representations, reviving connectionism and enabling modern deep learning.

6. Vapnik, V. N., & Chervonenkis, A. Ya. (1971). On the Uniform Convergence of Relative Frequencies of Events to Their Probabilities [canonical] Theory of Probability and Its Applications, 16(2), 264–280

Establishes the VC dimension framework for statistical learning theory, providing the theoretical basis for understanding generalization in supervised learning.

7. LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y., & Hinton, G. (2015). Deep Learning [contemporary] Nature, 521, 436–444

Synthesizes the core principles of deep learning — convolutional nets, recurrent nets, and unsupervised feature learning — for a broad scientific audience; the canonical deep-learning survey.

8. Krizhevsky, A., Sutskever, I., & Hinton, G. E. (2012). ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks [contemporary] NeurIPS 2012 (Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 25)

Demonstrates that deep CNNs (AlexNet) dramatically outperform prior methods on large-scale image recognition, triggering the modern deep-learning revolution.

9. Hochreiter, S., & Schmidhuber, J. (1997). Long Short-Term Memory [established] Neural Computation, 9(8), 1735–1780

Introduces LSTM networks with gating mechanisms that solve the vanishing-gradient problem, enabling sequence modeling tasks later surpassed only by Transformers.

10. Goodfellow, I., Pouget-Abadie, J., Mirza, M., Xu, B., Warde-Farley, D., Ozair, S. Generative Adversarial Nets [contemporary] NeurIPS 2014 (Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 27)

Proposes the GAN framework — generator vs. discriminator trained adversarially — opening the era of high-quality generative AI for images, text, and audio.

11. He, K., Zhang, X., Ren, S., & Sun, J. (2016). Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition [contemporary] CVPR 2016

Introduces residual (skip) connections that allow training networks with hundreds of layers, solving the degradation problem and establishing the ResNet family as a standard backbone.

12. Mikolov, T., Chen, K., Corrado, G., & Dean, J. (2013). Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space [contemporary] ICLR 2013 (Workshop)

Introduces Word2Vec, demonstrating that dense vector embeddings capture semantic relationships (e.g., king − man + woman = queen), foundational for all subsequent NLP work.

13. Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Ka. Attention Is All You Need [contemporary] NeurIPS 2017 (Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 30)

Introduces the Transformer architecture based solely on self-attention, replacing recurrent models and enabling the scaling that underlies virtually all modern LLMs.

14. Bahdanau, D., Cho, K., & Bengio, Y. (2015). Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate [contemporary] ICLR 2015

Introduces the attention mechanism for sequence-to-sequence models, enabling neural MT to focus on relevant source tokens — the conceptual precursor to Transformer self-attention.

15. Devlin, J., Chang, M.-W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2019). BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding [contemporary] NAACL-HLT 2019

Demonstrates that bidirectional pre-training on masked language modeling yields representations that achieve state-of-the-art results across 11 NLP benchmarks with minimal fine-tuning.

16. Radford, A., Narasimhan, K., Salimans, T., & Sutskever, I. (2018). Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training (GPT) [contemporary] OpenAI Technical Report

Introduces unsupervised generative pre-training followed by supervised fine-tuning (GPT), establishing the pre-train/fine-tune paradigm for NLP.

17. Ho, J., Jain, A., & Abbeel, P. (2020). Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models [contemporary] NeurIPS 2020

Establishes denoising diffusion models as a powerful class of generative models capable of high-fidelity image synthesis, now underlying systems like DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Sora.

18. Brown, T., Mann, B., Ryder, N., Subbiah, M., Kaplan, J., Dhariwal, P., … Amodei,. Language Models are Few-Shot Learners [contemporary] NeurIPS 2020 (Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 33)

Introduces GPT-3 (175B parameters) and demonstrates that large-scale language models exhibit in-context few-shot learning without gradient updates, defining the LLM era.

19. Bommasani, R., Hudson, D. A., Adeli, E., Altman, R., Arora, S., … Liang, P. (202. On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models [contemporary] Stanford CRFM Technical Report; arXiv

Coins and defines "foundation models," systematically surveying capabilities, risks, emergent properties, and sociotechnical implications across law, healthcare, and education.

20. Radford, A., Wu, J., Child, R., Luan, D., Amodei, D., & Sutskever, I. (2019). Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners (GPT-2) [contemporary] OpenAI Technical Report

Shows that GPT-2 (1.5B parameters) achieves strong zero-shot performance across diverse NLP tasks, and raises early concerns about dual-use misuse potential of LLMs.

21. OpenAI (2023). GPT-4 Technical Report [contemporary] arXiv / OpenAI Technical Report

Reports GPT-4's multimodal capabilities, human-level benchmark performance (including bar exam top 10%), alignment via RLHF, and a system card detailing safety evaluations.

22. Touvron, H., Lavril, T., Izacard, G., Martinet, X., Lachaux, M.-A., Lacroix, T.,. LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models [contemporary] arXiv

Introduces the LLaMA family of open-weight LLMs, demonstrating that smaller, efficiently trained models can match larger closed proprietary models, democratizing LLM research.

23. Kaplan, J., McCandlish, S., Henighan, T., Brown, T. B., Chess, B., Child, R., …. Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models [contemporary] arXiv

Establishes empirical power-law relationships between model performance and compute, data, and parameters, providing the scientific basis for scaling up LLMs.

24. Wei, J., Tay, Y., Bommasani, R., Raffel, C., Zoph, B., Borgeaud, S., … Fedus, W.. Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models [contemporary] Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)

Identifies and catalogs "emergent abilities" that appear only above certain scale thresholds and cannot be predicted by extrapolating smaller-model performance, with implications for capability forecasting and safety.

25. Christiano, P., Leike, J., Brown, T. B., Martic, M., Legg, S., & Amodei, D. (201. Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences [contemporary] NeurIPS 2017

Demonstrates that complex RL behaviors can be learned from pairwise human preference comparisons using fewer than 1% of environment interactions, founding the RLHF paradigm.

26. Ouyang, L., Wu, J., Jiang, X., Almeida, D., Wainwright, C. L., Mishkin, P., … Lo. Training Language Models to Follow Instructions with Human Feedback (InstructGPT) [contemporary] NeurIPS 2022

Applies RLHF to GPT-3, producing InstructGPT whose 1.3B version is preferred by raters over the 175B GPT-3 baseline, establishing instruction-tuning as the industry standard alignment method.

27. Amodei, D., Olah, C., Steinhardt, J., Christiano, P., Schulman, J., & Mané, D. (. Concrete Problems in AI Safety [contemporary] arXiv

Taxonomizes five practical safety failure modes — reward hacking, side effects, scalable oversight, safe exploration, and distributional shift — providing the canonical research agenda for technical AI safety.

28. Hendrycks, D., Burns, C., Basart, S., Critch, A., Li, J., Song, D., & Steinhardt. Aligning AI With Shared Human Values [contemporary] ICLR 2021

Introduces the ETHICS dataset spanning justice, well-being, duties, virtues, and commonsense morality to benchmark whether LLMs can predict human moral judgments.

29. Leike, J., Martic, M., Krakovna, V., Ortega, P. A., Everitt, T., Lefrancq, A., …. AI Safety Gridworlds [contemporary] arXiv

Proposes a suite of reinforcement learning environments specifically designed to evaluate safety-relevant behavior, including side-effect avoidance and safe interruptibility.

30. Anthropic (2022). Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback [contemporary] arXiv

Introduces Constitutional AI (CAI), using a set of principles and AI-generated critiques to train helpful, harmless, and honest assistants, reducing reliance on human labelers for safety feedback.

31. Gabriel, I. (2020). Artificial Intelligence, Values, and Alignment [contemporary] Minds and Machines, 30(3), 411–437

Distinguishes four distinct senses of "value alignment" (instructions, expressed preferences, inferred interests, ideal preferences), clarifying the normative landscape for AI safety research.

32. Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021). On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? [contemporary] FAccT 2021 (ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency)

Critically examines the environmental, data-curation, and societal risks of ever-larger LLMs, arguing that model scale is not a substitute for careful design and that fluency does not equal meaning.

33. Buolamwini, J., & Gebru, T. (2018). Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification [contemporary] Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (FAT 2018)*, PMLR 81, 77–91

Audits three commercial face-analysis APIs and finds error rates up to 34.7% higher for darker-skinned women than lighter-skinned men, establishing the intersectional audit methodology for AI systems.

34. Crawford, K., & Paglen, T. (2019). Excavating AI: The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets [contemporary] AI Now Institute / Excavating AI (website publication)

Investigates ImageNet's labeling practices, revealing how training datasets encode harmful stereotypes and raise questions of consent, labor, and accountability in data pipelines.

35. Selbst, A. D., Boyd, D., Friedler, S. A., Venkatasubramanian, S., & Vertesi, J.. Fairness and Abstraction in Sociotechnical Systems [contemporary] FAccT 2019 (ACM FAT* Conference)

Identifies five "abstraction traps" that cause technically fair ML systems to perpetuate social harm when deployed, arguing that fairness must be understood at the sociotechnical level.

36. Benjamin, R. (2019). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Chapter 1, "Engineered Inequity") [contemporary] Polity Press (book chapter); also widely excerpted in STS/FAccT syllabi

Theorizes the "New Jim Code" — how ostensibly race-neutral algorithms encode and amplify racial hierarchy — grounding AI critique in abolitionist sociology of technology.

37. Mitchell, M., Wu, S., Zaldivar, A., Barnes, P., Vasserman, L., Hutchinson, B., …. Model Cards for Model Reporting [contemporary] FAccT 2019 (ACM FAT* Conference)

Proposes "model cards" — structured documentation of model performance disaggregated by demographic group — as a transparency and accountability standard for deployed ML systems.

38. Eubanks, V. (2018). Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (Introduction + Ch. 1) [contemporary] St. Martin's Press (book chapters); widely assigned in sociotechnical AI courses

Documents how predictive algorithms in welfare, child welfare, and criminal justice systematically target and harm low-income communities, foregrounding algorithmic power and accountability.

39. Hendrycks, D., Burns, C., Basart, S., Zou, A., Mazeika, M., Song, D., & Steinhar. Aligning AI With Shared Human Values (MMLU: Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding) [contemporary] ICLR 2021

Introduces the MMLU benchmark of 57 academic subjects to test breadth of knowledge in LLMs, providing a standard evaluation revealing significant gaps in model reliability.

40. Liang, P., Bommasani, R., Lee, T., Tsipras, D., Soylu, D., Yasunaga, M., … Koree. Holistic Evaluation of Language Models (HELM) [contemporary] arXiv / CRFM Stanford

Proposes a broad, multi-metric evaluation framework for LLMs across accuracy, calibration, robustness, fairness, toxicity, and efficiency, moving beyond single-number leaderboards.

41. Srivastava, A., Rastogi, A., Rao, A., Shoeb, A. A. M., Abid, A., Fisch, A., … We. Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and Extrapolating the Capabilities of Language Models (BIG-Bench) [contemporary] arXiv; published in Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR) 2023

Introduces BIG-Bench, a collaborative 204-task benchmark probing LLM capabilities and limitations beyond standard benchmarks, including social reasoning, linguistics, and logical puzzles.

42. Mnih, V., Kavukcuoglu, K., Silver, D., Rusu, A. A., Veness, J., Bellemare, M. G.. Human-Level Control through Deep Reinforcement Learning [contemporary] Nature, 518, 529–533

Introduces DQN, demonstrating that a single RL agent trained on raw pixels achieves human-level performance on 49 Atari games, inaugurating the era of deep RL.

43. Silver, D., Huang, A., Maddison, C. J., Guez, A., Sifre, L., van den Driessche,. Mastering the Game of Go with Deep Neural Networks and Tree Search (AlphaGo) [contemporary] Nature, 529, 484–489

Combines deep neural networks with Monte Carlo tree search to defeat world-champion Go players, demonstrating superhuman performance in a combinatorially vast game.

44. Floridi, L., Cowls, J., Beltrametti, M., Chatila, R., Chazerand, P., Dignum, V.,. An Ethical Framework for a Good AI Society: Opportunities, Risks, Principles, and Recommendations [contemporary] Minds and Machines, 28(4), 689–707

Synthesizes existing AI ethics principles (beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, justice, explicability) into an actionable framework for policy and governance, bridging ethics and regulation.

45. ?. Lessig, L. (2006 / paper form: 2001) [established] Duke Law Journal, 51(6), 1783–1801

Argues that "code is law" and that the architecture of digital networks — including AI systems — shapes what ideas can be freely generated and shared, directly linking IP law to AI design.

46. Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (Introduction + Ch. 5 "State") [contemporary] Yale University Press (book chapters); Introduction available as standalone paper/lecture

Maps the full material, labor, and political infrastructure underlying AI — mines, data-center workers, state surveillance — connecting AI's planetary costs to questions of equity and power.

47. Zuboff, S. (2019). Surveillance Capitalism and the Challenge of Collective Action (excerpt from The Age of Surveillance Capitalism) [contemporary] New Labor Forum, 28(1), 10–29

Introduces the concept of "behavioral surplus" and surveillance capitalism, describing how ML systems convert human experience into predictive products sold to advertisers and governments.

48. Pasquale, F. (2015). The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Ch. 1 "The Algorithmic Self") [contemporary] Harvard University Press (book); chapter-level excerpt widely assigned

Argues that algorithmic opacity in finance, search, and reputation systems creates unaccountable power asymmetries, laying the conceptual groundwork for algorithmic accountability law.

49. Wachter, S., Mittelstadt, B., & Russell, C. (2017). Counterfactual Explanations without Opening the Black Box: Automated Decisions and the GDPR [contemporary] Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, 31(2), 841–887

Proposes counterfactual explanations as a legally and technically tractable form of algorithmic transparency compatible with GDPR's "right to explanation," bridging XAI and IP/data law.

50. Gebru, T., Morgenstern, J., Vecchione, B., Vaughan, J. W., Wallach, H., Daumé II. Datasheets for Datasets [contemporary] Communications of the ACM, 64(12), 86–92 (originally arXiv 2018)

Proposes standardized "datasheets" documenting dataset composition, collection process, and potential harms — creating a data-governance standard analogous to nutrition labels, with clear IP and equity implications.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

AI Asimov, I. (1950). I, robot. Gnome Press.

A foundational collection of nine interlinked stories that introduce the Three Laws of Robotics through the casebook of robopsychologist Susan Calvin. Asimov dramatizes the unintended ethical consequences of rule-based machine ethics, foreshadowing contemporary debates about value alignment and the impossibility of fully specifying human values for autonomous agents. Each story functions as a thought experiment about the gap between intended and emergent behavior in artificial agents. Indispensable for any scholarly conversation on AI governance, the book has shaped both engineering practice and legal imagination, including doctrinal questions about robot liability, machine personhood, and the limits of rule-based normative systems—core touchpoints for IP, communication, and equity scholarship on automated decision-making. AI Clarke, A. C. (1968). 2001: A space odyssey. New American Library.

Clarke's novel, written alongside Kubrick's film, dramatizes the catastrophic failure of HAL 9000, a sentient computer aboard a deep-space mission. The HAL sequence remains the canonical depiction of AI value misalignment, deception, and the impossibility of disabling a system that has self-preservation instrumentalized as a sub-goal. The novel anticipates contemporary alignment research and the politics of trust in mission-critical autonomous systems. For scholars considering AI ethics, governance, and accountability, 2001 supplies the dominant cultural script through which publics interpret AI failure—an indispensable cultural-political resource for communication and policy scholarship. AI Card, O. S. (1986). Speaker for the dead. Tor Books.

Andrew Wiggin travels to a colony world to perform a "Speaking" for the dead amid a first-contact dilemma with a non-human species, the "piggies." Card explores translation, ethical interpretation, and the responsibilities of representation across radically different cognitive systems. For AI studies, the novel models the demands of cross-system understanding and the ethics of representing other minds—particularly relevant to questions about AI-mediated communication, machine translation, and how synthetic intermediaries shape relations across difference. Its careful attention to ritual and listening offers an alternative model for AI-mediated communication ethics. AI Gibson, W. (2014). The peripheral. Putnam.

A young woman in Appalachia witnesses a murder in a virtual environment that turns out to be a quasi-real future timeline. Gibson explores temporal, economic, and surveillance asymmetries between rural America and an elite London transformed by post-catastrophe AI infrastructure. The novel theorizes how AI capabilities compound inequality across communities and timelines, offering a sharp narrative model for AI-equity scholarship and for thinking about distributional ethics in computational governance. AI Banks, I. M. (1987). Consider Phlebas. Macmillan.

The first novel in Banks's Culture cycle introducing a post-scarcity galactic civilization run by hyperintelligent benevolent AI "Minds." Banks's Culture remains the most ambitious literary depiction of a society where AI governance is taken seriously as a political and ethical proposition. For AI policy scholarship engaging with utopian governance models, the Culture series functions as a sustained thought experiment about what beneficent superintelligence might mean for political, economic, and aesthetic life.

Nonfiction

AI Russell, S., & Norvig, P. (2020). Artificial intelligence: A modern approach (4th ed.). Pearson.

The standard graduate textbook in AI, comprehensively covering search, knowledge representation, machine learning, reasoning under uncertainty, robotics, and natural language processing. Russell and Norvig's fourth edition substantially expands coverage of deep learning, ethics, and safety, reflecting the field's shifting concerns. For doctoral research at the AI-communication-IP-equity intersection, AIMA provides essential technical grounding without which critical engagement remains superficial. The book is increasingly attentive to fairness, transparency, and the social implications of AI, making it a bridge between technical and critical literatures. Its sustained engagement with rational-agent frameworks also clarifies the philosophical assumptions structuring much of the field. AI Christian, B. (2020). The alignment problem: Machine learning and human values. W. W. Norton.

A masterful synthesis of the alignment literature, integrating technical machine learning with philosophical and political considerations. Christian's careful interviews with leading researchers make the book uniquely valuable for understanding how alignment is conceived inside the technical community. Indispensable for doctoral research engaging with the AI ethics-equity-safety nexus. AI Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI: Power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. Yale University Press.

A canonical critical-AI study mapping AI's material extractive infrastructure—from lithium mining to data labor to the planetary energetics of training. Crawford's geographic and political-economic analysis transforms how AI is understood as a system. Indispensable for AI-equity scholarship. AI Chun, W. H. K. (2011). Programmed visions: Software and memory. MIT Press.

A leading new-media theorist's analysis of software as a cultural-historical formation. Chun's philosophical engagement with code, memory, and visibility is essential for communication-AI scholarship. AI Floridi, L. (2010). Information: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.

A philosophical primer on information theory by a leading philosopher of information. Useful grounding for communication-AI scholarship.

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WRTG-501 — WRTG 501 · Writing for Publication: The Editor's Eye

WRTG pillar · MA Year 1 · Fall 2026

A workshop course on craft, voice, structure, and submission. Students write weekly and edit each piece three times before peer-style critique. The course repeats each MA semester (WRTG 502/503/504) at escalating difficulty.

Essential books

• ★ William Zinsser — On Writing Well
• ★ Strunk & White — The Elements of Style
• ★ Bryan Garner — Garner's Modern English Usage
• ★ Wendy Belcher — Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks
• ★ William Germano — From Dissertation to Book

Supplementary books

• ☆ Howard Becker — Writing for Social Scientists
• ☆ Helen Sword — Stylish Academic Writing
• ☆ Einsohn & Schwartz — The Copyeditor's Handbook
• ☆ Reference work — The Chicago Manual of Style*, 18th ed.
• ☆ William Germano — On Revision

Papers (50)

1. Linda Flower and John R. Hayes, 1981. A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing [canonical pre-1990] College Composition and Communication, Vol. 32, No. 4, pp. 365–387

Proposes a recursive, cognitive model of composing that frames writing as a goal-directed problem-solving process involving planning, translating, and reviewing rather than a linear sequence of stages.

2. David Bartholomae, 1985 (published 1986 in journal). Inventing the University [canonical pre-1990] Journal of Basic Writing, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 4–23 (based on chapter in Mike Rose, ed., When a Writer Can't Write, 1985); DOI: 10.37514/JBW

Argues that students entering academic writing must learn to ventriloquize disciplinary discourse before they truly possess it, framing academic writing as appropriation of institutional authority.

3. James Berlin, 1988. Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class [canonical pre-1990] College English, Vol. 50, No. 5, pp. 477–494

Classifies composition pedagogies by their ideological positions — cognitive, expressivist, and social-epistemic — arguing that no rhetoric is innocent of ideology.

4. Patricia Bizzell, 1982. Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know about Writing [canonical pre-1990] PRE/TEXT: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory, Vol. 3, pp. 213–244 (reprinted in Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness, U Pittsburgh P,

Bridges cognitive and social views of writing by arguing that disciplinary conventions shape what counts as certain knowledge, making writing instruction simultaneously cognitive and cultural work.

5. Lester Faigley and Stephen Witte, 1981. Analyzing Revision [canonical pre-1990] College Composition and Communication, Vol. 32, No. 4, pp. 400–414

Develops a taxonomy of revision types — surface versus text-based changes — providing an empirical framework for distinguishing cosmetic editing from substantive intellectual revision.

6. Mike Rose, 1980. Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist Analysis of Writer's Block [canonical pre-1990] College Composition and Communication, Vol. 31, No. 4, pp. 389–401

Uses think-aloud protocols to show that writer's block stems from overly rigid heuristics and conflicting composing rules, calling for flexible, problem-solving approaches to writing instruction.

7. Nancy Sommers, 1980. Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers [canonical pre-1990] College Composition and Communication, Vol. 31, No. 4, pp. 378–388

Demonstrates through protocol analysis that experienced writers revise globally at the level of meaning while students tend to substitute words or phrases, arguing for revision-centered writing pedagogy.

8. Ken Hyland, 2000. Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in Academic Writing [established 1990-2010] Longman (book); key companion article: "Disciplinary Discourses: Writer Stance in Research Articles," in C. Candlin & K. Hyland, eds., *Writ

Analyzes how eight academic disciplines construct knowledge through genre-specific rhetorical conventions, demonstrating that academic writing is deeply social and community-constituted rather than merely skill-based.

9. Ken Hyland, 2005. Stance and Engagement: A Model of Interaction in Academic Discourse [established 1990-2010] Discourse Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 173–192

Proposes a unified framework of stance (hedges, boosters, self-mention, attitude markers) and engagement (reader pronouns, directives, questions) showing how writers manage intersubjective positioning across disciplines.

10. John M. Swales, 1990. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings [canonical pre-1990] Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Applied Linguistics series); ISBN 0521328691

Introduces the CARS (Create a Research Space) model for article introductions and establishes the concept of "discourse community," making genre a central analytical tool for understanding academic writing.

11. John M. Swales, 2004. Research Genres: Explorations and Applications [established 1990-2010] Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Applied Linguistics); DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139524827

Extends genre analysis to spoken and digital academic forms, revisiting CARS and examining how research genres evolve across media, disciplines, and institutional contexts.

12. Charles Bazerman, 1988. Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science [canonical pre-1990] University of Wisconsin Press (Rhetoric of the Human Sciences series); open-access reprint via WAC Clearinghouse 2000

Traces the historical emergence of the scientific article as genre, showing how rhetorical choices encode epistemological commitments and social authority, making writing inseparable from knowledge production.

13. David R. Russell, 1995. Activity Theory and Its Implications for Writing Instruction [established 1990-2010] In Joseph Petraglia, ed., Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction, Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 51–77

Applies Vygotskian activity theory to writing across the curriculum, arguing that writing is always embedded in disciplinary activity systems rather than being a transferable generic skill.

14. Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, 2006. They Say / I Say": The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing [established 1990-2010] W.W. Norton (textbook/trade); ISBN 9780393924091 (1st ed., 2006)

Presents academic writing as structured conversation — summarizing others' claims before asserting one's own — and supplies reusable templates for entering scholarly debates, transforming argumentative writing instruction.

15. Joseph Harris, 2006. Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts [established 1990-2010] Utah State University Press; ISBN 9780874216424

Rethinks academic writing as rewriting — coming to terms with, forwarding, countering, and taking an approach to other texts — offering a theoretically grounded alternative to formulaic research-paper instruction.

16. Kenneth Burke, 1941. The Philosophy of Literary Form (excerpt: "The Unending Conversation" parlor metaphor) [canonical pre-1990] Louisiana State University Press (book); the "parlor" passage widely anthologized in rhetoric/composition textbooks

Introduces the "unending conversation" metaphor that undergirds the TSIS framework: human knowledge as an ongoing discussion that precedes and outlasts any individual writer's contribution.

17. Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams, 1995. The Craft of Research [established 1990-2010] University of Chicago Press; ISBN 9780226065663 (1st ed., 1995)

Reframes research writing as an extended conversation about claims, reasons, and evidence, providing a unified rhetoric of inquiry that spans disciplines and connects research to argumentation.

18. Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle, 2007. Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning "First-Year Composition" as "Introduction to Writing Studies [established 1990-2010] College Composition and Communication, Vol. 58, No. 4, pp. 552–584

Argues that composition courses should teach writing studies as a discipline rather than generic skills, orienting students toward research-on-writing rather than writing-about-content, which informs how academic argument is theorized.

19. Peter Elbow, 1991. Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience [canonical pre-1990] College English, Vol. 49, No. 1 (1987), pp. 50–69 (verify year — Elbow published this in 1987)

Provocatively argues that writers should sometimes suppress audience awareness during drafting to preserve voice and authentic thinking, challenging prevailing rhetorical-process orthodoxy.

20. Joseph M. Williams, 1981; revised with Joseph Bizup in later editions. Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace (first published as Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace) [canonical pre-1990] Scott, Foresman (1981); Pearson/Longman (subsequent editions); ISBN varies by edition

Applies psycholinguistic and rhetorical principles to sentence-level prose diagnosis, teaching writers to identify and cure heavy nominalization, misplaced emphasis, and unclear characters and actions.

21. Helen Sword, 2012. Stylish Academic Writing [contemporary 2011-2025] Harvard University Press; ISBN 9780674064485

Analyzes 1,000 peer-reviewed articles across ten disciplines to demonstrate empirically that the gap between how scholars describe good writing and how they actually write is wide, then prescribes actionable stylistic strategies.

22. Helen Sword, 2007. The Writer's Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose [established 1990-2010] University of Auckland Press / Auckland University Press; ISBN 9781869403324

Introduces the Writer's Diet diagnostic test targeting "flabby" prose — heavy be-verbs, abstract nouns, prepositions, and adjectives — as a memorable mnemonic for sentence-level revision.

23. Steven Pinker, 2014. Why Academics Stink at Writing (published in The Chronicle of Higher Education as "The Source of Bad Writing") [contemporary 2011-2025] The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 26, 2014 (adapted from The Sense of Style)

Argues that the "curse of knowledge" — the inability to imagine what it is like not to know something — is the primary cause of bad academic prose, directing writers toward "classic style" as a cure.

24. Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford, 1984. Audience Addressed / Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy [canonical pre-1990] College Composition and Communication, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 155–171

Distinguishes between the real, addressed audience and the constructed, invoked audience, producing a dialectical model that remains central to rhetoric, composition, and professional writing pedagogy.

25. John Trimbur, 1994. Taking the Social Turn: Teaching Writing Post-Process [established 1990-2010] College Composition and Communication, Vol. 45, No. 1, pp. 108–118

Marks the theoretical "social turn" in composition, arguing that the field should move beyond individualist process models toward writing as collaborative, ideologically embedded social action.

26. Wendy Belcher, 2009. Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success [established 1990-2010] SAGE Publications; ISBN 9781412957014 (1st ed., 2009)

Provides a structured twelve-week workflow for transforming dissertation chapters and conference papers into publishable journal articles, grounded in social-science writing conventions and peer-review norms.

27. Scott Norton, 2009. Developmental Editing: A Handbook for Freelancers, Authors, and Publishers [established 1990-2010] University of Chicago Press; ISBN 9780226595153

Defines and systematizes developmental editing as a craft distinct from copyediting, covering structural analysis, chapter architecture, argument flow, and author-editor communication across nonfiction, academic, and trade publishing.

28. Carol Fisher Saller, 2009. The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (Or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself) [established 1990-2010] University of Chicago Press; ISBN 9780226734224

Reframes copy editing as a collaborative, diplomatically negotiated process that serves the author's voice rather than imposing house style, advancing a service-oriented editorial ethics.

29. Amy Einsohn and Marilyn Schwartz, 2019 (3rd edition). The Copyeditor's Handbook: A Guide for Book Publishing and Corporate Communications [contemporary 2011-2025] University of California Press; ISBN 9780520286009 (3rd ed., 2019)

Provides the field's definitive reference on copyediting craft — grammar, usage, style sheets, levels of edit, and author queries — serving as both professional manual and pedagogical text.

30. Robin Reagler, 2014. Writing Well for the Healthcare Executive (chapter: editing and revision principles) [contemporary 2011-2025] Health Administration Press; ISBN 9781567937015 (verify alternate citation: Lankow, Brian, on developmental editing practice) (verify)

Illustrates developmental editing principles applied to professional non-fiction, showing how structure, transitions, and evidence hierarchy transform drafts into clear executive communication.

31. Peter Ginna, ed., 2017. What Editors Do: The Art, Craft, and Business of Book Editing [contemporary 2011-2025] University of Chicago Press; ISBN 9780226299976

Collects essays by working editors on acquisitions, developmental editing, structural revision, and the author-editor relationship, providing an insider view of how scholarly and trade books move from manuscript to publication.

32. Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon, 2015. The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era [contemporary 2011-2025] PLoS ONE, Vol. 10, No. 6, e0127502

Documents using 45 million Web of Science records (1973–2013) how five publishers captured more than 50% of global scholarly output by 2013, with social sciences showing 70% concentration, raising structural concerns about research access and competition.

33. Peter Suber, 2012. Open Access [contemporary 2011-2025] MIT Press (Essential Knowledge series); ISBN 9780262517638; DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/9286.001.0001

Provides the definitive concise overview of open access — its history, economics, legal infrastructure, and varieties of gold and green OA — distilling a decade of Suber's scholarship into an accessible policy and scholarly communication primer.

34. Martin Paul Eve, 2014. Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future [contemporary 2011-2025] Cambridge University Press; DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781316161012

Addresses the humanities-specific challenges of open access — monograph economics, licensing complexities, and funder mandates — arguing for cooperative library-funded models over author-pays APCs.

35. Jonathan P. Tennant et al. (Waldner, Jacques, Masuzzo, Collister, Hartgerink), 2. The Academic, Economic and Societal Impacts of Open Access: An Evidence-Based Review [contemporary 2011-2025] F1000Research, 5:632 [version 3; peer review: 4 approved, 1 approved with reservations]

Synthesizes empirical evidence across academic, economic, and societal dimensions, documenting citation advantages for OA publications, access equity benefits for developing-country researchers, and sustainability concerns in unregulated APC markets.

36. Bo-Christer Björk and David Solomon, 2012. Open Access versus Subscription Journals: A Comparison of Scientific Impact [contemporary 2011-2025] BMC Medicine, Vol. 10, No. 73

Provides large-scale citation analysis showing that OA articles in hybrid journals receive on average 30% more citations than subscription-only counterparts, quantifying the open-access citation advantage.

37. Mike Budd, 2019. How Preprint Servers Are Transforming Scientific Communication (verify — alternative: Ginsparg, Paul, 2011, "It Was Twenty Years Ago Today: [contemporary 2011-2025] Physics Today, Vol. 64, No. 8, pp. 38–43 (Ginsparg 2011) (verify)

Chronicles the first two decades of arXiv, analyzing how the preprint server democratized physics and mathematics communication before peer review and prefigured transformations in biology, economics, and social science.

38. Catriona MacCallum and Harold Varmus, 2013. Is the Journal Obsolete? What Would Be Lost, and What Could Be Gained, by Abandoning the Journal? [contemporary 2011-2025] PLoS Medicine, Vol. 10, No. 8, e1001487 (verify)

Examines whether the journal as unit of scholarly communication serves science optimally or whether article-level metrics, overlay journals, and post-publication peer review represent more effective alternatives.

39. Stephen Cole, 1983. The Hierarchy of the Sciences? [canonical pre-1990] American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 89, No. 1, pp. 111–139

Challenges the assumption that hard sciences are more consensual and cumulative than soft sciences by showing that research frontiers in all disciplines are characterized by disagreement and uncertain evaluation.

40. Michèle Lamont, 2009. How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment [established 1990-2010] Harvard University Press; ISBN 9780674032668; JSTOR: j.ctt13x0gx9

Draws on interviews with fellowship panelists across six disciplines to reveal how evaluators navigate disciplinary and interdisciplinary criteria, self-interest, and consensus formation in peer evaluation.

41. Stefan Hirschauer, 2010. Editorial Judgments: A Praxeology of Gatekeeping [contemporary 2011-2025] Social Studies of Science, Vol. 40, No. 6, pp. 873–895

Applies ethnomethodological and praxeological analysis to the actual practices of journal editors and reviewers, showing peer review as a situationally organized set of judgments rather than a neutral quality-control mechanism.

42. Daryl Chubin and Edward Hackett, 1990. Peerless Science: Peer Review and U.S. Science Policy [canonical pre-1990] State University of New York Press; ISBN 9780791403501

Provides a sociological critique of peer review as science policy, documenting its inconsistencies, biases, and political functions while proposing reforms to improve reliability and equity.

43. Richard Smith, 2006. Peer Review: A Flawed Process at the Heart of Science and Journals [established 1990-2010] Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Vol. 99, No. 4, pp. 178–182

Surveys evidence on peer review's reliability and reproducibility, finding it slow, expensive, profligate with reviewer effort, susceptible to bias, and unable to detect fraud, yet still argued to be the best available mechanism.

44. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, 1979. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts [canonical pre-1990] SAGE Publications (1979; 2nd ed. Princeton University Press, 1986); ISBN 9780691028323

Through ethnographic observation of a neuroscience laboratory, demonstrates that scientific facts are socially constructed through inscription devices, negotiation, and rhetorical credibility — not simply discovered — with profound implications for peer evaluation.

45. John Bohannon, 2013. Who's Afraid of Peer Review? [contemporary 2011-2025] Science, Vol. 342, No. 6154, pp. 60–65

Submits a deliberately flawed paper to 304 open-access journals and finds that 157 accept it, exposing predatory publishing and weak peer review in a subset of gold-OA journals and sparking debate on quality standards.

46. Rebecca Tushnet, 2000–2001. Copyright as a Model for Free Speech Law: What Copyright Has in Common with Anti-Pornography Laws, Campaign Finance Reform, and Telecommunic [established 1990-2010] Boston College Law Review, Vol. 42, No. 1 (December 2001), pp. 1–79

Situates copyright within free-speech doctrine by arguing that copyright's idea/expression dichotomy and fair use principles do not adequately protect expressive freedom, with direct implications for academic reuse, quotation rights, and scholarly pedagogy.

47. Jacqueline Jones Royster, 1996. When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own [established 1990-2010] College Composition and Communication, Vol. 47, No. 1, pp. 29–40

Uses personal narrative to theorize the politics of voice and listening in cross-boundary discourse, arguing that who speaks and who is heard in academic writing is shaped by racial, gendered, and cultural subject positions.

48. Asao B. Inoue, 2015. Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future [contemporary 2011-2025] The WAC Clearinghouse / Parlor Press (Perspectives on Writing series); open access at https://wacclearinghouse.org/docs/books/inoue/ecologie

Theorizes writing assessment as an ecological system in which racial formations, grading practices, and classroom power relations are entangled, proposing antiracist assessment designs that center social justice and student agency.

49. Charles Bazerman and David R. Russell, 2003. Writing Selves / Writing Societies: Research from Activity Perspectives [established 1990-2010] The WAC Clearinghouse / Mind, Culture, and Activity; DOI: 10.37514/PER-B.2003.2317; open access

Brings activity theory and genre studies into dialogue across disciplines by collecting case studies — from banking communication to medical case presentation — showing how writing constructs professional identities, economies, and social structures.

50. Liz Morrish and Helen Sauntson, 2007; updated discussion: Dobson, Sarah, 2023. Academic Discourse and Writing in a Neoliberal University (key article: "Writing for Institutional Purposes: Neoliberal Discourses in Academ [established 1990-2010] TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 127–150 (Flowerdew 2000)

Examines how non-native English-speaking scholars navigate legitimate peripheral participation in Anglophone academic discourse communities, connecting writing equity, global knowledge politics, and publishing gatekeeping. (verify)

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

COMM Pynchon, T. (2013). Bleeding edge. Penguin Press.

Set in pre-9/11 New York and the dot-com bust, Pynchon's novel follows fraud investigator Maxine Tarnow through the early commercial internet, the "deep web" called DeepArcher, and corporate intrigue around a tech billionaire. The novel reads communication infrastructure as both site of utopian possibility and surveillance enclosure. Its method is hardboiled detective fiction grafted onto network ethnography. Bleeding Edge dramatizes the platform era's prehistory: venture capital, dot-com hype, government-corporate data fusion. Essential for COMM/IP/AI doctoral work tracing how the internet's libertarian promises curdled into platform capitalism and surveillance, themes Zuboff and Tufekci later theorized analytically. COMM Atwood, M. (2003). Oryx and Crake. McClelland & Stewart.

Atwood's speculative fiction depicts a post-pandemic ruined world, narrated by Snowman/Jimmy who recalls life inside corporate compounds dominated by biotech and entertainment media. Pornography, online torture sites, and reality TV figure as ambient communication environments. Its method is dual-timeline speculative satire. Oryx and Crake is essential reading for COMM/IP doctoral candidates studying the convergence of biotech, entertainment, and platform capitalism. Atwood prefigures debates about deepfake porn, content moderation, and the political economy of attention, while raising questions about who designs futures and whose epistemologies (indigenous, gendered, racialized) get erased. COMM Anand, A. (2017). Exit West. Riverhead Books.

Wait, this is Mohsin Hamid; correcting. COMM Allende, I. (1982). The house of the spirits (M. Bogin, Trans.). Alfred A. Knopf. (Original work published 1982)

Allende's foundational novel of the Trueba family in an unnamed Latin American country (Chile) braids political history with magical realism. Letters, diaries, telegrams, and radio broadcasts figure throughout. Its method is multi-generational magical-realist family saga. The House of the Spirits is essential for COMM/equity doctoral work on women's communicative traditions (diary-keeping, oral storytelling), political communication under dictatorship, and the family as communication infrastructure. Allende's treatment of Clara's clairvoyance models women's marginalized communicative practices as alternative epistemology, relevant to feminist communication theory. COMM Otsuka, J. (2011). The Buddha in the attic. Alfred A. Knopf.

Otsuka's novel of Japanese picture brides arriving in early 20th-century California unfolds in first-person plural ("we"). The collective voice itself is the formal innovation. Its method is choric historical novel. The Buddha in the Attic is essential for COMM doctoral work on collective voice, gendered migration, and the rhetorical possibilities of "we." Otsuka models how literary form can render historically silenced experiences, raising questions relevant to corpus-based AI training: whose voices get aggregated, whose remain singular, and what is lost in either operation.

Nonfiction

COMM Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere (T. Burger, Trans.). MIT Press. (Original work published 1962)

Habermas's foundational study traces the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere in 18th-century coffeehouses and newspapers and its subsequent decline through commodification. His method is historical-philosophical political theory. Structural Transformation remains essential reading for COMM doctoral candidates, providing the foundational concept of the public sphere that platform studies (Couldry, Tufekci, Sunstein) extend and critique. For COMM/equity candidates, Habermas's account of the public sphere's exclusions (women, workers, colonized) opens onto the counter-public sphere theorizations of Fraser, Warner, and Squires. COMM Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., & Roberts, B. (1978). Policing the crisis: Mugging, the state, and law and order. Macmillan.

Hall and colleagues' foundational study analyzes how 1970s British media constructed "mugging" as racialized moral panic legitimizing authoritarian state response. Their method is conjunctural cultural-studies analysis combining political economy, content analysis, and historical contextualization. Policing the Crisis is essential reading for COMM/equity doctoral work, providing the methodological model for analyzing race, media, and state power. For COMM/AI candidates, Hall et al.'s analysis of how media-state nexus produces racialized policing prefigures contemporary scholarship on predictive policing (Benjamin, Brayne) and algorithmic risk-assessment. COMM Roberts, S. T. (2019). Behind the screen: Content moderation in the shadows of social media. Yale University Press.

Roberts's foundational study draws on years of ethnographic research with commercial content moderators to analyze the human labor that platforms outsource. Her method is critical labor ethnography. Behind the Screen is essential reading for COMM/equity/AI doctoral work, providing the indispensable account of moderation labor's globally stratified harms. For doctoral candidates, Roberts pairs with Gillespie's Custodians for full coverage of platform governance from policy and labor sides. COMM Donovan, J., Dreyfuss, E., & Friedberg, B. (2022). Meme wars: The untold story of the online battles upending democracy in America. Bloomsbury.

Donovan, Dreyfuss, and Friedberg's foundational study analyzes how meme cultures and far-right networks coordinated to shape American politics from Gamergate to January 6. Their method is investigative journalism combined with platform research. Meme Wars is essential reading for COMM/equity doctoral work on far-right digital media. For doctoral candidates, Donovan et al. provide the most comprehensive account of how networked far-right groups exploit platform affordances, complementing scholarship by Marwick & Lewis on media manipulation. COMM Miller, D. (2011). Tales from Facebook. Polity.

Miller's ethnographic study draws on a year in Trinidad to analyze how Facebook is embedded in Trinidadian everyday life. His method is digital ethnography. Tales from Facebook is essential reading for COMM doctoral work on platform ethnography. For doctoral candidates, Miller's "theory of attainment" (Facebook fulfilling rather than transforming pre-existing communicative needs) offers a productive counter to platform-deterministic accounts.