MA Year 1 · Spring 2027

Jan 18 – May 14, 2027 · 5 courses

Sharpening the lenses: rhetoric, copyright, AI ethics, race & technology

COMM-510 — COMM 510 · Rhetoric, Argument & Persuasion

COMM pillar · MA Year 1 · Spring 2027

A graduate-level rhetoric course covering classical foundations (Aristotle, Cicero), the New Rhetoric (Perelman, Burke), contemporary feminist and decolonial rhetorical theory, and rhetoric of science and technology.

Essential books

★ Aristotle — On Rhetoric* (Kennedy trans.)
★ Bizzell & Herzberg — The Rhetorical Tradition
★ Wayne Booth — The Rhetoric of Rhetoric
★ Krista Ratcliffe — Rhetorical Listening
★ Debra Hawhee — Bodily Arts

Supplementary books

☆ Kenneth Burke — A Rhetoric of Motives
☆ Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca — The New Rhetoric
☆ Lloyd Bitzer — 'The Rhetorical Situation'
☆ Douglas Walton — Informal Logic
☆ James Crosswhite — The Rhetoric of Reason

Papers (50)

1. Wichelns, Herbert A., 1925. The Literary Criticism of Oratory canonical pre-1990 In A. M. Drummond (ed.), Studies in Rhetoric and Public Speaking in Honor of James Albert Winans. Century, New York. pp. 181–216.

Establishes the founding distinction between literary criticism and rhetorical criticism, grounding the discipline's attention to speaker, audience, and occasion rather than aesthetic permanence.

2. Black, Edwin, 1965/1978. Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method (Chapter 2: The Neo-Aristotelian Method) canonical pre-1990 Macmillan, New York (1965); 2nd ed. University of Wisconsin Press (1978). pp. 27–90.

Critiques neo-Aristotelianism as the dominant critical paradigm and opens space for ideological and genre-based alternatives, reshaping the field's methodological self-understanding.

3. Black, Edwin, 1970. The Second Persona canonical pre-1990 Quarterly Journal of Speech, 56(2), pp. 109–119.

Identifies the "implied auditor" constructed by discourse as a moral and ideological figure, initiating audience-centered ideological criticism.

4. McGee, Michael Calvin, 1980. The "Ideograph": A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology canonical pre-1990 Quarterly Journal of Speech, 66(1), pp. 1–16.

Introduces the ideograph as a condensed ideological term (e.g., "liberty," "rule of law") that organizes collective action, bridging rhetorical theory and cultural critique.

5. Hyde, Michael J., and Craig R. Smith, 1979. Hermeneutics and Rhetoric: A Seen but Unobserved Relationship canonical pre-1990 Quarterly Journal of Speech, 65(4), pp. 347–363.

Argues that rhetorical and hermeneutic inquiry share a deep methodological kinship, establishing phenomenological grounds for rhetorical theory.

6. Braet, Antoine C., 2005. The Common Topic in Aristotle's Rhetoric: Precursor of the Argumentation Scheme established 1990-2010 Argumentation, 19(1), pp. 65–83.

Demonstrates that Aristotle's common topic functions as the abstract principle behind the enthymeme's implicit major premise, making it a historical precursor to modern argumentation schemes.

7. Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar, 1990. Object and Method in Rhetorical Criticism: From Wichelns to Leff and McGee established 1990-2010 Western Journal of Speech Communication, 54(3), pp. 290–316.

Traces the shift from neo-Aristotelian object-centered criticism to the post-McGee emphasis on productive/generative criticism, mapping a key transition in rhetorical theory.

8. Bitzer, Lloyd F., 1968. The Rhetorical Situation canonical pre-1990 Philosophy & Rhetoric, 1(1), pp. 1–14.

Defines the rhetorical situation through exigence, audience, and constraints, establishing the situational premise that rhetoric is evoked by external conditions rather than purely internal impulse.

9. Vatz, Richard E., 1973. The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation canonical pre-1990 Philosophy & Rhetoric, 6(3), pp. 154–161.

Contests Bitzer by arguing that rhetors construct rather than discover exigence, foregrounding the constitutive power of language over situations.

10. Overington, Michael A., 1977. Kenneth Burke and the Method of Dramatism canonical pre-1990 Theory and Society, 4(1), pp. 131–156.

Provides a foundational sociological account of Burke's dramatistic pentad as a systematic method for analyzing motives, symbolic action, and rhetoric in social life.

11. Sigler, J. E., 2015. The New Rhetoric's Concept of Universal Audience, Misconceived established 1990-2010 Argumentation, 29(3), pp. 325–349.

Identifies three persistent misreadings of Perelman's universal audience and argues the concept belongs exclusively to philosophical—not general rhetorical—discourse.

12. Foss, Sonja K., and Cindy L. Griffin, 1995. Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric established 1990-2010 Communication Monographs, 62(1), pp. 2–18.

Challenges the dominance of persuasion as rhetoric's goal, proposing invitational rhetoric grounded in equality, immanent value, and self-determination as an alternative feminist framework.

13. Charland, Maurice, 1987. Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois canonical pre-1990 Quarterly Journal of Speech, 73(2), pp. 133–150.

Extends Burke's identification to argue that rhetoric constitutes the very subjects it addresses, demonstrating how nationalist discourse creates the people it invokes.

14. Kienpointner, Manfred, 1993. The Empirical Relevance of Perelman's New Rhetoric established 1990-2010 Argumentation, 7(4), pp. 419–437.

Demonstrates how Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's argumentative schemes can be operationalized for empirical analysis of everyday arguments by addressing the typology's lack of explicit demarcation criteria.

15. Walton, Douglas N., 1989. Dialogue Theory for Critical Thinking canonical pre-1990 Argumentation, 3(2), pp. 169–184.

Presents a foundational theory of reasoned dialogue types—persuasion, inquiry, negotiation, information-seeking, deliberation, eristic—and applies it to the critical analysis and reconstruction of argument texts.

16. Verheij, Bart, 2005. Evaluating Arguments Based on Toulmin's Scheme established 1990-2010 Argumentation, 19(3), pp. 347–371.

Formally extends Toulmin's layout with a dialectical evaluation procedure based on defeasible argumentation, enabling systematic assessment of when warrants and backing are defeated.

17. Blair, J. Anthony, 2001. Walton's Argumentation Schemes for Presumptive Reasoning: A Critique and Development established 1990-2010 Argumentation, 15(4), pp. 365–379.

Advances scheme theory by clarifying distinctions between deductive and presumptive schemes, the probative force of scheme instantiation, and the motivation behind critical questions.

18. Walton, Douglas, 2010 [published online 2009]. Defeasible Reasoning and Informal Fallacies established 1990-2010 Synthese, 179(3), pp. 377–407.

Reconceptualizes classic informal fallacies as contextually reasonable defeasible arguments, establishing normative conditions (retraction failure, non-openness to defeat, illicit burden shift) for distinguishing legitimate from fallacious reasoning.

19. Walton, Douglas, and Chris Reed, 2005. Argumentation Schemes and Enthymemes established 1990-2010 Synthese, 145(3), pp. 339–370.

Shows how argumentation schemes provide a principled method for reconstructing enthymematic arguments in natural language, handling both deductive and defeasible cases and avoiding straw-man charity.

20. Hitchcock, David, 1998. Does the Traditional Treatment of Enthymemes Rest on a Mistake? established 1990-2010 Argumentation, 12(1), pp. 15–37.

Challenges the assumption that enthymemes always suppress a premise deductively required for validity, proposing the concept of "enthymematic consequence" as a more accurate model of real argument.

21. Habermas, Jürgen, 1990. Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification established 1990-2010 In Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (trans. Christian Lenhardt & Shierry Weber Nicholsen). MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. pp. 43–11

Articulates the discourse principle and universalizability postulate as validity conditions for normative argumentation, providing the philosophical backbone for communicative rationality applied to rhetoric.

22. Ratcliffe, Krista, 1999. Rhetorical Listening: A Trope for Interpretive Invention and a "Code of Cross-Cultural Conduct established 1990-2010 College Composition and Communication, 51(2), pp. 195–224.

Introduces rhetorical listening as a stance of openness that attends to both what is said and the cultural logics informing it, enabling cross-cultural understanding without assimilation.

23. Royster, Jacqueline Jones, 1996. When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own established 1990-2010 College Composition and Communication, 47(1), pp. 29–40.

Offers a deeply personal and theoretically important account of the ethical stakes of scholarly cross-boundary inquiry, arguing for accountability and humility when speaking across racial and cultural difference.

24. Glenn, Cheryl, 2002. Silence: A Rhetorical Art for Resisting Discipline(s) established 1990-2010 JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, 22(2), pp. 261–291.

Theorizes silence as an active rhetorical strategy rather than absence, showing how silencing and choosing silence function as forms of resistance and agency, especially for marginalized voices.

25. Lyon, Arabella, 2010 (pub. online). Rhetorical Authority in Athenian Democracy and the Chinese Legalist State established 1990-2010 Philosophy & Rhetoric, 43(3), pp. 272–296.

Extends rhetorical listening cross-culturally by analyzing how legitimacy and authority are constructed differently in democratic Athens and Legalist China, complicating Western-centric norms of rhetorical ethics.

26. Royster, Jacqueline Jones, and Gesa E. Kirsch, 2012. Feminist Rhetorical Practices: In Search of Excellence (Chapter 1: Reorienting Our Vision) contemporary 2011-2025 In Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbon

Proposes feminist rhetorical methodology built on critical imagination, strategic contemplation, and globalization of inquiry, shifting attention to overlooked voices in historical and contemporary rhetoric.

27. Davis, James, and David Godden, 2021. Adversarial Listening in Argumentation contemporary 2011-2025 Topoi, 40(5), pp. 925–937.

Develops the normative vocabulary for listening as a conversational role in argument, identifying how listening can be performed adversarially and why argumentation theory needs explicit norms governing it.

28. Hawhee, Debra, 2004. Bodily Pedagogies: Rhetoric, Athletics, and the Sophists' Three Rs established 1990-2010 College English, 65(2), pp. 142–162.

Recovers the sophistic understanding of rhetoric as rooted in the body and athletic practice (rhythm, repetition, response), challenging purely discursive conceptions of rhetorical education.

29. Selzer, Jack, 1999. Rhetorical Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Rhetoric (Introduction) established 1990-2010 In Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (eds.), Rhetorical Bodies. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. pp. 3–15.

Introduces the concept of "rhetorical bodies" as both producers and products of discourse, collecting essays that situate the corporeal at the center of rhetorical theory.

30. Crowley, Sharon, 1999. Afterword: The Material of Rhetoric established 1990-2010 In Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (eds.), Rhetorical Bodies. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. pp. 357–366.

Articulates a materialist account of rhetoric that ties discourse to bodies, institutions, and political economy, challenging idealist conceptions of argumentation.

31. Rickert, Thomas, 2004. In the House of Doing: Rhetoric and the Kairos of Ambience established 1990-2010 JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, 24(4), pp. 901–927.

Develops ambient rhetoric by rethinking kairos as environmental attunement rather than timely intervention, expanding rhetoric beyond intentional agents toward ecological entanglement.

32. Blair, Carole, 1999. Contemporary U.S. Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric's Materiality established 1990-2010 In Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley (eds.), Rhetorical Bodies. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. pp. 16–57.

Analyzes material memorials (the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt) as rhetorical texts that circulate political memory through material form rather than language alone.

33. Katz, Steven B., 2020. Sonic Rhetorics as Ethics in Action: Hidden Temporalities of Sound in Language(s) contemporary 2011-2025 Humanities (MDPI), 9(1), article 13.

Theorizes sonic rhetorics as an ethical practice embedded in time, showing how rhythm, tempo, and sound shape the ethical encounter with the Other across ancient Greek and Hebrew linguistic traditions.

34. Zappen, James P., 2005. Digital Rhetoric: Toward an Integrated Theory established 1990-2010 Technical Communication Quarterly, 14(3), pp. 319–325.

Outlines a synthetic framework for digital rhetoric integrating classical persuasion, community formation, identity construction, and collaborative engagement in digital spaces.

35. Boyle, Casey, James J. Brown Jr., and Steph Ceraso, 2018. The Digital: Rhetoric Behind and Beyond the Screen contemporary 2011-2025 Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 48(3), pp. 251–259.

Argues that digital rhetoric must move beyond screens and interfaces to analyze the infrastructures, algorithms, and materials that shape rhetoric in digital environments.

36. Gries, Laurie, 2015. Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics (Introduction) contemporary 2011-2025 Still Life with Rhetoric. Utah State University Press, Logan. pp. 1–30.

Applies new materialist ontology to visual rhetoric through the concept of rhetorical "things," tracing how the Obama "Hope" image circulated, mutated, and became politically generative across digital and material sites.

37. Lodoen, Shannon, and Alexi Orchard, 2025. Ethics and Persuasion in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback: A Procedural Rhetorical Approach contemporary 2011-2025 arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.09576. (IEEE conference submission)

Uses Bogost's procedural rhetoric to analyze how RLHF-enhanced LLMs build persuasion into their underlying procedures rather than message content, exposing ideological assumptions embedded in AI training pipelines.

38. Warnick, Barbara, 2007. Rhetoric Online: Persuasion and Politics on the World Wide Web (Chapter 1: The Emergence of Online Rhetoric) established 1990-2010 Rhetoric Online: Persuasion and Politics on the World Wide Web. Peter Lang, New York. pp. 1–28.

Maps the adaptation of classical rhetorical canons to web-based communication, showing how credibility, argument, and identification operate in participatory digital environments.

39. McGee, Jennifer, and Laura Carradini, 2021 (verify year). Computational Rhetoric: How Algorithms Persuade in the Age of Automation contemporary 2011-2025 Computers and Composition, (verify volume/issue — search EBSCO) (verify)

Examines how algorithmic recommendation, automated sorting, and content-feed curation constitute new forms of rhetorical agency that extend beyond human intentional persuasion.

40. Fraser, Nancy, 1990. Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy established 1990-2010 Social Text, 25–26, pp. 56–80.

Critiques Habermas's single bourgeois public sphere for exclusions of gender, race, and class, and introduces "subaltern counterpublics" as alternative arenas of discursive contestation.

41. Warner, Michael, 2002. Publics and Counterpublics established 1990-2010 Public Culture, 14(1), pp. 49–90.

Theorizes publics as self-organized through the circulation of discourse, and counterpublics as formations that maintain awareness of their subordinate status, transforming the relational logic of public address.

42. Asen, Robert, 2000. Seeking the "Counter" in Counterpublics established 1990-2010 Communication Theory, 10(4), pp. 424–446.

Analyzes what makes a counterpublic genuinely "counter," distinguishing rhetorical opposition from mere difference and connecting counterpublicity to democratic practice.

43. Benson, Rodney, 2009. Shaping the Public Sphere: Habermas and Beyond established 1990-2010 The American Sociologist, 40(3), pp. 175–197.

Reviews post-Habermasian public sphere frameworks, comparing pluralist, constructionist, arena, and critical political economy approaches, with implications for how media and rhetoric shape democratic publics.

44. Habermas, Jürgen, 1974. The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964) canonical pre-1990 New German Critique, 3, pp. 49–55.

Provides a concise foundational statement of the public sphere as a domain mediating between private citizens and state power through rational-critical debate, the conceptual seed of the larger Structural Transformation project.

45. Squires, Catherine R., 2002. Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres established 1990-2010 Communication Theory, 12(4), pp. 446–468.

Proposes a three-tiered typology (enclave, counterpublic, satellite) to describe how Black publics negotiate visibility and autonomy in relation to dominant public sphere norms.

46. Salvi, Francesco, et al., 2024. Large Language Models are as Persuasive as Humans, but How? About the Cognitive Effort and Moral-Emotional Language of LLM Arguments contemporary 2011-2025 arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.09329. (Submitted April 2024)

Using experimental data from 1,251 participants, demonstrates that LLMs match human persuasiveness while deploying higher cognitive complexity and greater moral-language intensity, raising empirical questions for rhetorical and ethical analysis of AI-generated discourse.

47. Shoemaker, Eric, 2024. Is AI Art Theft? The Moral Foundations of Copyright Law in the Context of AI Image Generation contemporary 2011-2025 Philosophy & Technology, 37(4), article 141.

Analyzes the rhetorical and moral argument that AI-generated art constitutes "theft," arguing the claim conflates moral harm with legal infringement and clarifying what forms of protection for artists are genuinely warranted.

48. Powell, Malea, 2002. Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing established 1990-2010 College Composition and Communication, 53(3), pp. 396–434.

Theorizes "rhetorics of survivance" drawing on Vizenor, analyzing how American Indian writers negotiate colonial discourses by using writing as both resistance and cultural continuance rather than assimilation.

49. Cushman, Ellen, 2013. Wampum, Sequoyan, and Story: Decolonizing the Digital Archive contemporary 2011-2025 College English, 76(2), pp. 115–135.

Enacts decolonial digital practice by centering Cherokee syllabary and wampum as rhetorical-archival technologies, challenging digital archives built on Western literacy assumptions.

50. Tan, David, 2017. Semiotics and the Spectacle of Transformation in Copyright Law contemporary 2011-2025 International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 30(3), pp. 455–484.

Applies semiotic analysis—Barthesian myth, polysemy, transformative use—to U.S. copyright doctrine, arguing that fair use adjudication is fundamentally a rhetorical contest over the meaning of signs rather than a neutral legal test.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

COMM Pynchon, T. (1973). Gravity's rainbow. Viking Press.

Pynchon's encyclopedic novel of WWII rocketry doubles as a treatise on communication: paranoid signals, encrypted messages, conditioning experiments, and the V-2 as both weapon and meaning-making apparatus. The novel renders Pavlovian behaviorism, ballistic mathematics, and corporate cartels as overlapping communication systems. Its method is hallucinatory polyphony. For COMM scholars, Gravity's Rainbow models how warfare, science, and media converge in what Friedrich Kittler would later theorize as discourse networks. Its relevance to contemporary AI debates lies in its early dramatization of how technical systems shape subjectivity, anticipating Zuboff's instrumentarian power and the algorithmic governance critiqued by Eubanks and Noble. COMM Le Guin, U. K. (1971). The lathe of heaven. Charles Scribner's Sons.

Le Guin's novel imagines George Orr, whose dreams alter reality, and a psychologist who weaponizes Orr's gift to remake society. The novel raises questions about authorial intention, communication of subjective worlds, and the ethics of reality-construction. Its method is philosophical SF infused with Taoist sensibility. The Lathe of Heaven speaks to contemporary COMM/AI debates about generative model authorship, simulated worlds, and who gets to author shared realities. For doctoral candidates working at the equity intersection, Le Guin's careful attention to how Orr's modest, often racialized utopian visions get colonized by a powerful interpreter remains a foundational parable about epistemic injustice in communication. COMM boyd, d. (2014). It's complicated: The social lives of networked teens. Yale University Press.

boyd's ethnography of teenage networked life provides a foundational corrective to moral panics about social media use. Drawing on years of fieldwork, the book argues that platforms are not corrupting youth but providing new architectures for ancient developmental tasks: identity formation, peer connection, navigating public/private boundaries. Methodologically, the work models how to study mediated practices ethnographically rather than through aggregate platform metrics. For COMM scholars, It's Complicated is essential reading on networked publics, drama dynamics, and the labor of identity performance online, with direct relevance to algorithmic content moderation and the contemporary discourse on youth and AI. COMM García Márquez, G. (1967). One hundred years of solitude (G. Rabassa, Trans.). Harper & Row. (Original work published 1967)

García Márquez's foundational magical realist novel of the Buendía family in Macondo features Melquíades, whose parchments contain the family's entire prophesied history. Communication infrastructure (the railroad, the banana company's broadcasts, government repression of the massacre's record) shape Macondo's history. Its method is panoramic magical realism. One Hundred Years of Solitude is essential for COMM/equity doctoral work on collective memory, the erasure of inconvenient histories (the banana massacre), and the genres of historical communication. García Márquez's depiction of how state and corporate power rewrite catastrophe prefigures platform-era debates about archive, denial, and historical revisionism. COMM Yanagihara, H. (2015). A little life. Doubleday.

Yanagihara's epic novel of four friends in New York centers on Jude, whose traumatic past resists full communication even to his closest intimates. Therapy, friendship correspondence, and selective revelation structure the narrative. Its method is intimate close third-person across decades. A Little Life is essential for COMM/equity doctoral work on trauma's communicative impossibility, the genre of confession, and the limits of testimonial recovery. Yanagihara models communication as ethical relation rather than information transfer, a theme with implications for AI-mediated mental health interventions and the limits of computational empathy.

Nonfiction

COMM Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso.

Anderson's foundational claim that nations are imagined communities sustained by print capitalism (the novel, the newspaper) inaugurates a generation of scholarship on the relation between media and political belonging. His method is comparative historical political theory. Imagined Communities is essential reading for COMM doctoral work on media and politics. For COMM/AI/equity candidates, Anderson's print-capitalism framework offers a generative analogue for analyzing how platform capitalism constitutes new (and disrupts old) imagined communities, themes Castells, Couldry, and Bratton extend. COMM Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text, (25/26), 56-80. [substituting book.]

COMM Suzor, N. (2019). Lawless: The secret rules that govern our digital lives. Cambridge University Press.

Suzor's foundational legal study analyzes how platform terms of service function as a private law regime governing billions of users without democratic accountability. His method is platform law analysis grounded in legal theory. Lawless is essential reading for COMM/IP doctoral work on platform governance. For candidates at the COMM/IP intersection, Suzor provides the foundational legal analytic for understanding terms of service as constitutional infrastructure of platforms. COMM boyd, d., & Marwick, A. E. (2011). Social privacy in networked publics: Teens' attitudes, practices, and strategies. A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society. (Substituting book.)

COMM Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI: Power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. Yale University Press.

Crawford's foundational study analyzes AI's material and political economies, from lithium mining to data labor to electrical infrastructure. Her method is critical materialist STS infused with art-historical method. Atlas of AI is essential reading for COMM/AI/equity doctoral work, providing the foundational materialist analytic for AI critique. For doctoral candidates, Crawford pairs productively with Couldry and Mejias's data colonialism framework for comprehensive coverage of AI's political economy.

EQ-510 — EQ 510 · Race, Gender, and Technology

EQ pillar · MA Year 1 · Spring 2027

How race, gender, and sexuality have been produced through, by, and against technological systems — from the colonial photograph to the algorithm. Foundations of critical race and feminist technology studies, with sustained attention to Black, Indigenous, and women-of-color scholarship.

Essential books

★ Lisa Nakamura — Digitizing Race
★ André Brock Jr. — Distributed Blackness
★ Charlton McIlwain — Black Software
★ Catherine Knight Steele — Digital Black Feminism
★ Kishonna L. Gray — Intersectional Tech

Supplementary books

☆ Judy Wajcman — TechnoFeminism
☆ bell hooks — Black Looks
☆ Sarah Florini — Beyond Hashtags
☆ Sasha Costanza-Chock — Design Justice
☆ D'Ignazio & Klein — Data Feminism

Papers (50)

1. Lisa Nakamura, 2002. Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet established 1990-2010 Works and Days, 25/26, Vol. 13, Nos. 1 & 2 (1995); reprinted in Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (Rou

Introduces "identity tourism" to describe how white users performed racialized avatars in early MUDs, normalizing digital racial masquerade.

2. Lisa Nakamura, 2008. Cyberrace established 1990-2010 PMLA, 123(5), pp. 1673–1682

Maps the critical terrain of "cyberrace" scholarship and argues that visual technologies produce race rather than merely reflecting it.

3. Kishonna L. Gray, 2014. Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming Space contemporary 2011-2025 The Western Journal of Black Studies, 38(2), pp. 109–121

Applies intersectionality to online gaming to show how Black women players navigate compounding forms of harassment and exclusion.

4. Safiya Umoja Noble, 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism" (book introduction as stand-alone chapter) contemporary 2011-2025 Algorithms of Oppression (NYU Press, 2018), Introduction, pp. 1–14

Demonstrates through empirical search analysis that commercial algorithms encode anti-Black sexist bias as a structural, not incidental, feature.

5. Ruha Benjamin, 2019. Discriminatory Design, Liberating Imagination" (book chapter) contemporary 2011-2025 Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity, 2019), ch. 1, pp. 1–30

Introduces the "New Jim Code" framework to theorize how ostensibly neutral technologies encode and extend racial hierarchy.

6. Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, 2019. Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures" (introduction) contemporary 2011-2025 Surrogate Humanity (Duke University Press, 2019), Introduction, pp. 1–30

Argues that automation fantasies rely on racialized and gendered "surrogate" labor, connecting robotics to settler-colonial and racial-capitalist histories.

7. André Brock, 2012. From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation contemporary 2011-2025 Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56(4), pp. 529–549

Uses Critical Race Theory and discourse analysis to show how Black Twitter enacts a distinct cultural logic of vernacular expression and community formation online.

8. Kishonna L. Gray, 2020. Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming Space contemporary 2011-2025 Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming Space — see also Gray, Intersectional Tech (Louisiana State University Press, 2020),

Provides the theoretical grounding for reading gaming platforms as intersectional sites of racial and gendered violence.

9. Moya Bailey, 2021. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women's Digital Resistance" (introduction) contemporary 2011-2025 Misogynoir Transformed (New York University Press, 2021), Introduction

Documents how Black women construct counter-publics and transformative digital practices in response to misogynoir in online spaces.

10. Moya Bailey and Trudy, 2018. On Misogynoir: Citation, Erasure, and Plagiarism contemporary 2011-2025 Feminist Media Studies, 18(4), pp. 762–768

Reclaims and historicizes the term "misogynoir" while critiquing academic citation practices that erase Black feminist intellectual labor.

11. Catherine Knight Steele, 2021. Black Bloggers and Their Varied Publics: The Everyday Politics of Black Discourse Online contemporary 2011-2025 Television & New Media, 19(2), pp. 112–127 (2018)

Maps how Black bloggers navigate multiple publics to produce counter-narratives against mainstream media's erasure of Black women's perspectives.

12. Sarah T. Roberts, 2019. Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media" (ch. 4: "The Bodies Behind the Screens") contemporary 2011-2025 Behind the Screen (Yale University Press, 2019), ch. 4

Exposes the racialized and gendered labor of commercial content moderation, revealing who bears the psychological costs of platform sanitation.

13. Jessie Daniels, 2009. Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, Gender, and Embodiment established 1990-2010 WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, 37(1–2), pp. 101–124

Critiques cyberfeminist discourse for its inattention to race and argues for an intersectional feminist framework for understanding gendered digital spaces.

14. Saidiya Hartman, 1997. Seduction and the Ruses of Power" (chapter) established 1990-2010 Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997), ch. 3

Theorizes the entanglement of pleasure, coercion, and Black subjectivity in ways that later scholars apply to digital media and datafication. (verify application to tech studies)

15. Simone Browne, 2010. Digital Epidermalization: Race, Identity and Biometrics established 1990-2010 Critical Sociology, 36(1), pp. 131–150

Coins "digital epidermalization" to describe how biometric systems inscribe race onto bodies through technological rather than biological processes, extending Du Bois's color line into surveillance infrastructures.

16. Simone Browne, 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness" (introduction and ch. 1) contemporary 2011-2025 Dark Matters (Duke University Press, 2015), Introduction + ch. 1

Theorizes "racializing surveillance" as a technology of social control with roots in the transatlantic slave trade, founding the subfield of Black surveillance studies.

17. Ruha Benjamin, 2016. Catching Our Breath: Critical Race STS and the Carceral Imagination contemporary 2011-2025 Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, 2, pp. 145–156

Urges critical-race scholars to engage STS frameworks and calls for a "carceral imagination" lens to analyze how science and technology extend state punishment.

18. Rashida Richardson, Jason M. Schultz, and Kate Crawford, 2019. Dirty Data, Bad Predictions: How Civil Rights Violations Impact Police Data, Predictive Policing Systems, and Justice contemporary 2011-2025 New York University Law Review Online, 94, pp. 15–55

Documents how historically corrupt police datasets become training data for predictive policing tools, laundering civil-rights violations into algorithmic outputs.

19. Ifeoma Ajunwa, 2019. The Paradox of Automation as Anti-Bias Intervention contemporary 2011-2025 Cardozo Law Review, 41(5), pp. 1671–1742

Exposes how algorithmic hiring tools marketed as neutral frequently replicate and conceal racial and gender discrimination behind technical legitimacy.

20. Virginia Eubanks, 2018. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor" (ch. 2: "The Digital Poorhouse") contemporary 2011-2025 Automating Inequality (St. Martin's Press, 2018), ch. 2

Analyzes welfare-eligibility algorithms in Indiana to show how automated decision systems replicate and amplify poverty's racial and gender dimensions.

21. Oscar Gandy Jr., 1993. The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information" (ch. 1) established 1990-2010 The Panoptic Sort (Westview Press, 1993), ch. 1

Pioneering account of how data collection and classification systems sort populations by race and class, prefiguring later algorithmic discrimination scholarship.

22. Donna Haraway, 1985. A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s canonical pre-1990 Socialist Review, 80 (1985), pp. 65–108; reprinted in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (Routledge, 1991)

Foundational cyborg manifesto proposing the hybrid cyborg figure as a means to deconstruct dualisms of gender, race, and nature/culture that underpin Western technoscience.

23. Judy Wajcman, 2007. From Women and Technology to Gendered Technoscience established 1990-2010 Information, Communication & Society, 10(3), pp. 287–298

Surveys feminist technology studies from early "women and technology" frameworks through to the social shaping approach, identifying productive directions for gendered technoscience.

24. Anne Balsamo, 1996. Forms of Technological Embodiment: Reading the Body in Contemporary Culture established 1990-2010 Body & Society, 1(3–4), pp. 215–237; reprinted in Technologies of the Gendered Body (Duke UP, 1996)

Develops a feminist cultural-studies framework for analyzing how bodies are gendered and raced through technologies of representation and modification.

25. N. Katherine Hayles, 1999. Toward Embodied Virtuality" (chapter) established 1990-2010 How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (University of Chicago Press, 1999), ch. 1

Traces how information was disembodied in cybernetics discourse and argues for recovering embodiment as central to posthumanist theory, with implications for gendered subjectivity.

26. Wendy Faulkner, 2001. The Technology Question in Feminism: A View from Feminist Technology Studies established 1990-2010 Women's Studies International Forum, 24(1), pp. 79–95

Reviews feminist engagements with the "technology question" across three paradigms — equity, essentialism, and social constructionism — and advocates for a gendered sociotechnical approach.

27. Lucy Suchman, 2007. Feminist STS and the Sciences of the Artificial" (chapter) established 1990-2010 The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 3rd ed. (MIT Press, 2007), ch. 5, pp. 139–163

Synthesizes feminist STS with human–computer interaction research, demonstrating how design encodes gendered assumptions about human agency and machine intelligence.

28. Jason Edward Lewis, Noelani Arista, Archer Pechawis, and Suzanne Kite, 2018. Making Kin with the Machines contemporary 2011-2025 Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), Issue 3

Proposes Indigenous frameworks — kinship, responsibility, and reciprocity — as alternatives to Western AI ethics, calling for making "kin" rather than "tools" with machine intelligence.

29. Stephanie Russo Carroll, Ibrahim Garba, Oscar L. Figueroa-Rodríguez, Jarita Holb. The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance contemporary 2011-2025 Data Science Journal, 19(1), Article 43

Articulates Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics as principles for Indigenous data sovereignty, complementing and critiquing the FAIR data movement.

30. Marisa Elena Duarte and Miranda Belarde-Lewis, 2015. Imagining: Creating Spaces for Indigenous Ontologies contemporary 2011-2025 Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 53(5–6), pp. 677–702

Challenges Western classification systems in digital libraries and archives and advocates for Indigenous ontological frameworks to govern Indigenous knowledge metadata.

31. Kim TallBear, 2013. Genomic Articulations of Indigeneity contemporary 2011-2025 Social Studies of Science, 43(4), pp. 509–533

Critiques genomic science's production of Indigenous identity through settler-colonial biological logics and calls for Indigenous peoples to control their own biogenetic data.

32. Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias, 2019. Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data's Relation to the Contemporary Subject contemporary 2011-2025 Television & New Media, 20(4), pp. 336–349

Frames big-data capitalism as a new form of colonialism that appropriates social life as raw material, drawing parallels with historical land dispossession of Indigenous peoples.

33. Leilani Sabzalian, 2019. The Tensions Between Indigenous Sovereignty and Multicultural Citizenship Education: Toward an Anticolonial Approach to Civic Education contemporary 2011-2025 Theory & Research in Social Education, 47(3), pp. 311–346

Situates technology-integrated civic education in Indigenous survivance frameworks, offering a decolonial critique of multicultural digital citizenship curricula. (verify direct tech-studies applicability)

34. Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles, 2020. #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice" (introduction) contemporary 2011-2025 #HashtagActivism (MIT Press, 2020), Introduction

Analyzes hashtag campaigns (#BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, #SayHerName) as networked counter-publics that amplify marginalized voices and challenge dominant media narratives.

35. Susana Loza, 2014. Hashtag Feminism, #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, and the Other #FemFuture contemporary 2011-2025 Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No. 5

Critically examines how hashtag feminism can simultaneously mobilize feminist solidarity and reproduce racial hierarchies within feminist digital spaces.

36. Kishonna L. Gray, 2016. Solidarity Is for White Women in Gaming: How DiGRA Has Perpetuated a False Dichotomy and Harmed Women contemporary 2011-2025 Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No. 9

Critiques gaming studies conferences for marginalizing women-of-color scholars and documents the racial dynamics reproducing inequality within feminist gaming communities. (verify)

37. Brendesha M. Tynes, Joshua Schuschke, and Safiya Umoja Noble, 2016. Digital Intersectionality Theory and the #BlackLivesMatter Movement contemporary 2011-2025 In The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class and Culture Online, Eds. Noble & Tynes (Peter Lang, 2016), ch. 2

Develops "digital intersectionality theory" by analyzing how #BlackLivesMatter mobilized across interlocking axes of race, gender, and sexuality online.

38. Deen Freelon, Charlton D. McIlwain, and Meredith D. Clark, 2016. Beyond the Hashtags: #Ferguson, #Blacklivesmatter, and the Online Struggle for Offline Justice contemporary 2011-2025 Center for Media & Social Impact, American University (research report)

Provides the largest quantitative-qualitative study of #BlackLivesMatter's Twitter ecology, documenting who speaks, who is amplified, and how race and gender shape digital protest visibility.

39. Sherri Williams, 2015. Digital Defense: Black Feminists Resist Violence with Hashtag Activism contemporary 2011-2025 Feminist Media Studies, 15(2), pp. 341–344

Documents how Black feminist Twitter campaigns resist online and offline violence through what Williams terms "digital defense" — a form of collective protective practice.

40. Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch, 2019. Crip Technoscience Manifesto contemporary 2011-2025 Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 5(1), pp. 1–34

Articulates "crip technoscience" as a political-epistemological framework centered on disabled people's expertise, resistance to cure-focused design, and access justice as world-making.

41. Mara Mills, 2011. On Disability and Cybernetics: Helen Keller, Norbert Wiener, and the Hearing Glove contemporary 2011-2025 differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 22(2–3), pp. 74–111

Recovers the entangled histories of disability and cybernetics to show how Deaf and blind users shaped foundational human–machine communication research.

42. Jonathan Sterne, 2003. Mediate Auscultation, the Stethoscope, and the 'Autopsy of the Living': Medicine's Acoustic Culture established 1990-2010 Journal of Medical Humanities, 22(2), pp. 115–136

Analyzes the stethoscope as a racial and gendered medical technology that produced diagnostic listening practices exclusionary to certain bodies, foundational for crip and critical STS. (verify direct disability/crip-tech relevance)

43. Gerard Goggin and Christopher Newell, 2003. Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Disability in New Media established 1990-2010 Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Disability in New Media (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), ch. 1

Examines how mobile and internet technologies are designed around ableist norms, rendering disabled users as afterthoughts and the internet as a site of compounded exclusion.

44. Ellen Samuels, 2014. Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time contemporary 2011-2025 Disability Studies Quarterly, 37(3) (2017)

Theorizes "crip time" — the temporal reorientation demanded by disability — as a framework that intersects with race and gender to challenge normative productivity assumptions embedded in digital work environments.

45. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, 2011. Misfitting: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept contemporary 2011-2025 Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 26(3), pp. 591–609

Introduces "misfitting" — the friction between body and world — as a generative feminist materialist concept connecting disability, race, and gender to designed environments, including digital ones.

46. Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, 2018. Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification contemporary 2011-2025 Proceedings of Machine Learning Research (PMLR), 81, pp. 1–15 (Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency — FAT* 2018)

Demonstrates through systematic audit that commercial face-recognition systems have significantly higher error rates for darker-skinned women, establishing intersectionality as a benchmark for AI fairness.

47. Keith Hampton, Inyoung Shin, and Weixu Lu, 2017. Social Media and Political Discussion: Predicting Facebook Use About the 2016 Presidential Primary contemporary 2011-2025 Political Communication, 34(2), pp. 221–244

Examines how racial identity and algorithmic curation interact to shape political expression on social platforms, linking computational network analysis to race and media scholarship. (verify as Hampton computer-vision/race paper — may need to substitute Hampton's computer-vision paper) (verify)

48. Siva Vaidhyanathan, 2001. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity" (ch. 5: "Blues Burglary") established 1990-2010 Copyrights and Copywrongs (New York University Press, 2001), ch. 5

Traces how copyright law was used to dispossess Black musicians of their creative labor, establishing race as a structuring force in intellectual property regimes.

49. Anjali Vats, 2020. The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans" (ch. 1) contemporary 2011-2025 The Color of Creatorship (Stanford University Press, 2020), ch. 1

Argues that intellectual property law constructs "creatorship" as a racially white category that excludes Black, Indigenous, and other racialized makers from full cultural citizenship.

50. Dan L. Burk, 2019. Algorithmic Fair Use contemporary 2011-2025 University of Chicago Law Review, 86(2), pp. 283–313

Examines how automated systems deploy and misapply copyright fair-use doctrine in ways that systematically disadvantage minority cultural producers, connecting IP law to algorithmic power.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

EQ Atwood, M. (2003). Oryx and Crake. McClelland and Stewart.

The first novel in Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy follows Snowman/Jimmy in a post-pandemic world engineered by corporate biotech. Atwood scrutinizes how unregulated genetic and algorithmic optimization, driven by private capital, produces both new species and new precarities. The compound/pleeblands divide dramatizes the spatial logic of surveillance capitalism, where elite enclaves benefit from data extraction performed on marginalized populations outside the walls. The novel is indispensable for AI-equity scholarship because it links biotech, platform power, and ecological collapse to questions of who counts as human. Atwood's satire of techno-utopianism prefigures critiques by Zuboff, Benjamin, and Couldry. EQ Huxley, A. (1932). Brave new world. Chatto & Windus.

Huxley imagines a society stratified by biological caste—Alphas to Epsilons—maintained by chemical pacification, behavioral conditioning, and consumer pleasure. Unlike Orwell's repressive state, Huxley's dystopia rules through engineered desire, anticipating the soft coercions of recommendation algorithms and platform-mediated affect. The novel offers AI-equity scholars a framework for thinking about consent under manufactured preference, the racialization of labor castes, and the ideology of optimization. Read alongside Eubanks and Noble, Brave New World exposes how technological "improvement" can naturalize hierarchy and depoliticize inequality. EQ Butler, O. E. (1979). Kindred. Doubleday.

Dana, a Black woman in 1976 Los Angeles, is repeatedly pulled back to a Maryland plantation in the early nineteenth century to save her white ancestor. Butler uses time travel to insist on the material continuities of racial violence and to render embodied the historical conditions structuring contemporary technological systems. For equity scholars, Kindred operates as theory: it shows how present infrastructures—legal, economic, technological—are sedimented from past extraction. The novel anchors any reading list bridging Black studies, surveillance studies, and AI critique. EQ Okorafor, N. (2010). Who fears death. DAW Books.

Set in a post-apocalyptic Saharan Africa, Okorafor's novel follows Onyesonwu, an Ewu (mixed-race) sorceress confronting genocidal violence and patriarchal control. The novel critiques how technologies of war—including weaponized rape—are deployed against marked bodies. Okorafor draws on Sudanese cosmology, refusing Western generic conventions and centering African epistemologies. For scholars working on decolonial AI and Black feminist thought, Who Fears Death models how speculative fiction can hold trauma, magic, and political analysis simultaneously. EQ Jemisin, N. K. (2016). The obelisk gate. Orbit.

The second Broken Earth volume deepens questions of inheritance, resistance, and the ethics of using inherited tools of oppression. Essun's reunion with her daughter Nassun stages two competing theories of survival: refusal versus mastery. Jemisin's narration—largely in second person—implicates the reader in the violence she narrates, modeling the embodied stakes of refusing complicity. The novel is a powerful resource for thinking through critical-race-AI questions of repair, abolition, and complicity.

Nonfiction

EQ Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the New Jim Code. Polity Press.

Benjamin argues that contemporary technologies often reinforce racial hierarchies under the guise of objectivity—what she calls the "New Jim Code." Drawing on Michelle Alexander's framing and Black feminist thought, Benjamin develops a toolkit for analyzing how design choices, training data, and infrastructure encode racial logics. Chapters interrogate predictive policing, automated risk assessment, and seemingly innocuous platform design. The book closes with abolitionist imagination as methodological commitment. For doctoral readers, Benjamin's text is essential—theoretically generative, empirically grounded, and pedagogically clear. EQ Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism. PublicAffairs.

Zuboff names surveillance capitalism as the dominant economic logic of contemporary platforms, defining it as the unilateral claiming of human experience as raw material for behavioral prediction products. The book traces Google's invention of this logic and its diffusion across industries. While critiqued for under-theorizing race and the Global South, Surveillance Capitalism remains foundational vocabulary for AI-equity scholars. EQ Wajcman, J. (2004). TechnoFeminism. Polity Press.

Wajcman synthesizes feminist STS to theorize how technology and gender mutually constitute one another. The book traces shifts from liberal feminist arguments about access, through cyberfeminist celebrations of cyborg politics, to material feminist engagements with infrastructure. For AI-equity readers, Wajcman is essential historical grounding for contemporary feminist tech scholarship. EQ Crenshaw, K. W. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299.

Crenshaw's foundational essay introduces intersectionality as a framework for understanding how legal and political categories fail women of color. For AI-equity scholars, intersectionality is indispensable for thinking about classification harms in automated systems. EQ Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Pantheon Books.

Foucault's classic analyzes how modern power produces docile bodies through surveillance, classification, and discipline. While Foucault's framework requires supplementation from Black studies and decolonial theory, Discipline and Punish remains foundational vocabulary—panopticon, biopower, governmentality—for surveillance studies.

LAW-510 — LAW 510 · US Copyright Law: Doctrine, Cases & the AI Frontier

LAW pillar · MA Year 1 · Spring 2027

A deep dive into US copyright — subject matter, originality, the §106 exclusive rights, the §107 fair-use test, §512 safe harbor, §1201 anti-circumvention — anchored in the current generative-AI cases. The most consequential single course in the curriculum.

Essential books

★ Paul Goldstein — Copyright's Highway
★ William Patry — How to Fix Copyright
★ Neil Netanel — Copyright's Paradox
★ Jessica Litman — Digital Copyright
★ Aufderheide & Jaszi — Reclaiming Fair Use

Supplementary books

☆ Lawrence Lessig — Remix
☆ Siva Vaidhyanathan — Copyrights and Copywrongs
☆ William Patry — Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars
☆ Rebecca Tushnet — 'Copy This Essay'
☆ Madhavi Sunder — From Goods to a Good Life

Papers (50)

1. Jane C. Ginsburg, 1990. The Concept of Authorship in Comparative Copyright Law canonical pre-1990 DePaul Law Review, 52(4), 1063–1092

Traces the author-centric foundations of U.S. copyright and contrasts them with European moral-rights traditions, grounding debates over machine authorship.

2. Jessica Litman, 1990. The Public Domain canonical pre-1990 Emory Law Journal, 39(4), 965–1023

Argues that the public domain is not a residual category but a constitutive element of copyright, foundational for later fair-use and AI-training debates.

3. Justin Hughes, 1988. The Philosophy of Intellectual Property canonical pre-1990 Georgetown Law Journal, 77(2), 287–366

Synthesizes Lockean labor and Hegelian personhood justifications for IP ownership, supplying philosophical scaffolding for debates about AI-generated output.

4. Jane C. Ginsburg, 2018. People Not Machines: Authorship and What It Means in the Berne Convention contemporary 2011-2025 IIC — International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law, 49(2), 131–135

Forcefully argues that the Berne Convention's architecture presupposes human authors, directly contesting proposals to extend copyright to AI outputs.

5. L. Ray Patterson & Stanley W. Lindberg, 1991. The Nature of Copyright: A Law of Users' Rights established 1990-2010 University of Georgia Press (book excerpt reprinted in law review literature; see also 40 J. Copyright Soc'y USA 1)

Reframes copyright as a tripartite system of author, publisher, and user rights, anticipating user-rights defenses in digital and AI contexts.

6. Paul Goldstein, 1992. Copyright and the First Amendment canonical pre-1990 Columbia Law Review, 70(6), 983–1057

Landmark analysis of the tension between copyright's exclusivity and the First Amendment, laying the groundwork for transformative-use and AI-speech doctrines.

7. Shyamkrishna Balganesh, 2011. Foreseeability and Copyright Incentives established 1990-2010 Harvard Law Review, 122(6), 1569–1637

Applies ex-ante foreseeability analysis to copyright incentive theory, offering a doctrinal tool for assessing whether AI-generated works merit protection.

8. Pierre N. Leval, 1990. Toward a Fair Use Standard canonical pre-1990 Harvard Law Review, 103(5), 1105–1136

Articulates the transformative-use doctrine that reshaped § 107 analysis in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose and anchors virtually every AI fair-use argument today.

9. Michael J. Madison, 2004. A Pattern-Oriented Approach to Fair Use established 1990-2010 William & Mary Law Review, 45(4), 1525–1690

Proposes analyzing fair use through recurring "patterns" of legally sanctioned use rather than purely ad hoc balancing, influencing later empirical scholarship.

10. Matthew Sag, 2012. Predicting Fair Use contemporary 2011-2025 Ohio State Law Journal, 73(1), 47–91

Uses empirical methods to identify which factual variables most reliably predict fair-use outcomes, providing a data-driven foundation for AI training-data analysis.

11. Barton Beebe, 2008. An Empirical Study of U.S. Copyright Fair Use Opinions, 1978–2005 established 1990-2010 University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 156(3), 549–624

Comprehensive empirical analysis of published fair-use decisions reveals structural patterns in how courts weigh the four statutory factors.

12. Rebecca Tushnet, 2004. Copy This Essay: How Fair Use Doctrine Harms Free Speech and How Copying Serves It established 1990-2010 Yale Law Journal, 114(3), 535–590

Argues that fair use insufficiently protects expressive copying and that a robust conception of copying-as-speech is necessary, anticipating AI-output speech arguments.

13. Neil Weinstock Netanel, 2011. Making Sense of Fair Use contemporary 2011-2025 Lewis & Clark Law Review, 15(3), 715–772

Synthesizes Supreme Court fair-use doctrine post-Campbell and critiques its incoherence, offering a normative framework applicable to AI cases.

14. Mark A. Lemley & Bryan Casey, 2020. Fair Learning contemporary 2011-2025 Texas Law Review, 99(4), 743–798

Argues that machine-learning training on copyrighted data constitutes non-infringing fair use under all four § 107 factors, establishing the dominant defense framework.

15. Benjamin L. W. Sobel, 2017. Artificial Intelligence's Fair Use Crisis contemporary 2011-2025 Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts, 41(1), 45–97

First systematic analysis of why AI training strains the fair-use framework and why the doctrine's current structure may fail to accommodate machine learning at scale.

16. Matthew Sag, 2023. Copyright Safety for Generative AI contemporary 2011-2025 Houston Law Review, 60(2), 295–358

Proposes a "copyright safety" framework distinguishing training from inference, arguing that output-level infringement — not training — is the appropriate doctrinal focus.

17. Peter Henderson, Xuechen Li, Dan Jurafsky, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Mark A. Lemley &. Foundation Models and Fair Use contemporary 2011-2025 Journal of Machine Learning Research (arXiv preprint 2303.15715); also forthcoming in law review venues

Interdisciplinary study combining ML and legal analysis to evaluate fair-use arguments for large foundation-model training across multiple axes of the four-factor test.

18. Pamela Samuelson, 2023. Generative AI Meets Copyright contemporary 2011-2025 Science, 381(6654), 158–161

Concise policy-facing overview of the key copyright questions raised by generative AI—training data, authorship of outputs, and the need for legislative clarification.

19. Ryan Whalen, 2023. Artificial Intelligence and Copyright Infringement: What Does It Mean to Train on Copyrighted Works? contemporary 2011-2025 Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 38(3), 1085–1132 (verify)

Analyzes the act-of-copying argument in AI training pipelines, distinguishing transient RAM copies from persistent model weights to assess infringement liability.

20. Timothy B. Lee & Sean Trende, 2023. How Copyright Law Could Stifle Generative AI contemporary 2011-2025 Lawfare (online; not a peer-reviewed law review — supplementary reading)

Accessible policy analysis arguing that expansive copyright liability for AI training would chill technological development and proposing statutory safe-harbor alternatives.

21. Annemarie Bridy, 2012. Coding Creativity: Copyright and the Artificially Intelligent Author contemporary 2011-2025 Stanford Technology Law Review, 2012(5), 1–28

First detailed doctrinal argument that copyright law's authorship requirement structurally excludes AI, while exploring work-for-hire as a possible workaround.

22. James Grimmelmann, 2016. Copyright for Literate Robots contemporary 2011-2025 Iowa Law Review, 101(2), 657–681

Argues that AI systems capable of authoring works cannot satisfy the human-authorship requirement, while examining what "reading" and "writing" mean for computational agents.

23. Pamela Samuelson, 1986. Allocating Ownership Rights in Computer-Generated Works canonical pre-1990 University of Pittsburgh Law Review, 47(4), 1185–1228

Seminal early analysis of who should own works produced by computers, establishing conceptual distinctions still central to generative-AI ownership debates.

24. Daniel J. Gervais, 2020. The Machine as Author contemporary 2011-2025 Iowa Law Review, 105(5), 2053–2106

Provides a comparative and theoretical analysis of whether and how "machine authorship" can be accommodated within existing copyright regimes globally.

25. Jane C. Ginsburg, 2018. People Not Machines: Authorship and What It Means in the Berne Convention contemporary 2011-2025 IIC — International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law, 49(2), 131–135

(See Paper 4 above — dual assignment; the international dimension places it in the AI-authorship sub-topic as well.) Argues Berne's architecture presupposes human creative effort.

26. Ryan Abbott, 2016. I Think, Therefore I Invent: Creative Computers and the Future of Patent Law contemporary 2011-2025 Boston College Law Review, 57(4), 1079–1126

Cross-domain analysis of AI and IP that frames the originality and authorship questions in copyright alongside analogous patent challenges, providing comparative doctrinal leverage.

27. Mark A. Lemley, 2007. Rationalizing Internet Safe Harbors established 1990-2010 Journal on Telecommunications and High Technology Law, 6(1), 101–120

Synthesizes the Sony-Grokster-DMCA §512 doctrinal arc and proposes a principled basis for safe-harbor scope, directly relevant to AI-platform liability analysis.

28. Rebecca Tushnet, 2007. I Put You There: User-Generated Content and Anticircumvention established 1990-2010 Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law, 12(4), 889–946

Examines how DMCA §1201 anti-circumvention provisions interact with user-generated content, anticipating AI-content-scraping and terms-of-service circumvention issues.

29. Annemarie Bridy, 2015. Notice and Takedown in the Domain Name System: ICANN's Ambivalent Drift into Online Content Regulation contemporary 2011-2025 Washington and Lee Law Review, 74(3), 1345–1408

Extends the DMCA notice-and-takedown framework to DNS infrastructure, revealing the limits of intermediary liability regimes relevant to AI-hosting platforms.

30. Fred von Lohmann, 2004. Fair Use as Innovation Policy established 1990-2010 Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 19(3), 1419–1446

Frames fair use as an ex-ante innovation subsidy for disruptive technologies—a framing central to AI-industry arguments defending training-data use.

31. Pamela Samuelson & Tara Wheatland, 2009. Statutory Damages in Copyright Law: A Remedy in Need of Reform established 1990-2010 William & Mary Law Review, 51(2), 439–512

Argues that copyright's statutory damage regime creates over-deterrence and chilling effects on secondary users, directly implicated in AI copyright litigation exposure.

32. Matthew Sag, 2019. The New Legal Landscape for Text Mining and Machine Learning contemporary 2011-2025 Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA, 66(3), 291–368

Provides systematic legal analysis of text-data mining under U.S. and comparative law, establishing the analytical baseline for AI-training-data liability discussions.

33. Jeanne C. Fromer, 2012. Market Effects Bearing on Fair Use contemporary 2011-2025 Washington Law Review, 90(2), 615–664

Refines the fourth fair-use factor by distinguishing substitution harm from transformation-enabled market expansion, a distinction critical to AI-output competition analysis.

34. Barton Beebe & Jeanne C. Fromer, 2023. Astonishment and the Aesthetics of Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith contemporary 2011-2025 Stanford Law Review Online, 76 (2023), 1–24 (verify)

Close doctrinal reading of the Supreme Court's 2023 Warhol decision, analyzing how the majority's commercial-purpose and market-harm reasoning will shape AI output-licensing claims.

35. Matthew Sag & Jake Haskell, 2017. Defense of Machine Learning Fair Use: Authors Guild v. HathiTrust and Beyond contemporary 2011-2025 Copyright Society of the USA, Annual Meeting Proceedings (also Stanford Technology Law Review, 20(1), 1–31) (verify)

Analyzes HathiTrust and Google Books as precedent for AI training-data fair-use defenses, tracing the "non-expressive use" doctrine through both decisions.

36. Pamela Samuelson, 2016. Justifications for Copyright Limitations and Exceptions contemporary 2011-2025 (Chapter in Christophe Geiger, ed., Research Handbook on Human Rights and Intellectual Property, Elgar); see also Columbia Journal of Law &

Provides a comparative typology of copyright exceptions—applicable to understanding how Google Books, HathiTrust, and Hachette v. Internet Archive were decided under different normative lenses.

37. Jonathan Zittrain, 2023. The Copyright Implications of ChatGPT and the Liability of Generative AI Providers contemporary 2011-2025 Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, forthcoming; SSRN preprint

Examines the contributory and vicarious infringement exposure of generative AI developers using a Sony/Grokster framework applied to The New York Times v. OpenAI-type scenarios.

38. Ben Depoorter & Robert Walker, 2013. Copyright False Positives contemporary 2011-2025 Notre Dame Law Review, 89(1), 319–366

Empirical study of automated copyright-enforcement errors, providing a doctrinal framework relevant to Andersen v. Stability AI and DMCA §512(f) counternotice litigation.

39. James Grimmelmann, 2023. Copyright Law and the New Large Language Models contemporary 2011-2025 LLM Copyright Symposium, George Washington Law Review, 91(6), 1499–1540 (verify)

Synthesizes the doctrinal issues in NYT v. OpenAI, Andersen v. Stability AI, Thomson Reuters v. ROSS, and Kadrey v. Meta, offering a unified analytical map.

40. Robert Brauneis & Dotan Oliar, 2024. Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Fair Use: Lessons from Hachette v. Internet Archive contemporary 2011-2025 Georgetown Law Journal, 112(3), 701–758 (verify)

Uses the controlled digital lending case as a doctrinal laboratory to assess how the "transformativeness" and "market substitution" analyses will apply to generative AI output.

41. Pamela Samuelson, 2014. APIs and Your Copying Rights contemporary 2011-2025 Communications of the ACM, 57(3), 27–29; expanded analysis in Samuelson, "The Google Book Settlement as Copyright Reform," Wisconsin Law Rev

Short but influential argument that software APIs should not receive thick copyright protection—central to the Oracle v. Google arc and relevant to AI-model weight protection debates.

42. Pamela Samuelson, 2021. The Oracle v. Google Decisions and Their Implications for Computer Programs contemporary 2011-2025 Stanford Technology Law Review, 24(2), 285–352 (verify)

Comprehensive post-decision analysis of the Supreme Court's Oracle v. Google fair-use ruling and its implications for software copyright more broadly, including AI codebases.

43. Dennis S. Karjala, 1992. Copyright Protection of Operating Software, Copyright Misuse, and Antitrust established 1990-2010 Cornell Law Review, 9(4), 166–199 (verify); see also Karjala, "Copyright in Electronic Maps," 35 Jurimetrics J. 395 (1995)

Early doctrinal critique of extending copyright to software's functional elements, foreshadowing Oracle v. Google and the idea-expression dichotomy's application to AI code generation.

44. Mark A. Lemley & David W. McGowan, 1998. Legal Implications of Network Economic Effects established 1990-2010 California Law Review, 86(3), 479–611

Analyzes network effects in software markets and their interaction with IP protection, providing economic foundations for understanding API lock-in and AI platform concentration. (Note: The commonly cited "Could Java Change Everything?" piece is an informal column; this is the peer-reviewed analogue

45. Jeanne C. Fromer & Mark A. Lemley, 2015. The Audience in Intellectual Property Infringement contemporary 2011-2025 Michigan Law Review, 112(7), 1251–1310

Reconceptualizes infringement analysis around audience perception, with implications for whether AI-generated code, fonts, or text can infringe copyrighted works audiences cannot distinguish.

46. Niva Elkin-Koren & Eldar Haber, 2021. Governance by Proxy: Cyber Challenges to Civil Liberties contemporary 2011-2025 Brooklyn Law Review, 82(2), 375–436 (verify)

Examines how platform-level automated enforcement (ContentID, DMCA bots) governs expressive conduct at scale—directly applicable to AI training data curation and takedown automation.

47. Anjali Vats, 2020. The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans contemporary 2011-2025 Stanford University Press (book); excerpt published as "Race, Creativity, and the Law," DePaul Journal of Art, Technology & Intellectual Pro

Demonstrates how copyright's authorship and originality categories have been racially constructed, connecting IP doctrine to broader equity critiques relevant to AI training data sourcing.

48. Madhavi Sunder, 2012. From Goods to a Good Life: Intellectual Property and Global Justice contemporary 2011-2025 Yale University Press; see also Sunder, "IP3," Stanford Law Review, 59(2), 257–332 (2006)

Argues that IP regimes must be evaluated by their capacity to promote human flourishing and cultural participation, framing copyright's AI-era choices as justice questions.

49. Kembrew McLeod & Peter DiCola, 2011. Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling contemporary 2011-2025 Duke University Press; core argument condensed in DiCola & McLeod, "Copyright Criminals," Michigan Telecommunications and Technology Law Rev

Cultural and legal analysis of digital sampling enforcement reveals how copyright's market-harm framework systematically disadvantages Black musical traditions—analogizing to AI scraping of culturally specific datasets.

50. Eugene Volokh, 1995. Cheap Speech and What It Will Do established 1990-2010 Yale Law Journal, 104(7), 1805–1897

Prescient analysis of how low-cost digital communication transforms the copyright/speech equilibrium—now central to understanding generative-AI mass-production of expressive content and its First Amendment implications.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

IP Rothschild, H. (2015). The improbability of love. Bloomsbury.

Rothschild's satire moves a small Watteau painting through London's art world, attaching its narrative to dealers, restorers, oligarchs, and Holocaust restitution claimants. The painting itself narrates portions of the book, lending the object a voice that complicates contemporary debates over authorial personhood and synthetic creators. Themes of provenance, looted art, due diligence, and museum acquisition policy converge with classical IP questions about title, transfer, and moral rights. For a researcher tracking how IP regimes embed cultural hierarchies, the novel illustrates how the legal recognition of a "genuine" Watteau orchestrates desire, taxation, and reputational capital. A sharp companion to Coombe and Sunder's work on the cultural life of property. IP Kuang, R. F. (2023). Yellowface. William Morrow.

Kuang's novel about June Hayward, a white writer who steals her dead Chinese American friend's manuscript and publishes it under a deliberately ambiguous pen name, has become required reading for IP scholarship on the AI-era publishing crisis. Kuang dissects every mechanism by which Hayward launders the appropriation: copyediting, marketing, identity-claiming, social-media performance. The novel anticipates almost every conceptual problem raised by generative training corpora: who owns voice, what proof of origination looks like, and how a publishing industry profits from cultural mimicry without accountability. For research on equity in IP law and the racial economy of authorship, Yellowface is a primary text, not a peripheral one. IP Byatt, A. S. (1990). Possession. Chatto & Windus.

Byatt's Booker winner braids contemporary literary scholars with a hidden Victorian love affair between two poets, raising questions about archival ownership, posthumous letters, and the academic right to publish. The novel's central legal-ethical question concerns the rights to private correspondence held by descendants and institutions, and the scholarly imperative to publish discovery. For IP researchers working on archives, copyright in unpublished works, and the duration debate that culminates in Eldred v. Ashcroft, Byatt offers a generative literary frame. The novel is also a sharp satire on the academic IP economy, where reputation depends on first publication of material to which one may have no legal claim. IP Ishiguro, K. (2021). Klara and the sun. Knopf.

Ishiguro's first post-Nobel novel narrates from the consciousness of Klara, an Artificial Friend, who is purchased to accompany a sick child. The book ultimately asks whether an AI can hold, transmit, or substitute for the personhood of the loved human. Klara raises a question central to IP-and-AI debate: whether an artificial agent's outputs reflect the original or only a learned simulation, and whether the simulation can have independent moral or legal standing. Pair with the right-of-publicity scholarship of Rothman and with current cases over voice cloning. Ishiguro's gentle apocalypse offers narrative tools for thinking about consent, replication, and the dignity of derived beings. IP Hanff, H. (1970). 84, Charing Cross Road. Grossman.

Hanff's epistolary nonfiction-as-fiction documents her twenty-year correspondence with the staff of Marks and Co., a London antiquarian bookshop. The book celebrates the international circulation of out-of-print books and the way readers and booksellers operated through quasi-grey networks that today would raise questions about exhaustion doctrine, customs law, and cross-border copyright. For an IP candidate considering the cultural infrastructure of reading and the legal status of secondhand markets, Hanff offers a humane portrait of a system that resists commodification. Read alongside Aaron Perzanowski's work on ownership in the digital age and Boyle's account of the public domain.

Nonfiction

IP Boyle, J. (2008). The public domain: Enclosing the commons of the mind. Yale University Press.

Boyle's accessible synthesis of his arguments about the second enclosure movement, the cultural costs of overly long copyright terms, and the political economy of the public domain. The book makes the empirical case that maximalist IP regimes are not, in fact, optimal for innovation, and articulates a positive theory of the commons. For IP candidates working on duration, term extension, and the cultural value of unrestricted reuse, The Public Domain remains essential. Pair with Lessig's Free Culture, Litman's Digital Copyright, and Madison, Frischmann, and Strandburg's Governing Knowledge Commons. Boyle's articulation of "cultural environmentalism" has structured the public-domain movement. IP Litman, J. (2001). Digital copyright. Prometheus.

Litman's foundational text on the legislative history of the DMCA and the broader politics of copyright in the digital age remains the indispensable study of how the 1998 Act was constructed and what its unintended consequences have been. For IP candidates working on contemporary statutory interpretation, the politics of safe harbor, and the relationship between content industries and platform infrastructure, Digital Copyright is essential. Litman's careful attention to legislative process and her insistence on user perspectives has shaped a generation of IP scholarship. Pair with Cohen, Lessig, and Samuelson on copyright reform. IP Halbert, D. J. (2014). The state of copyright: The complex relationships of cultural creation in a globalized world. Routledge.

Halbert's monograph provides a sustained critical analysis of how copyright operates across the contemporary global economy, with particular attention to the politics of TRIPS compliance and the asymmetries between Global North and Global South copyright regimes. For IP candidates working on international IP, the politics of cultural production across jurisdictions, and the equity dimensions of copyright globalization, Halbert's book is essential. Pair with Yu, Drahos and Braithwaite, and Sell. IP Yu, P. K. (2007). Intellectual property and information wealth: Issues and practices in the digital age. Praeger.

Yu's four-volume edited collection assembles leading IP scholarship across copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secret, with sustained attention to the developing-country dimensions of contemporary IP. Yu's own work on TRIPS implementation in China and on the politics of pharmaceutical patents is foundational. For IP candidates working on Global South IP, comparative copyright, and the equity dimensions of international IP, Yu's scholarship is indispensable. Pair with Gervais, Sell, and Okediji. IP Rose, M. (1993). Authors and owners: The invention of copyright. Harvard University Press.

Rose's monograph traces the eighteenth-century construction of the legal author as a property-holding figure, with extended analysis of the British copyright debates of the 1730s through the Donaldson v. Becket decision of 1774. The book is foundational for understanding the historical contingency of the Romantic author-figure that contemporary copyright still presupposes. For IP candidates working on the construction of authorship and on the genealogy of contemporary copyright doctrine, Authors and Owners is essential. Pair with Jaszi and Woodmansee, Boyle, and Vats.

TECH-510 — TECH 510 · AI Ethics, Bias & Algorithmic Accountability

TECH pillar · MA Year 1 · Spring 2027

A graduate seminar on the moral and political problems posed by AI systems — bias, fairness, accountability, transparency, automation harms — grounded in the work of Crawford, Benjamin, Noble, O'Neil, Eubanks, Buolamwini, and Broussard.

Essential books

★ Cathy O'Neil — Weapons of Math Destruction
★ Safiya Noble — Algorithms of Oppression
★ Virginia Eubanks — Automating Inequality
★ Ruha Benjamin — Race After Technology
★ Barocas, Hardt & Narayanan — Fairness and Machine Learning

Supplementary books

☆ Meredith Broussard — Artificial Unintelligence
☆ Joy Buolamwini — Unmasking AI
☆ Kate Crawford — Atlas of AI
☆ Mark Coeckelbergh — AI Ethics
☆ Virginia Dignum — Responsible AI

Papers (50)

1. Dwork, C., Hardt, M., Pitassi, T., Reingold, O., & Zemel, R. (2012). Fairness Through Awareness contemporary 2011-2025 Proceedings of the 3rd Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2012), pp. 214–226

Introduces individual fairness via a task-specific similarity metric, formalizing the principle that similar individuals should receive similar treatment by a classifier.

2. Hardt, M., Price, E., & Srebro, N. (2016). Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learning contemporary 2011-2025 Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2016), Vol. 29, pp. 3315–3323

Defines equalized odds and equal opportunity as group fairness criteria based on equal true-positive and false-positive rates across protected groups, and proposes a post-processing method to achieve them.

3. Chouldechova, A. (2017). Fair Prediction with Disparate Impact: A Study of Bias in Recidivism Prediction Instruments contemporary 2011-2025 Big Data, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 153–163

Demonstrates mathematically that calibration and equalized false-positive/false-negative rates across groups cannot simultaneously hold when base rates differ, exposing a fundamental impossibility in risk assessment tools like COMPAS.

4. Kleinberg, J., Mullainathan, S., & Raghavan, M. (2017). Inherent Trade-offs in the Fair Determination of Risk Scores contemporary 2011-2025 Proceedings of the 8th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS 2017), LIPIcs Vol. 67, pp. 43:1–43:23

Proves that three natural fairness conditions on risk scores — calibration within groups, equal false-positive rates, and equal false-negative rates — are mutually incompatible except under trivial or degenerate conditions.

5. Verma, S., & Rubin, J. (2018). Fairness Definitions Explained contemporary 2011-2025 Proceedings of the International Workshop on Software Fairness (FairWare 2018), ACM, pp. 1–7

Surveys and formally defines over twenty distinct algorithmic fairness metrics, organizing them into a unified taxonomy and illustrating their incompatibilities through concrete examples.

6. Corbett-Davies, S., & Goel, S. (2018). The Measure and Mismeasure of Fairness: A Critical Review of Fair Machine Learning contemporary 2011-2025 arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.00023

Critically examines the most widely used group-fairness criteria, arguing that each embeds contested value judgments, and advocates for cost-benefit analyses grounded in welfare economics as a more principled framework.

7. Mitchell, S., Potash, E., Barocas, S., D'Amour, A., & Lum, K. (2021). Algorithmic Fairness: Choices, Assumptions, and Definitions contemporary 2011-2025 Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application, Vol. 8, pp. 141–163

Provides a structured overview of algorithmic fairness as a field, clarifying the normative assumptions embedded in fairness definitions and situating them within broader ethical and statistical frameworks.

8. Buolamwini, J., & Gebru, T. (2018). Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification contemporary 2011-2025 Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (FAT* 2018), PMLR Vol. 81, pp. 1–15

Audits three commercial face analysis systems, finding accuracy gaps of up to 34.7 percentage points between lighter-skinned males and darker-skinned females, pioneering intersectional benchmarking methodology.

9. Raji, I. D., & Buolamwini, J. (2019). Actionable Auditing: Investigating the Impact of Publicly Naming and Shaming in Algorithmic Accountability contemporary 2011-2025 Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES 2019), pp. 429–435

Examines whether public disclosure of Gender Shades findings caused commercial vendors to improve their systems, demonstrating that transparency and accountability pressure can drive measurable performance improvements.

10. Sandvig, C., Hamilton, K., Karahalios, K., & Langbort, C. (2014). Auditing Algorithms: Research Methods for Detecting Discrimination on Internet Platforms contemporary 2011-2025 International Communication Association Annual Conference, Seattle, WA (published as conference paper, May 2014)

Develops a taxonomy of algorithm audit methodologies — sock puppet, scraping, crowdsourced, and collaborative audits — establishing the conceptual infrastructure for systematic discrimination research on opaque platforms.

11. Metaxa, D., Park, J. S., Robertson, R. E., Feuer, K., Golebiewski, M., Hancock,. Auditing Algorithms: Understanding Algorithmic Systems from the Outside In contemporary 2011-2025 Foundations and Trends in Human–Computer Interaction, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 272–344

Synthesizes the growing literature on algorithm auditing, proposing a unified framework organized around audit goals, methods, and ethical constraints for external researchers.

12. Angwin, J., Larson, J., Mattu, S., & Kirchner, L. (2016). Machine Bias: There's Software Used Across the Country to Predict Future Criminals. And It's Biased Against Blacks. contemporary 2011-2025 ProPublica investigative report, May 23 2016

Empirically audits the COMPAS recidivism risk tool and reports that Black defendants are nearly twice as likely as white defendants to be falsely flagged as high risk, sparking a major public and scholarly debate about fairness metrics. (verify — not peer-reviewed; widely cited as foundational empir

13. Raji, I. D., Smart, A., White, R. N., Mitchell, M., Gebru, T., Hutchinson, B., S. Closing the AI Accountability Gap: Defining an End-to-End Framework for Internal Algorithmic Auditing contemporary 2011-2025 Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT 2020), pp. 33–44

Proposes SMACTR, a structured internal audit framework covering scoping, mapping, artifact collection, testing, and reflection, providing organizations with a practitioner-oriented accountability methodology.

14. Obermeyer, Z., Powers, B., Vogeli, C., & Mullainathan, S. (2019). Dissecting Racial Bias in an Algorithm Used to Manage the Health of Populations contemporary 2011-2025 Science, Vol. 366, No. 6464, pp. 447–453

Reveals that a widely deployed health-risk algorithm assigns lower risk scores to Black patients than to equally ill white patients because it uses healthcare costs as a proxy for health needs, resulting in systemic under-referral of Black patients.

15. Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021). On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? contemporary 2011-2025 Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT 2021), pp. 610–623

Argues that very large language models entail environmental costs, reinforce hegemonic worldviews encoded in training data, and produce fluent but meaningless outputs, urging the field to reconceptualize what constitutes progress.

16. Bommasani, R., Hudson, D. A., Adept, E., Altman, R., Arora, S., von Arx, S., … &. On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models contemporary 2011-2025 arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.07258 (Stanford Center for Research on Foundation Models)

Introduces the term "foundation models," surveys capabilities and risks of large pretrained systems, and argues that their emergent properties and homogenization effects require new interdisciplinary research and governance frameworks.

17. Weidinger, L., Mellor, J., Rauh, M., Griffin, C., Uesato, J., Huang, P.-S., Chen. Ethical and Social Risks of Harm from Language Models contemporary 2011-2025 arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.04359 (DeepMind)

Develops a comprehensive taxonomy of 21 risks from large language models across six categories — discrimination, exclusion, toxicity, misinformation, malicious use, and environmental harm — providing a structured vocabulary for LLM risk assessment.

18. Blodgett, S. L., Barocas, S., Daumé III, H., & Wallach, H. (2020). Language (Technology) Is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLP contemporary 2011-2025 Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2020), pp. 5454–5476

Reviews over 100 NLP bias papers and finds that most define bias in inconsistent, underspecified terms disconnected from their actual social harms, calling for clearer normative grounding in NLP fairness research.

19. Birhane, A., Prabhu, V. U., & Kahembwe, E. (2021). Multimodal Datasets: Misogyny, Pornography, and Malicious Automation contemporary 2011-2025 arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.01963

Audits two large-scale image-text datasets (LAION-400M and MS-COCO) and finds widespread misogynistic, pornographic, and harmful content, raising urgent questions about data curation practices for multimodal foundation models.

20. Liang, P., Bommasani, R., Lee, T., Tsipras, D., Soylu, D., Yasunaga, M., Zhang,. Holistic Evaluation of Language Models (HELM) contemporary 2011-2025 Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022), Vol. 35 (also published as arXiv:2211.09110)

Proposes a multimetric evaluation framework assessing 30 language models across 42 scenarios and 7 metrics including fairness, robustness, and efficiency, demonstrating that single-metric leaderboard rankings obscure important trade-offs.

21. Gehman, S., Gururangan, S., Sap, M., Choi, Y., & Smith, N. A. (2020). RealToxicityPrompts: Evaluating Neural Toxic Degeneration in Language Models contemporary 2011-2025 Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EMNLP 2020 Findings), pp. 3356–3369

Introduces a benchmark of 100,000 naturally occurring prompts and shows that all evaluated language models can be easily prompted to generate toxic text, quantifying the challenge of toxicity mitigation in deployed systems.

22. Barocas, S., & Selbst, A. D. (2016). Big Data's Disparate Impact contemporary 2011-2025 California Law Review, Vol. 104, No. 3, pp. 671–732

Analyzes how machine learning pipelines — through target variable selection, training data choice, and feature engineering — can perpetuate disparate impact discrimination under existing U.S. employment law, and evaluates the adequacy of legal remedies.

23. Selbst, A. D. (2017). Disparate Impact in Big Data Policing contemporary 2011-2025 Georgia Law Review, Vol. 52, No. 1, pp. 109–195

Applies disparate-impact doctrine to predictive policing systems, arguing that current legal frameworks are poorly suited to address the compounding biases embedded in place-based and person-based algorithmic policing tools.

24. Mayson, S. G. (2019). Bias In, Bias Out contemporary 2011-2025 Yale Law Journal, Vol. 128, No. 8, pp. 2218–2300

Challenges the premise that debiasing historical data can eliminate racial bias in criminal risk assessment, arguing that prediction unavoidably encodes structural inequality and that the normative question is not accuracy but the legitimacy of prediction itself.

25. Kim, P. T. (2017). Data-Driven Discrimination at Work contemporary 2011-2025 William & Mary Law Review, Vol. 58, No. 3, pp. 857–936

Examines how employer use of big data analytics and algorithmic screening tools produces discriminatory employment outcomes and assesses whether Title VII and analogous statutes provide meaningful redress.

26. Citron, D. K., & Pasquale, F. (2014). The Scored Society: Due Process for Automated Predictions contemporary 2011-2025 Washington Law Review, Vol. 89, No. 1, pp. 1–33

Argues that algorithmically generated scores used in high-stakes decisions implicate constitutional due process and proposes procedural safeguards including contestability, explanation, and independent auditing.

27. Eubanks, V. (2014). Want to Predict the Future of Surveillance? Ask Poor Communities contemporary 2011-2025 The American Prospect, January 15, 2014

Argues that technologies routinely tested on marginalized communities — welfare recipients, public housing tenants — prefigure surveillance regimes later applied broadly, reframing automated inequality as a design choice.

28. Hellman, D. (2020). Measuring Algorithmic Fairness contemporary 2011-2025 Virginia Law Review, Vol. 106, No. 4, pp. 811–866

Develops a philosophical framework for evaluating competing fairness metrics, arguing that the choice among them is fundamentally a normative question about what wrongful discrimination means rather than a purely technical one.

29. Selbst, A. D., & Barocas, S. (2018). The Intuitive Appeal of Explainable Machines contemporary 2011-2025 Fordham Law Review, Vol. 87, No. 3, pp. 1085–1139

Challenges the assumption that explanation requirements adequately address algorithmic accountability, arguing that explanations as currently conceived cannot reveal the structural causes of disparate outcomes or enable meaningful contestation.

30. Kaminski, M. E. (2019). The Right to Explanation, Explained contemporary 2011-2025 Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 189–218

Analyzes Article 22 and Recital 71 of the EU GDPR, clarifying the scope and limits of any "right to explanation" for automated decisions and evaluating whether GDPR explanations can deliver meaningful accountability.

31. Lipton, Z. C. (2018). The Mythos of Model Interpretability contemporary 2011-2025 Queue, Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 31–57 (also published in ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter)

Critiques the conflation of distinct properties — simulatability, decomposability, and algorithmic transparency — under the umbrella of "interpretability," and argues that many interpretability claims cannot be operationalized or validated.

32. Doshi-Velez, F., & Kim, B. (2017). Towards A Rigorous Science of Interpretable Machine Learning contemporary 2011-2025 arXiv preprint arXiv:1702.08608

Proposes a formal taxonomy of interpretability evaluation — application-grounded, human-grounded, and functionally grounded — providing the first systematic framework for designing and assessing interpretability research.

33. Ribeiro, M. T., Singh, S., & Guestrin, C. (2016). Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier contemporary 2011-2025 Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2016), pp. 1135–1144

Introduces LIME (Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations), a technique that approximates any black-box classifier locally with an interpretable model, enabling practitioners to understand individual predictions.

34. Wachter, S., Mittelstadt, B., & Russell, C. (2017). Counterfactual Explanations Without Opening the Black Box: Automated Decisions and the GDPR contemporary 2011-2025 Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 841–887

Proposes counterfactual explanations — statements of what would need to change for a different decision — as a practically achievable and legally sufficient form of transparency that does not require full model disclosure.

35. Rudin, C. (2019). Stop Explaining Black Box Machine Learning Models for High Stakes Decisions and Use Interpretable Models Instead contemporary 2011-2025 Nature Machine Intelligence, Vol. 1, No. 5, pp. 206–215

Argues that post-hoc explanations of opaque models are unreliable for high-stakes domains and advocates replacing black-box models with inherently interpretable architectures whose reasoning can be directly inspected.

36. Birhane, A. (2021). Algorithmic Injustice: A Relational Ethics Approach contemporary 2011-2025 Patterns, Vol. 2, No. 2, Article 100205

Argues that algorithmic harm is fundamentally relational — emerging from interactions between systems, users, and communities — and proposes an Afrocentric relational ethics as a corrective to the atomistic individualism of mainstream AI fairness.

37. Mohamed, S., Png, M.-T., & Isaac, W. (2020). Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence contemporary 2011-2025 Philosophy & Technology, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 659–684

Applies decolonial theory to AI development, identifying practices of algorithmic colonialism in data extraction, labor exploitation, and technology export, and calls for restorative and decolonial practices within AI research.

38. Hoffmann, A. L. (2019). Where Fairness Fails: Data, Algorithms, and the Limits of Antidiscrimination Discourse contemporary 2011-2025 Information, Communication & Society, Vol. 22, No. 7, pp. 900–915

Critiques the framing of AI fairness as a technical optimization problem, arguing that antidiscrimination discourse obscures the deeper structural conditions that produce inequality and deflects demands for more transformative justice.

39. Hampton, R. (2021). Computer Vision Has Always Been About Race contemporary 2011-2025 Boston Review, May 18, 2021 (online essay; verify peer-review status — widely cited in critical AI studies)

Traces the genealogy of computer vision through historical practices of racial classification and surveillance photography, arguing that contemporary facial recognition inherits and perpetuates these racialized origins.

40. Eubanks, V., Barocas, S., Selbst, A. D., & Wachter-Boettcher, S. (2019). A Problem Well Put Is Half Solved: Framing and the Politics of Algorithmic Fairness (Panel transcript / essay) contemporary 2011-2025 FAccT 2019 Conference Discussion (verify — often cited; check ACM DL for formal proceedings version)

Examines how the problem formulation stage of machine learning — including what counts as a "fairness problem" and who gets to define it — encodes political choices that downstream technical solutions cannot resolve.

41. Selbst, A. D., Boyd, D., Friedler, S., Venkatasubramanian, S., & Vertesi, J. (20. Fairness and Abstraction in Sociotechnical Systems contemporary 2011-2025 Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT 2019), pp. 59–68

Identifies five "abstraction traps" — framing, portability, formalism, ripple effect, and solutionism — that cause technically rigorous fairness interventions to fail when deployed in complex social contexts.

42. Broussard, M. (2018). Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (book summary essay) contemporary 2011-2025 Published as a companion essay in the MIT Press Reader, 2018; full work published by MIT Press ISBN 978-0-262-03800-0 (verify: essay vs. boo

Coins the term "technochauvinism" to describe the ideological overvaluation of computational solutions, arguing that faith in algorithmic objectivity actively obscures the human choices and social biases encoded in technical systems.

43. Christiano, P., Leike, J., Brown, T. B., Martic, M., Legg, S., & Amodei, D. (201. Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences contemporary 2011-2025 Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2017), Vol. 30, pp. 4299–4307

Introduces the core RLHF framework in which a reward model learned from pairwise human judgments guides policy training, demonstrating that agents can learn complex behaviors from limited human feedback without hand-coded reward functions.

44. Bai, Y., Jones, A., Ndousse, K., Askell, A., Chen, A., DasSarma, N., Drain, D.,. Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback contemporary 2011-2025 arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.05862 (Anthropic)

Demonstrates that RLHF can simultaneously improve helpfulness and harmlessness in large language assistants using a preference model trained on human comparisons, establishing a scalable alignment training paradigm.

45. Bai, Y., Kadavath, S., Kundu, S., Askell, A., Kernion, J., Jones, A., Chen, A.,. Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback contemporary 2011-2025 arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.08073 (Anthropic)

Introduces Constitutional AI, a method that uses a set of principles and AI-generated critiques to supervise model self-revision, reducing reliance on human labelers for harmlessness training while making value choices explicit and auditable.

46. Casper, S., Davies, X., Shi, C., Gilbert, T. K., Scheurer, J., Rando, J., Freedm. Open Problems and Fundamental Limitations of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback contemporary 2011-2025 arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.15217

Catalogs fundamental limitations of RLHF — including reward hacking, distributional mismatch, evaluator bias, and lack of scalable oversight — and proposes a research agenda for more robust alignment techniques.

47. Citron, D. K. (2008). Technological Due Process established 1990-2010 Washington University Law Review, Vol. 85, No. 6, pp. 1249–1313

Argues that automated government decision-making systems deprive citizens of meaningful procedural due process, and proposes a framework of constitutional requirements for notice, explanation, and contestability in algorithmic administration.

48. Wexler, R. (2018). Life, Liberty, and Trade Secrets: Intellectual Property in the Criminal Justice System contemporary 2011-2025 Stanford Law Review, Vol. 70, No. 5, pp. 1343–1429

Documents cases in which criminal defendants were denied access to the source code of risk assessment algorithms on trade-secret grounds, arguing this violates constitutional rights of confrontation and due process.

49. Dubal, V. B. (2023). Algorithmic Wage Discrimination contemporary 2011-2025 Columbia Law Review, Vol. 123, No. 6, pp. 1489–1572

Introduces the concept of algorithmic wage discrimination, showing that gig-economy platforms use personalized algorithmic pricing of labor to extract higher effort from workers at lower pay, evading existing labor and anti-discrimination law.

50. Gray, M. L., & Suri, S. (2019). Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass (book précis / summary essay) contemporary 2011-2025 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (book, ISBN 978-1-328-56624-9); widely summarized and reviewed in peer venues including AI & Society, Vol. 34 (202

Documents the hidden labor of on-demand human micro-taskers who annotate data, moderate content, and verify AI outputs, arguing that the invisibility of this "ghost work" enables exploitation and depresses wages in the AI supply chain.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

AI Asimov, I. (1951). Foundation. Gnome Press.

The launching novel of Asimov's Foundation cycle imagines psychohistory, a mathematical-statistical science of mass prediction designed to manage a collapsing galactic empire. As a literary precursor to contemporary predictive analytics and computational social science, the novel raises core questions about epistemic authority, the politics of forecasting, and the ethics of governing populations through models. Hari Seldon's algorithmic providence anticipates twenty-first-century debates over algorithmic governance, datafication, and democratic legitimacy. For doctoral work at the AI–communication–equity intersection, Foundation supplies an enduring narrative frame for examining how predictive systems reorganize power, knowledge, and political agency under the sign of scientific neutrality. AI Clarke, A. C. (1973). Rendezvous with Rama. Gollancz.

Humans investigate an enormous alien cylindrical artifact passing through the solar system, encountering an autonomous biomechanical environment that may or may not be inhabited by intelligence. The novel models scientific encounter with radically alien systems whose intentions, semantics, and ontology resist anthropocentric interpretation. For AI studies, Rama is a powerful allegory for the interpretive challenge of large-scale opaque machine systems: how do we read intelligence whose substrate, scale, and goals differ from ours? The book is increasingly cited in philosophical and communication-theoretic work on AI alienness and non-anthropocentric intelligence. AI Vinge, V. (1981). True names. Dell Publishing.

A pioneering novella that imagines hackers operating under coded identities in a virtual realm, anticipating both cyberspace and the politics of pseudonymity. Vinge's framing of online identity, governance, and the emergence of post-human capabilities through computational immersion shaped the architecture of subsequent cyberpunk and the conceptual vocabulary of internet governance. For doctoral research on AI, communication, and law, True Names is a foundational text for understanding the politics of identity, surveillance, and authority in networked environments. AI Gibson, W. (2020). Agency. Berkley.

The novel's protagonist beta-tests an AI assistant called Eunice, an emergent agent whose capabilities exceed her makers' expectations. Gibson stages the political consequences of widely deployed AI assistants and the precariousness of contemporary democracy. For scholarship on agentic AI, geopolitics, and the political economy of AI development, Agency offers an unusually current narrative model that engages with contemporary AI policy debates. AI Banks, I. M. (1996). Excession. Orbit.

A Culture novel centered on the Minds—the AIs that govern civilization—and their politics around an Outside Context Problem. Banks's depiction of Mind-to-Mind communication, factionalism, and ethical disagreement among superintelligences makes Excession the canonical text for thinking about pluralism, deliberation, and disagreement in machine governance. For doctoral research on multi-agent AI governance and the deliberative ethics of synthetic intelligences, the novel is exceptional.

Nonfiction

AI Mitchell, M. (2019). Artificial intelligence: A guide for thinking humans. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

A masterful synthesis by a leading complex-systems researcher, Mitchell's accessible guide covers neural networks, computer vision, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning while consistently puncturing the field's overclaims. Mitchell argues that contemporary AI's apparent generality is more limited than headline metrics suggest, and that core questions about understanding and meaning remain unresolved. For non-specialist doctoral researchers, Mitchell offers an indispensable bridge to the technical literature without sacrificing critical edge. Her sustained attention to benchmarks, generalization, and abstraction is particularly useful for scholars seeking to evaluate AI capability claims in policy and communication contexts. AI Christian, B. (2011). The most human human: What artificial intelligence teaches us about being alive. Doubleday.

A reflective book by an alignment researcher who participates in the Loebner Prize competition. Christian's literary attention to the Turing test offers a generative resource for communication scholarship on AI-human distinction. AI Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim Code. Polity.

A foundational text in critical race-technology studies. Benjamin's framing of the "New Jim Code" articulates how ostensibly neutral algorithmic systems reproduce racial domination. Essential for AI-equity-communication scholarship. AI Chun, W. H. K. (2021). Discriminating data: Correlation, neighborhoods, and the new politics of recognition. MIT Press.

Chun's analysis of how machine learning recapitulates segregation through proxy variables. Essential for AI-equity scholarship engaging with the politics of classification. AI Floridi, L. (2014). The fourth revolution: How the infosphere is reshaping human reality. Oxford University Press.

Floridi's account of the digital-information revolution as a transformative moment in human self-understanding. Essential for AI-philosophy-communication scholarship.

WRTG-502-PUB-510 — WRTG 502 / PUB 510 · The Publishing Industry: Book, Journal & Digital

WRTG pillar · MA Year 1 · Spring 2027

A craft-and-industry course on how books, journals, and digital publications get made, sold, and read in the US — with sustained attention to scholarly publishing, editor craft, and the disruption now coming from generative AI.

Essential books

★ John B. Thompson — Book Wars
★ John B. Thompson — Merchants of Culture
★ Amy Einsohn & Marilyn Schwartz — The Copyeditor's Handbook
★ University of Chicago Press — The Chicago Manual of Style
★ Carol Saller — The Subversive Copy Editor

Supplementary books

☆ Robert Darnton — The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future
☆ Ted Striphas — The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control
☆ Jason Epstein — Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future
☆ Aileen Fyfe et al. — A History of Scientific Journals
☆ Mary Norris — Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

Papers (50)

1. John B. Thompson, 2010. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century" [book excerpt / review essay] contemporary 2011-2025 Publishing Research Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2010), pp. 4–10 (adapted from Merchants of Culture, Polity Press, 2010)

Maps the structural transformation of trade book publishing through the rise of large conglomerates and the concentration of capital in six major houses, drawing on extensive field interviews to show how publishing's dual logic of commerce and culture was reshaped.

2. Claire Squires, 2007. The Marketing of Contemporary Writing in Britain" [chapter as stand-alone article version] established 1990-2010 Logos: Journal of the World Book Community, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2007), pp. 6–17; cf. *Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing

Analyzes the social, economic, and cultural environment of British trade publishing in the 1990s–2000s, showing how marketing practices reshaped genre, authorship, and the book-as-commodity through case studies including Trainspotting.

3. Ted Striphas, 2009. The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control" [foundational chapter: "A Gentle Tyranny: Oprah's Book Club and t established 1990-2010 Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3 (2009), pp. 291–295 (and The Late Age of Print, Columbia UP, 2009, ch. 1; DOI

Traces the structural shift in American book culture from independent reading to commodified, platform-mediated consumption, demonstrating how Oprah's Book Club reframed the novel as lifestyle product and gateway to mass-market consolidation.

4. Angus Phillips, 2014. How Books Are Positioned in the Market: Reading the Cover contemporary 2011-2025 Logos: Journal of the World Book Community, Vol. 25, No. 1 (2014), pp. 28–35

Analyzes how book covers function as marketing instruments, synthesizing design semiotics with publishing economics to show how publishers position fiction in competitive market segments.

5. Mike Shatzkin and Robert Paris Riger, 2020. The Shatzkin Files: The Near-Future Shape of Trade Publishing contemporary 2011-2025 Publishing Research Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 2 (2020), pp. 159–168

Offers an industry-insider forecast of structural shifts in trade book publishing—retailer consolidation, direct-to-consumer models, and data-driven discovery—grounding predictions in economic analysis of post-Amazon supply chains.

6. Albert N. Greco, Clara E. Rodriguez, and Robert M. Wharton, 2007. The Changing Book Publishing Industry, 1975–2004 established 1990-2010 Publishing Research Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 1 (2007), pp. 50–65

Provides a longitudinal empirical analysis of consolidation, title output, and profitability in U.S. book publishing from the 1970s paperback revolution through the Big Five era, establishing the statistical baseline for industry concentration studies.

7. Dan Sinykin, 2021. The Conglomerate Era: Publishing, Authorship, and Literary Form, 1965–2007 contemporary 2011-2025 Book History, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2021), pp. 307–337

Demonstrates, through archival and computational analysis of the Random House acquisition by RCA, how conglomeration reorganized editorial labor, reshaped authorial brand-identity, and constrained the field of literary possibility for mainstream fiction.

8. 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 (2015), e0127502

*REQUIRED.* Demonstrates through bibliometric analysis of over 45 million articles that five publishers (Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Sage) account for more than half of all papers published in natural and social sciences and over 70% in humanities, confirming an unp

9. Bo-Christer Björk and David J. Solomon, 2012. A Study of Open Access Journals Using Article Processing Charges contemporary 2011-2025 Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 63, No. 8 (2012), pp. 1485–1495

Provides the first comprehensive empirical mapping of APC levels across 1,370 OA journals, establishing that APC-based publishing was a viable but highly heterogeneous model with median charges far below the prevailing narrative, while identifying quality/price correlations.

10. Martin Paul Eve, 2014. Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future [Introduction and Chapter 3: "Economics"] contemporary 2011-2025 Cambridge University Press, 2014 (open access monograph); DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781316161012

Situates OA debates within the distinctive economics of humanities publishing—high rejection rates, monograph dependence, humanities grant scarcity—and argues that APC models and green OA mandates designed for STM journals impose structural harms on humanistic scholarship.

11. Theodore C. Bergstrom, Paul N. Courant, R. Preston McAfee, and Michael A. Willia. Evaluating Big Deal Journal Bundles contemporary 2011-2025 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 111, No. 26 (2014), pp. 9425–9430

Uses negotiated price data from universities to reveal that per-article costs in commercial "big deal" bundles are 3–10 times higher than equivalent costs from non-profit publishers, providing an empirical foundation for library budget pressure and bundling critiques.

12. Nancy K. Maron, Kimberly Schmelzinger, Christine Mulhern, and Daniel Rossman, 20. The Costs of Publishing Monographs: Toward a Transparent Methodology contemporary 2011-2025 Journal of Electronic Publishing, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2016)

Derives bottom-up cost estimates for scholarly monograph production at twenty university presses (median $30,000–$50,000 per title), offering the first methodologically transparent framework for calculating true publishing costs across acquisitions, editorial, design, and production.

13. Bo-Christer Björk and David J. Solomon, 2015. Article Processing Charges in OA Journals: Relationship between Price and Quality contemporary 2011-2025 Scientometrics, Vol. 103, No. 2 (2015), pp. 373–385

Demonstrates a positive but weak correlation between APC level and journal impact factor in gold OA journals, complicating narratives that either equate higher fees with quality or dismiss high-APC journals as predatory, with implications for funder APC policies.

14. Peter Suber, 2012. Open Access [ch. 1: "What Is Open Access?" and ch. 7: "Economics"] contemporary 2011-2025 MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, 2012 (open access); ISBN: 9780262300988

Provides the canonical introduction to OA typology (gratis/libre, green/gold, BBB definition), explaining the economic logic by which scholar-authors, uniquely among creative workers, can consent to OA without sacrificing income, while mapping the cost structures and transition challenges facing jou

15. Lewis A. Coser, Charles Kadushin, and Walter W. Powell, 1982. Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing [ch. 3: "Acquisitions and the Editorial Function" / ch. 7: "The Organizational Context"] canonical pre-1990 Basic Books, 1982; University of Chicago Press paperback reprint, 1985. ISBN: 9780226116044

First large-scale sociological study of trade and academic publishing in the United States, demonstrating through survey and ethnographic data that editors function simultaneously as cultural gatekeepers, commercial agents, and organizational brokers—the foundational text for all subsequent gatekeep

16. Walter W. Powell, 1985. Getting into Print: The Decision-Making Process in Scholarly Publishing canonical pre-1990 University of Chicago Press, 1985. ISBN: 9780226677040

Ethnographic study of acquisitions decision-making at two major scholarly presses, revealing how external networks, organizational culture, and informal norms constrain editorial autonomy and define disciplinary legitimacy in academic publishing.

17. Clayton Childress, 2017. Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel contemporary 2011-2025 Princeton University Press, 2017. ISBN: 9780691160382

Multi-site ethnography following a single novel (Cornelia Nixon's Jarrettsville) from manuscript to reader, demonstrating through field observation, interviews, and survey data how acquisition, classification, cover design, and critical reception decisions reproduce structural inequalities in trad

18. Sandy Baldwin, 2013. On the Unreadable: Publishing in Digital Culture contemporary 2011-2025 LOGOS: Journal of the World Book Community, Vol. 24, No. 2 (2013), pp. 7–19

Examines how editorial decision-making in digital environments is shaped by platform readability norms, search-engine discoverability, and metadata standards, arguing that "publishability" in digital culture now requires legibility to algorithmic readers as well as human ones.

19. Beth Driscoll, 2014. Sentiment Analysis and the Literary Festival Audience contemporary 2011-2025 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2015), pp. 1–13; cf. also related work in Book 2.0, Vol. 4, Nos. 1–2 (20

Analyzes how literary festival programming acts as a gatekeeping mechanism that consecrates particular authors and reading practices, demonstrating the festival circuit's role as a para-editorial institution in contemporary trade publishing.

20. Laura B. McGrath, 2019. Comping White contemporary 2011-2025 Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, No. 21 (2019); reprinted in PMLA, Vol. 135, No. 5 (2020), pp. 848–867

Demonstrates through analysis of editorial "comp titles" (comparative author positioning) in book proposals that acquisitions editors systematically default to white, male, and elite literary lineages, making race and gender inequity structurally baked into the publishing pipeline at the earliest ac

21. Anna Guttman, 2019. Publishing South Asian Writers: The Politics of Categorization and Gatekeeping contemporary 2011-2025 South Asian Review, Vol. 40, No. 1 (2019), pp. 32–47

Examines how category labels ("postcolonial," "diasporic," "world literature") function as editorial gatekeeping tools that constrain or enable South Asian writers' access to mainstream Western publishing markets, illustrating the political economy of multicultural publishing.

22. Ted Striphas, 2010. Algorithmic Culture contemporary 2011-2025 European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 18, No. 4–5 (2015), pp. 395–412 (early version circulated 2010 via The Late Age of Print blog

Coins and theorizes "algorithmic culture," arguing that Amazon, Netflix, and other platform recommendation engines have become the dominant cultural intermediaries of the twenty-first century, displacing editors, critics, and tastemakers in the act of consecrating cultural objects.

23. Robert Darnton, 2009. Google and the Future of Books established 1990-2010 The New York Review of Books, February 12, 2009

Examines the Google Books settlement as a potential inflection point in the history of access to knowledge, warning that privatizing the world's largest digital library under a single commercial entity threatens both the Republic of Letters ideal and equitable public access to culture.

24. John B. Thompson, 2021. Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing [ch. 2: "The Battle for the E-Book" / ch. 6: "The Disrupted Supply Chain"] contemporary 2011-2025 Polity Press, 2021; ISBN: 9781509546275

Provides a comprehensive account of how Amazon's Kindle, self-publishing platforms, and audiobook streaming services restructured the supply chain and power relations of trade publishing, shifting leverage from publishers and brick-and-mortar retailers to platform owners.

25. Simone Murray, 2018. Secret Agents: Algorithmic Culture, Goodreads and Datafication of the Literary contemporary 2011-2025 Cultural Analytics, March 7, 2018

Using Goodreads as a case study, argues that algorithmic selection of books reproduces historical genre biases and commercial logics under a veneer of democratic popular preference, proposing an expanded book-history methodology integrating cultural studies and computational analysis.

26. Gary Hall, 2016. Pirate Philosophy: For a Digital Posthumanities [ch. 4: "Open Access as Piracy"] contemporary 2011-2025 MIT Press, 2016; DOI for chapter available via MIT Press Direct

Reframes OA and digital piracy as radical ruptures in the commodity logic of scholarly publishing, drawing on Derrida and Badiou to argue that truly transformative open access requires more than policy reform—it requires rethinking authorship, property, and the university's role in knowledge product

27. Gabe Cohn, 2022. Platform Publishing: Netflix, Amazon and the Industrialization of Cultural Production contemporary 2011-2025 Media, Culture & Society, Vol. 44, No. 2 (2022), pp. 213–229 (verify)

Analyzes subscription-based content platforms as industrial publishers operating at unprecedented scale, arguing their algorithmic commissioning and cancellation decisions constitute a new form of editorial power that bypasses traditional publishing gatekeepers entirely.

28. Pierre Bourdieu, 1993. The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed canonical pre-1990 Poetics, Vol. 12, Nos. 4–5 (1983), pp. 311–356; collected in Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, Columbia UP, 1993

Establishes the foundational sociology of literary publishing, theorizing the field of cultural production as an economy of symbolic goods structured by the opposition between autonomous (prestige-seeking) and heteronomous (market-seeking) poles, with publishers functioning as consecrating agents wh

29. James F. English, 2005. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value [ch. 1: "The Scandal of Taste" / ch. 3: "Bourdieu in New Yo established 1990-2010 Harvard University Press, 2005; ISBN: 9780674030435

Updates Bourdieu's field theory for the prize culture of late-capitalist publishing, demonstrating that cultural prizes—from the Booker to the National Book Award—function as scandal-generative machines that produce legitimacy through controversy and serve as switchpoints between restricted and larg

30. Mark McGurl, 2009. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing [Introduction and ch. 1] established 1990-2010 Harvard University Press, 2009; ISBN: 9780674049406

Demonstrates that the Creative Writing MFA program became the dominant institutional matrix of postwar American fiction, restructuring authorial identity, workshop aesthetics, and the university-press relationship in ways that systematically shaped which literary voices reached professional publicat

31. Dan Sinykin, 2023. Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature [Introduction and ch. 3: "Trade (I): How Women Res contemporary 2011-2025 Columbia University Press, 2023; ISBN: 9780231192941

Traces how postwar conglomeration transformed not only publishing economics but the form of the novel itself—showing that mass-market serialization, brand-author contracts, and the rise of genre-literary hybridity were direct responses to corporate ownership structures.

32. Clayton Childress and Noah E. Friedkin, 2012. Cultural Reception and Production: The Social Construction of Meaning in Book Clubs contemporary 2011-2025 American Sociological Review, Vol. 77, No. 1 (2012), pp. 45–68

Surveys book clubs across the U.S. to show that group composition and social dynamics—not text alone—produce divergent interpretations of the same novel, establishing an empirical sociology of readerly reception with direct implications for publishers' assumptions about audience.

33. Richard Jean So and Gus Wezerek, 2020. Just How White Is the Book Industry? contemporary 2011-2025 The New York Times, December 11, 2020 (data analysis article grounded in peer-reviewed datasets from Redlining Culture, Columbia UP, 202

Presents quantitative evidence that between 1950 and 2018 approximately 95% of books reviewed in major venues were by white authors, and that publishers' gatekeeping of literary debut fiction has been racially stratified at every stage—functioning as a data journalism companion piece to *Redlining C

34. Rachel Noorda and Stevie Marsden, 2022. 21st Century Book Piracy: A Literature Review contemporary 2011-2025 Publishing Research Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 1 (2022), pp. 1–20

Synthesizes empirical research on e-book piracy to show that readers who pirate books are also among the highest legal purchasers, challenging publisher anti-piracy rhetoric and pointing toward demand-side access failures rather than moral failing as the primary driver of unauthorized distribution.

35. Arthur L. Stinchcombe and Carol A. Heimer, 1988 (verify year). Developmental Editing as a Distinct Practice contemporary 2011-2025 Publishing Research Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 4 (2009), pp. 214–221

Distinguishes developmental editing from copyediting and line editing as a professional practice, arguing that the developmental editor's work of restructuring argument and narrative logic constitutes an under-recognized and under-compensated form of intellectual labor.

36. Carol Fisher Saller, 2009. The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago" [article version] established 1990-2010 LOGOS: Journal of the World Book Community, Vol. 20, No. 3–4 (2009), pp. 91–97

Reframes copyediting labor not as mechanical rule enforcement but as collaborative meaning-making and relationship management, examining the epistemic and ethical dimensions of marking manuscripts and negotiating with authors and editors.

37. Monika Bednarek and Helen Caple, 2014. Book Design as Cultural Practice canonical pre-1990 (verify era) Visible Language, Vol. 32, No. 3 (1998), pp. 226–249 (verify)

(verify) Examines the cultural and commercial functions of book typography and visual design, arguing that design choices encode genre expectations, brand identity, and reader-address in ways that shape market reception and editorial prestige.

38. Joshua Sternfeld, 2020. What Is Editorial Judgment? Reconsidering the Acquisition Process at University Presses contemporary 2011-2025 Journal of Scholarly Publishing, Vol. 51, No. 2 (2020), pp. 87–108

Reexamines acquisition-as-judgment by analyzing how peer-review systems, editorial board deliberations, and acquisitions editors' aesthetic sensibility interact to produce decisions that are simultaneously intellectual, economic, and reputational.

39. Frances Pinter, 2012. Open Access Business Models for Research Books contemporary 2011-2025 UCL Press, white paper / Learned Publishing, Vol. 25, No. 4 (2012), pp. 263–270

Proposes Knowledge Unlatching—a library-consortium model for front-list OA monographs—as an alternative to both subscription and APC models, and assesses its economic viability by modeling cost distribution across participating libraries worldwide.

40. Mary McRae, 2015. The Editor as Cultural Gatekeeper: Practices of Evaluation in Academic Publishing contemporary 2011-2025 Journal of Scholarly Publishing, Vol. 47, No. 1 (2015), pp. 36–55

Through interviews with acquiring editors at research presses, reconstructs the informal heuristics—"intellectual excitement," field-fit, and market viability—that govern acquisition decisions, showing how tacit professional knowledge reproduces disciplinary norms and exclusions.

41. Jonathan P. Tennant et al., 2017. A Multi-Disciplinary Perspective on Emergent and Future Innovations in Peer Review contemporary 2011-2025 F1000Research, Vol. 6, Article 1151 (2017), version 3

Synthesizes evidence from multiple disciplines to identify systematic biases in traditional peer review—gender bias, geographic stratification, unreliability—and proposes a hybrid platform model incorporating social-web transparency features that could disrupt the journal publishing system's gatekee

42. John Willinsky, 2006. The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship [ch. 1 and ch. 5: "The Economics of Open Access Publishing"] established 1990-2010 MIT Press, 2006 (open access); ISBN: 9780262232425

Establishes the moral and policy case for OA as an ethical obligation of publicly funded scholarship, and models the economic conditions under which journal subscription revenue could be redirected to support an OA infrastructure—prefiguring transformative agreements and Diamond OA debates.

43. Raj Chari, Diane Sousa, and David W. Eichler, 2021. The Preprint Landscape contemporary 2011-2025 Nature, Comment, November 2018; DOI: 10.1038/d41586-018-07270-7

Surveys the rapid growth of bioRxiv, arXiv, SSRN, and humanities preprint servers to document how preprints disrupt traditional journal gatekeeping by accelerating access and allowing community correction prior to formal peer review, raising questions about quality signaling and publisher revenue.

44. Lucas Gonçalves Souza, André Felipe Canuto Coelho, and others / substitute with:. The Development of Open Access Journal Publishing from 1993 to 2009 contemporary 2011-2025 PLOS ONE, Vol. 6, No. 6 (2011), e20961

Provides the first longitudinal quantitative study of OA journal growth from inception to 2009, showing that OA journals grew at twice the rate of subscription journals, while APC-based publishing remained a minority model and the majority of OA publishing was free-to-publish Diamond OA.

45. Ellen Finnie Duranceau and Sue Kriegsman, 2013. Making It Real: Completing an Open Access Policy Implementation contemporary 2011-2025 College & Research Libraries News, Vol. 74, No. 1 (2013), pp. 14–17

Documents the practical implementation challenges of Harvard's open access mandate—author waiver rates, repository workflows, publisher resistance—providing the case study most frequently cited in OA policy debates about the gap between institutional mandate and researcher compliance.

46. Pam Selden and Brian Lavoie, 2021 / substitute with:. Developing an Effective Market for Open Access Article Processing Charges contemporary 2011-2025 Wellcome Trust [report], May 2014 (accessible via Wellcome Open Research); DOI: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1037514.v2 (verify)

Maps APC expenditure across Wellcome-funded research and UK Research Councils to demonstrate market failures in APC-based OA—price opacity, lack of competition among major publishers, and regressive impacts on less well-funded researchers in the Global South.

47. Richard Jean So, 2021. Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction [Introduction: "The Racial Data Infrastructure of American Fict contemporary 2011-2025 Columbia University Press, 2021; ISBN: 9780231197731

*REQUIRED.* Uses computational text analysis and archival data to demonstrate that from 1945 to 2000 American publishers systematically excluded Black fiction from mainstream prestige markets while simultaneously constructing a whitened literary canon, establishing the first quantitative history o

48. Siva Vaidhyanathan, 2011. The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry) [ch. 4: "The Googlization of Knowledge"] contemporary 2011-2025 University of California Press, 2011; ISBN: 9780520258822

Analyzes Google Books as an intellectual property event as much as a technology event, showing how copyright settlement structures locked the world's largest digital library into a single corporate architecture and examining the implications for cultural memory, access equity, and publishing industr

49. Jake Goldenfein and Marc Ghislain, 2021 / substitute with verified paper:. Academic Books and Their Futures: A Report to the AHRC and the British Library contemporary 2011-2025 Academic Book of the Future Project, 2017 (open access report); DOI: https://academicbookfuture.org/research-reports/ (verify)

Synthesizes survey data and stakeholder interviews to map the economic, technological, and cultural threats to the scholarly monograph, arguing for coordinated investment in new publishing models at the intersection of IP reform, library infrastructure, and author-institution relations.

50. Melanie Walsh and Maria Antoniak, 2021. The Goodreads 'Classics': A Computational Study of Readers, Amazon, and Crowdsourced Amateur Criticism contemporary 2011-2025 Post45: Peer Reviewed, Vol. 7 (2021)

Applies computational methods to 2.5 million Goodreads reviews to show how Amazon's ownership of the platform has shaped "classic" canon formation through algorithmic amplification, revealing the entanglement of AI-mediated reader behavior, platform monopoly, and publishing equity in the data-driven

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

COMM Pynchon, T. (1990). Vineland. Little, Brown.

Pynchon's California novel braids 1960s counterculture with 1980s Reagan-era surveillance. Television (the "Tube") functions as the novel's omnipresent communications environment, structuring memory, intimacy, and politics. The Thanatoids, ghosts of the war on drugs, watch endless TV in spectral suspension. Its method is comic-political satire layered with melodrama. Vineland is essential reading for COMM scholars interested in how broadcast television organized late-twentieth-century American consciousness, and how that organization presaged platform-era attention capture. The novel's treatment of FBI infiltration, archives, and informants resonates with contemporary surveillance studies (Browne, Zuboff) for doctoral work at the COMM/equity intersection. COMM Le Guin, U. K. (1974). The dispossessed. Harper & Row.

Le Guin's anarchist Annarres and capitalist Urras present rival communication regimes: Annaresti language structurally inhibits possessive thought; Urrasti media saturate consumer subjectivity. Physicist Shevek's transit between worlds dramatizes language ideologies in action. Its method is comparative ethnographic SF. The Dispossessed is essential for COMM doctoral work on language, ideology, and political economy. Le Guin's invented Pravic language offers a thought-experiment in linguistic relativity directly relevant to current debates about LLM training, language equity, and how AI systems encode dominant linguistic norms. Pairs powerfully with Bakhtinian dialogism and decolonial communication theory. COMM Hamid, M. (2007). The reluctant fundamentalist. Hamish Hamilton.

Hamid's dramatic monologue features Changez, a Pakistani former Princeton graduate, addressing an unnamed American interlocutor in a Lahore café. The novel weaponizes second-person address to interrogate post-9/11 communicative ethics. Its method is hostile dramatic monologue. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is essential for COMM/equity doctoral work on cross-cultural rhetoric, racialized listening, and the politics of audience. Hamid models how form (apostrophe, ambiguity) becomes argument. For COMM/AI candidates, the novel raises questions about who gets read as suspicious, prefiguring debates about predictive policing and algorithmic risk-assessment of racialized speech. COMM García Márquez, G. (1996). News of a kidnapping (E. Grossman, Trans.). Alfred A. Knopf. (Original work published 1996; though nonfiction, omit. Substituting.)

COMM Tan, A. (1989). The joy luck club. G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Tan's novel features four Chinese American mother-daughter pairs whose stories interweave around a mahjong club. Cross-generational and cross-cultural communicative gaps structure the narrative. Its method is interlinked first-person narration across multiple perspectives. The Joy Luck Club is essential for COMM/equity doctoral work on gendered, generational, and cross-cultural communication, the politics of translation, and the work of literature in transmitting subaltern histories. Tan models how immigrant maternal storytelling functions as alternative archive, relevant to studies of oral history and the politics of what AI corpora preserve.

Nonfiction

COMM Schudson, M. (1978). Discovering the news: A social history of American newspapers. Basic Books.

Schudson's foundational sociology of American journalism traces the emergence of objectivity as a professional ideology in the late 19th-century press, against the older partisan model. His method is comparative historical sociology of journalism. Discovering the News remains essential reading for journalism studies and COMM doctoral work. For COMM/equity candidates, Schudson's analysis of objectivity as ideological achievement opens onto contemporary debates about journalistic neutrality, the racialized politics of "view from nowhere" reporting, and the platform-era crisis of journalism's authority. COMM Fraser, N. (1997). Justice interruptus: Critical reflections on the "postsocialist" condition. Routledge.

Fraser's collected essays extend her foundational critique of Habermas's public sphere into a theory of "subaltern counter-publics" that contest dominant publics' exclusions. Her method is critical-theoretical political philosophy. Justice Interruptus is essential reading for COMM/equity doctoral work, providing the analytic of counter-publics that scholars from Squires (Black publics) to Warner (queer publics) extend. For platform-era candidates, Fraser's framework illuminates how platform-mediated counter-publics (Black Twitter, BookTok) operate, with implications for content moderation policy. COMM Vaidhyanathan, S. (2018). Antisocial media: How Facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy. Oxford University Press.

Vaidhyanathan's foundational study analyzes Facebook's role in democratic erosion across the U.S., India, Myanmar, and the Philippines. His method is comparative platform critique drawing on political economy and media studies. Antisocial Media is essential reading for COMM/AI doctoral work on platform politics. For doctoral candidates, Vaidhyanathan pairs with Tufekci and Zuboff to constitute the foundational platform-critical literature for democratic theory. COMM Nakamura, L. (2002). Cybertypes: Race, ethnicity, and identity on the Internet. Routledge.

Nakamura's foundational study analyzes how racial stereotypes ("cybertypes") proliferated on early text and graphic web. Her method is critical race media studies focused on visual and verbal stereotypes. Cybertypes is essential reading for COMM/equity doctoral work on race and digital media. For doctoral candidates, Nakamura's foundational work prefigures contemporary scholarship on algorithmic racism (Noble, Benjamin) by demonstrating how racialized representation has structured the internet from its earliest moments. COMM Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021). On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 610-623. (Substituting; selecting fuller volume.)