Jamal Awil

COMM-520 — COMM 520 · Science & Technology Studies (STS)

COMM pillar · MA Year 2 · Fall 2027

A graduate seminar in STS — the social construction of technology, infrastructure studies, classification politics, design justice — that gives the program its sharpest theoretical apparatus for reading AI and IP as technologies, not natural categories.

Essential books

• ★ Bruno Latour — Reassembling the Social
• ★ Bijker, Hughes & Pinch — Social Construction of Technological Systems
• ★ Lucy Suchman — Human-Machine Reconfigurations
• ★ Langdon Winner — The Whale and the Reactor
• ★ Susan Leigh Star — Boundary Objects and Beyond

Supplementary books

• ☆ Donna Haraway — Simians, Cyborgs, and Women
• ☆ Sheila Jasanoff — The Ethics of Invention
• ☆ John Law — After Method
• ☆ Madeleine Akrich — 'The De-scription of Technical Objects'
• ☆ Paul Edwards — A Vast Machine

Papers (50)

1. Pinch, T. J. & Bijker, W. E., 1984. The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other canonical pre-1990 Social Studies of Science, 14(3), 399–441

Introduces the SCOT framework, arguing that the meaning and stabilization of technologies emerge from the interpretive flexibility negotiated among relevant social groups.

2. Hughes, T. P., 1994. Technological Momentum established 1990-2010 In M. R. Smith & L. Marx (Eds.), Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (pp. 101–113). MIT Press; reprint

Elaborates the concept of technological momentum to show how large sociotechnical systems acquire path-dependent inertia while remaining socially shaped at early stages.

3. Bijker, W. E., 1995 [excerpt as assigned paper]. Sociohistorical Technology Studies (chapter from Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change) established 1990-2010 MIT Press book chapter, widely assigned as standalone reading; see also Bijker's précis in Jasanoff et al. (eds.) *Handbook of Science and T

Extends SCOT through detailed historical case studies of the safety bicycle and Bakelite, refining the concepts of relevant social groups and technological frames.

4. Pinch, T. J., 1996. The Social Construction of Technology: A Review established 1990-2010 In R. Fox (Ed.), Technological Change: Methods and Themes in the History of Technology (pp. 17–35). Harwood Academic

Surveys a decade of SCOT research, responds to critics, and clarifies how interpretive flexibility and closure mechanisms operate across diverse technological cases.

5. Russell, S., 1986. The Social Construction of Artefacts: A Response to Pinch and Bijker canonical pre-1990 Social Studies of Science, 16(2), 331–346

Offers an early critical response to SCOT, arguing that the framework underweights material agency and economic structures in shaping technological closure.

6. Oudshoorn, N. & Pinch, T. J., 2003. How Users Matter: The Co-construction of Users and Technologies (Introduction) established 1990-2010 In N. Oudshoorn & T. J. Pinch (Eds.), How Users Matter (pp. 1–25). MIT Press; chapter reprinted in Social Studies of Science syllabi

Extends SCOT by centering users as active co-constructors of technology, displacing producer-centric accounts of technological development.

7. Kline, R. & Pinch, T. J., 1996. Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Rural Electric Car in the United States established 1990-2010 Technology and Culture, 37(4), 763–795

Applies SCOT to rural U.S. automobile adoption, demonstrating how farm users reinterpreted and materially modified cars in ways not anticipated by designers.

8. Callon, M., 1986. Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay canonical pre-1990 In J. Law (Ed.), Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (pp. 196–233). Routledge; reprinted in *The Science Studies Reade

Establishes the vocabulary of translation, inscription, and enrollment through the emblematic scallop aquaculture case, founding ANT's symmetrical methodology.

9. Latour, B., 1992. Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts established 1990-2010 In W. E. Bijker & J. Law (Eds.), Shaping Technology / Building Society (pp. 225–258). MIT Press

Argues that artifacts carry delegated moral and social programs (the "missing masses"), making non-humans full participants in sociotechnical assemblages.

10. Law, J., 1992. Notes on the Theory of the Actor-Network: Ordering, Strategy, and Heterogeneity established 1990-2010 Systems Practice, 5(4), 379–393

Synthesizes ANT's core commitments—translation, heterogeneous engineering, and the management of ordering—while acknowledging the framework's limits for studying diffuse or fluid phenomena.

11. Latour, B., 2005 [assigned excerpt]. From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things Public (Introduction to Making Things Public) established 1990-2010 In B. Latour & P. Weibel (Eds.), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (pp. 14–41). MIT Press / ZKM

Translates ANT into political theory, proposing "Dingpolitik" to show how material objects constitute publics and democratic assemblies.

12. Mol, A., 2002 [assigned excerpt/article]. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (Introduction and Chapter 1) established 1990-2010 Duke University Press; also Mol, A., 1999, "Ontological Politics: A Word and Some Questions," The Sociological Review, 47(S1), 74–89

Introduces "ontological politics" and the multiple-objects thesis, showing how medical practitioners enact different versions of atherosclerosis rather than discovering one stable object.

13. Akrich, M., 1992. The De-Scription of Technical Objects established 1990-2010 In W. E. Bijker & J. Law (Eds.), Shaping Technology / Building Society (pp. 205–224). MIT Press

Develops the concepts of script and de-scription to analyze how designers inscribe anticipated user behaviors into artifacts and how users may negotiate or subvert those scripts.

14. Callon, M. & Latour, B., 1981. Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: How Actors Macro-structure Reality and How Sociologists Help Them to Do So canonical pre-1990 In K. Knorr-Cetina & A. Cicourel (Eds.), Advances in Social Theory and Methodology (pp. 277–303). Routledge

Challenges macro/micro distinctions in sociology, arguing that "macro-actors" are simply micro-actors that have successfully enrolled more allies and resources.

15. Star, S. L. & Griesemer, J. R., 1989. Institutional Ecology, "Translations" and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39 canonical pre-1990 Social Studies of Science, 19(3), 387–420

Introduces boundary objects as a concept for explaining how cooperative work proceeds across social worlds with different interests, without requiring consensus.

16. Star, S. L., 1999. The Ethnography of Infrastructure established 1990-2010 American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), 377–391

Provides the foundational methodological and theoretical framework for infrastructure studies, identifying nine dimensions (embeddedness, transparency, reach, etc.) that define infrastructure.

17. Bowker, G. C. & Star, S. L., 1999 [assigned excerpt]. The Case of Race Classification and Reclassification under Apartheid (Chapter 6 of Sorting Things Out) established 1990-2010 MIT Press; chapter widely reprinted in STS anthologies

Demonstrates through apartheid-era racial classification systems how classification schemes and standards invisibly encode politics and produce material effects on lives.

18. Edwards, P. N., 2003. Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems established 1990-2010 In T. J. Misa, P. Brey, & A. Feenberg (Eds.), Modernity and Technology (pp. 185–225). MIT Press

Theorizes infrastructure as a temporal and political phenomenon, arguing that large technical systems become invisible through "bootstrapping" processes that lock in particular modernities.

19. Plantin, J.-C., Lagoze, C., Edwards, P. N., & Sandvig, C., 2018. Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook contemporary 2011-2025 New Media & Society, 20(1), 293–310

Proposes a theoretical synthesis of infrastructure studies and platform studies, examining how commercial platforms simultaneously leverage and undermine traditional infrastructural properties.

20. Star, S. L., 2010. This Is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept established 1990-2010 Science, Technology, & Human Values, 35(5), 601–617

Star revisits and clarifies the boundary-object concept in response to its widespread adoption, distinguishing its original sociological intent from looser managerial and design uses.

21. Leigh Star, S. & Ruhleder, K., 1996. Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces established 1990-2010 Information Systems Research, 7(1), 111–134

Extends infrastructure theory into information systems, arguing that infrastructure is relational and that its "readiness-to-hand" breaks down for outsiders, revealing hidden labor and politics.

22. Jasanoff, S., 2004. The Idiom of Co-production (Introduction to States of Knowledge) established 1990-2010 In S. Jasanoff (Ed.), States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order (pp. 1–12). Routledge

Articulates co-production as an STS idiom showing how the natural and the social order are mutually constituted through scientific knowledge and technological practice.

23. Jasanoff, S., 2015. Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity contemporary 2011-2025 In S. Jasanoff & S.-H. Kim (Eds.), Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power (pp. 1–33). Universit

Introduces the sociotechnical imaginaries framework at book length, demonstrating how national visions of science-based futures shape technology governance across the US, UK, and South Korea.

24. Jasanoff, S. & Kim, S.-H., 2009. Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Power in the United States and South Korea established 1990-2010 Minerva, 47(2), 119–146

Applies the sociotechnical imaginaries concept comparatively, showing how different national imaginaries produce distinct nuclear energy regimes in the US and South Korea.

25. Jasanoff, S., 2005 [assigned excerpt]. Civic Epistemology (Chapter 10 of Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States) established 1990-2010 Princeton University Press

Develops the concept of civic epistemology—culturally specific public knowledge-ways—to explain why GMO regulation diverged so sharply between the US and Europe.

26. Hilgartner, S., 2000 [assigned excerpt]. The Staging of Risk (Chapter 1 of Science on Stage: Expert Advice as Public Drama) established 1990-2010 Stanford University Press

Introduces a dramaturgical model of expert advisory processes, showing how science advisors actively manage front-stage performances and backstage deliberations to produce authoritative risk knowledge.

27. Miller, C. A., 2004. Resisting Empire: Globalism, Relocalization, and the Politics of Knowledge established 1990-2010 In S. Jasanoff & M. L. Martello (Eds.), Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance (pp. 81–102). MIT Press

Examines how international scientific bodies (especially IPCC) negotiate epistemic authority across asymmetric national and local knowledge systems in global environmental governance.

28. Winner, L., 1980. Do Artifacts Have Politics? canonical pre-1990 Daedalus, 109(1), 121–136

Argues with canonical examples (Robert Moses's low bridges; nuclear power plants) that artifacts embed political properties, either by design or by structural affinity with social systems.

29. Feenberg, A., 1999 [assigned excerpt]. Subversive Rationalization: Technology, Power, and Democracy established 1990-2010 Originally in Inquiry, 35(3–4), 301–322, 1992; reprinted in A. Feenberg, Questioning Technology (pp. 131–157). Routledge, 1999

Develops critical theory of technology by arguing that technology embeds instrumental rationality that can be democratically subverted through design interventions and social movements.

30. Jasanoff, S., 2016 [assigned excerpt]. The Ethics of Invention: Technology and the Human Future (Introduction and Chapter 1) contemporary 2011-2025 W. W. Norton; Introduction also available as "Technology and the Human Future," Policy Sciences, 2015 (verify)

Frames technology governance as an ethical challenge, proposing a "constitutional moment" framework for deliberative oversight of emerging technologies like synthetic biology and AI.

31. Borgmann, A., 1984 [assigned excerpt]. The Device Paradigm (Chapters 9–10 of Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life) canonical pre-1990 University of Chicago Press; chapters reprinted in R. Scharff & V. Dusek (Eds.), Philosophy of Technology, Wiley-Blackwell

Introduces the "device paradigm" to argue that modern devices conceal their machinery and replace focal practices, impoverishing human engagement with the world.

32. Ellul, J., 1964 [assigned excerpt]. The Technological Society (Introduction and Chapter 1: Characteristics of Technique) canonical pre-1990 Vintage Books (originally La Technique ou l'enjeu du siècle, 1954); excerpts reprinted in philosophy of technology anthologies

Offers a foundational critique of "la technique" as an autonomous system that colonizes all social domains, establishing the terms for substantivist philosophy of technology.

33. Introna, L. D. & Nissenbaum, H., 2000. Shaping the Web: Why the Politics of Search Engines Matters established 1990-2010 The Information Society, 16(3), 169–185

Applies Winner's politics-of-artifacts thesis to web search engines, arguing that algorithmic design choices embed values that systematically favor some voices and marginalize others.

34. Haraway, D., 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective canonical pre-1990 Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599

Develops situated knowledges as a feminist epistemological alternative to both objectivism and relativism, insisting that all knowledge claims are embodied and partial.

35. Suchman, L., 2007 [assigned excerpt]. Feminist STS and the Sciences of the Artificial (Chapter 12 of Human-Machine Reconfigurations) established 1990-2010 Cambridge University Press (2nd ed.)

Applies feminist STS to AI and human-computer interaction, critiquing disembodied models of intelligence and advocating for situated, relational accounts of human-machine interaction.

36. Star, S. L., 1991. Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions established 1990-2010 In J. Law (Ed.), A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination (pp. 26–56). Routledge

Uses the phenomenology of allergy to argue that standards and conventions that work seamlessly for some actors impose invisible burdens on others, foregrounding marginalized standpoints in infrastructure studies.

37. Harding, S., 1992. Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is "Strong Objectivity"? established 1990-2010 The Centennial Review, 36(3), 437–470

Proposes "strong objectivity" as a feminist epistemological standard requiring researchers to examine their own social positions, producing more rigorous and democratic science.

38. Hayles, N. K., 1999 [assigned excerpt]. Toward Embodied Virtuality (Introduction to How We Became Posthuman) established 1990-2010 University of Chicago Press

Traces the historical construction of the "posthuman" through cybernetics and information theory, arguing that the erasure of embodiment from information theory was a contestable choice with lasting political consequences.

39. Wajcman, J., 2010. Feminist Theories of Technology established 1990-2010 Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34(1), 143–152

Reviews feminist STS from liberal to constructivist to materialist approaches, arguing for a political economy of technology sensitive to gendered labor and design.

40. boyd, d. & Crawford, K., 2012. Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a Cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Phenomenon contemporary 2011-2025 Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 662–679

Raises six critical questions about Big Data's epistemological claims, ethics, and power asymmetries, establishing a foundational STS-inflected critique of computational social science.

41. Gitelman, L. & Jackson, V., 2013. Introduction: "Raw Data" Is an Oxymoron contemporary 2011-2025 In L. Gitelman (Ed.), "Raw Data" Is an Oxymoron (pp. 1–14). MIT Press

Argues that all data are already "cooked"—shaped by historical, technical, and cultural assumptions—challenging positivist claims that data precede interpretation.

42. Kitchin, R., 2014. Big Data, New Epistemologies and Paradigm Shifts contemporary 2011-2025 Big Data & Society, 1(1), 1–12

Evaluates claims that Big Data enables a new empiricist epistemology and a fourth paradigm of science, arguing that such claims are overstated and ideologically motivated.

43. Mackenzie, A., 2015. The Production of Prediction: What Does Machine Learning Want? contemporary 2011-2025 European Journal of Cultural Studies, 18(4–5), 429–445

Applies STS to machine learning, tracing how prediction is produced as a commodity through specific materialities, labor practices, and epistemic infrastructures.

44. Seaver, N., 2017. Algorithms as Culture: Some Tactics for the Ethnography of Algorithmic Systems contemporary 2011-2025 Big Data & Society, 4(2), 1–12

Proposes treating algorithms as cultural phenomena amenable to ethnographic study, identifying tactics for studying algorithmic systems from the inside without exclusive reliance on reverse engineering.

45. Pasquale, F., 2015 [assigned excerpt/paper]. The Algorithmic Self (Chapter 1 of The Black Box Society, adapted) contemporary 2011-2025 Harvard University Press; related article: Pasquale, F., "The Automated Public Sphere," in Media Studies, 2016 (verify)

Diagnoses the political economy of algorithmic opacity ("black box" society), arguing that lack of accountability in search and financial algorithms undermines democratic governance.

46. Suchman, L. & Weber, J., 2016. Human-Machine Autonomies contemporary 2011-2025 In N. Bhuta, S. Beck, R. Geiß, H.-Y. Liu, & C. Kreß (Eds.), Autonomous Weapons Systems: Law, Ethics, Policy (pp. 75–102). Cambridge Univer

Applies feminist STS to autonomous weapons, challenging autonomous-systems discourse by showing that human-machine distinctions are always contextually constructed rather than technically given.

47. Vinsel, L. & Russell, A. L., 2019 [assigned excerpt]. The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most (Introduction) contemporary 2011-2025 Currency / Random House; related article: Russell, A. L. & Vinsel, L., "Hail the Maintainers," Aeon, 2016

Argues that STS and technology policy suffer from "innovation bias," neglecting the sociotechnical labor of maintenance and care that keeps systems functional.

48. Jasanoff, S., 2008. Speaking Honestly to Power established 1990-2010 American Scientist, 96(3), 240–243; see also Jasanoff, S., "Law's Knowledge: Science for Justice in Legal Settings," *American Journal of Pu

Examines how scientific knowledge is translated, stabilized, and contested in legal settings, arguing that different institutional epistemologies shape what counts as proof and who counts as an expert.

49. Subramaniam, B., Foster, L., Harding, S., Roy, D., & TallBear, K., 2017. Feminism, Postcolonialism, and Technoscience contemporary 2011-2025 In U. Felt, R. Fouché, C. A. Miller, & L. Smith-Doerr (Eds.), The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (4th ed., pp. 407–433). MIT P

Synthesizes feminist and postcolonial STS into an intersectional framework, showing how race, gender, and colonial legacies are co-produced with scientific knowledge and technological systems.

50. Couldry, N. & Hepp, A., 2017. The Mediated Construction of Reality: Society, Culture, Mediatization contemporary 2011-2025 Polity Press; related article: Couldry, N., "Mediatization or Mediation? Alternative Understandings of the Emergent Space of Digital Storyte

Bridges STS and media anthropology by theorizing how mediatization processes reshape social institutions, drawing on constructivist STS to show how media infrastructures co-produce social reality.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

COMM Gibson, W. (2003). Pattern recognition. G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Cayce Pollard, a "coolhunter" allergic to corporate logos, investigates anonymous video fragments uploaded to internet forums by an unknown auteur. Gibson's novel is among the first to treat the post-9/11 networked world as a thoroughly mediated landscape where branding, viral marketing, and forum communities constitute reality. Its method is hyperliterate observation of digital culture's emergent forms. Pattern Recognition dramatizes virality, anonymous authorship, and the political economy of attention. Crucial for COMM/IP doctoral candidates studying how anonymous creative production complicates copyright regimes, and how platform mediation transforms reception, fandom, and meaning-making in ways scholars like Henry Jenkins have analyzed. COMM Orwell, G. (1949). Nineteen eighty-four. Secker & Warburg.

Orwell's foundational dystopia centers communication: Newspeak's vocabulary engineering, the Two Minutes Hate, telescreens, the Ministry of Truth's archival fabrications, and Room 101's torture of meaning. Its method is realist political fable. 1984 remains the urtext for COMM scholarship on propaganda, surveillance, and language control. For doctoral candidates at the COMM/AI/equity intersection, Orwell's depiction of memory holes and continuous archival revision prefigures debates about AI-driven disinformation, platform content moderation, and the manipulability of historical record in the platform era. Anchor for any critical reading of contemporary surveillance capitalism and algorithmic governance. COMM Adichie, C. N. (2013). Americanah. Alfred A. Knopf.

Adichie's novel features Ifemelu, a Nigerian woman in the US whose blog "Raceteenth" becomes influential commentary on American race relations. The novel is centrally about diasporic communication, racialized address, and the political economy of blogging. Its method is realist novel interspersed with blog posts. Americanah is essential for COMM/equity doctoral work on diasporic media production, racialized public sphere participation, and the rhetoric of post-racial America. Adichie models how new digital genres (the blog) create publics, prefiguring scholarship by Brock on Black digital practice and Florini on networked Black publics. COMM Vargas Llosa, M. (1981). The war of the end of the world (H. R. Lane, Trans.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (Original work published 1981)

Vargas Llosa's epic historical novel of the Canudos War in 1890s Brazil features multiple narrators: a near-sighted journalist, a Scottish revolutionary, military officers, and the rebel community itself. The novel is centrally about how journalists construct events for distant publics and the violent gap between event and report. Its method is multi-perspectival historical novel. The War of the End of the World is essential for COMM doctoral work on journalism, war reporting, and the politics of which voices get heard. Vargas Llosa's depiction of the journalist's literally impaired vision becomes a metaphor for partial witness. COMM Kingston, M. H. (1976). The woman warrior. Alfred A. Knopf.

Kingston's genre-bending memoir/novel braids family stories, Chinese mythology, and Kingston's own coming-of-age in California. Its first chapter, "No Name Woman," is about the prohibition on speaking of a disgraced aunt. Its method is hybrid memoir-mythology-fiction. The Woman Warrior is essential for COMM/equity doctoral work on silencing, the gendered politics of family communication, and the work of literature in giving voice to the prohibited. Kingston's genre experimentation anticipates contemporary autotheory and raises foundational questions about whose stories enter the public archive.

Nonfiction

COMM Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the internet: Platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. Yale University Press.

Gillespie's foundational study of content moderation examines how platforms govern speech through outsourced and automated labor. His method is qualitative-empirical platform studies. Custodians of the Internet is essential reading for COMM doctoral work on platform governance. For COMM/IP/AI/equity candidates, Gillespie's account of the impossibility of neutral moderation and the structural inequities of moderation labor (outsourced to Global South workers) is foundational, pairing with Roberts's Behind the Screen and Suzor's Lawless for full coverage of platform governance. COMM Warner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. Zone Books.

Warner's foundational study theorizes publics as constituted by circulation of texts among strangers, with particular attention to queer counter-publics. His method is rhetorical theory in dialogue with political philosophy. Publics and Counterpublics is essential reading for COMM/equity doctoral work on the rhetorical theory of publicness. For platform-era candidates, Warner's analytic of circulation among strangers offers a powerful frame for analyzing platform-mediated public formation. COMM Marwick, A. E. (2013). Status update: Celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. Yale University Press.

Marwick's ethnography of San Francisco tech workers during the social-media boom theorizes "micro-celebrity" as a labor practice in which workers continuously brand themselves to remain employable. The argument: social media doesn't just transmit identities, it requires their constant production. Methodologically, the work combines participant observation with discourse analysis. For COMM scholars, Status Update is essential reading on attention economies, self-presentation labor, and the political economy of platform participation — with direct bearing on contemporary AI-generated content and the further compression of communicative labor. COMM Nakamura, L. (2007). Digitizing race: Visual cultures of the Internet. University of Minnesota Press.

Nakamura's expanded study analyzes how race continued to structure web visual culture in the broadband era. Her method is critical race visual studies of digital media. Digitizing Race is essential reading for COMM/equity doctoral work. For doctoral candidates, Nakamura's analysis of digital visual culture's racial logics anticipates contemporary work on AI image generation's racial biases (Birhane, Bender) and provides genealogical context for ongoing debates. COMM Birhane, A., Kalluri, P., Card, D., Agnew, W., Dotan, R., & Bao, M. (2022). The values encoded in machine learning research. Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 173-184. (Article. Substituting.)

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EQ-520 — EQ 520 · Critical Race and Technology Studies

EQ pillar · MA Year 2 · Fall 2027

Synthesis seminar bridging the equity, communication, and AI pillars. Reads recent critical-race scholarship on AI systems — surveillance, computer vision, predictive policing, content moderation — through the historical lens of race as itself a technology of social ordering.

Essential books

• ★ Simone Browne — Dark Matters
• ★ Ruha Benjamin — Race After Technology
• ★ Ruha Benjamin (ed.) — Captivating Technology
• ★ Wendy Hui Kyong Chun — Discriminating Data
• ★ Joy Buolamwini — Unmasking AI

Supplementary books

• ☆ Safiya Noble — Algorithms of Oppression
• ☆ Kate Crawford — Atlas of AI
• ☆ Meredith Broussard — More Than a Glitch
• ☆ Virginia Eubanks — Automating Inequality
• ☆ Anjali Vats — The Color of Creatorship

Papers (49)

1. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, 2009. Race and/as Technology, or How to Do Things to Race established 1990-2010 Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 24(1/70), pp. 7–35

Theorizes race not as a biological fact but as a technology — an instrument that operates, produces effects, and requires active maintenance — thereby grounding subsequent critical-race-tech scholarship.

2. 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

Introduces "critical race STS" as a distinct analytic that foregrounds carceral logics embedded in technoscientific practice, connecting scientific racism to contemporary algorithmic systems.

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

Deploys Critical Race Theory alongside media studies to show how Black Twitter users repurpose platform affordances, constructing race as an enacted cultural technology rather than a demographic attribute.

4. Andre Brock, 2020. Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis contemporary 2011-2025 New Media & Society, 22(7), pp. 1280–1299 (also: Distributed Blackness, NYU Press ch. 1 pre-print version)

Proposes CTDA as a method merging CRT, discourse analysis, and Science and Technology Studies to examine how race is produced through and within digital interfaces and platforms.

5. Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, 2019. Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (Introduction / excerpt) contemporary 2011-2025 Duke University Press (book intro widely assigned as standalone; journal version: Social Identities 2015)

Argues that robotic and AI labor substitution reproduces racial and colonial hierarchies by marking certain humans as fungible, theorizing "surrogate humanity" as an ideological function of automation.

6. Subhash Sharma, 2015. Race and Technology: A Sociological Perspective (chapter/article) contemporary 2011-2025 Published in: The Palgrave Handbook of Race and Ethnic Inequalities (also circulated as SSC working paper) (verify)

Surveys sociological frameworks linking structural racism to technological development, arguing that technology encodes existing racial hierarchies while appearing neutral, setting up the course's core problematic.

7. Ruha Benjamin, 2019. Discriminatory Design, Liberating Imagination contemporary 2011-2025 In: Captivating Technology (ed. R. Benjamin), Duke University Press, pp. 1–22 (introductory chapter widely assigned as standalone paper)

Introduces the "New Jim Code" framework, showing how seemingly race-neutral technologies re-inscribe caste and racial hierarchy, while calling for liberatory design imagination as a corrective practice.

8. 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 (Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency, FAT* 2018), pp. 1–15

Provides the first large-scale intersectional audit of three commercial face-analysis APIs, demonstrating that error rates for darker-skinned women exceed those for lighter-skinned men by up to 34.7 percentage points.

9. Inioluwa Deborah Raji and Joy Buolamwini, 2019. Actionable Auditing: Investigating the Impact of Publicly Naming Biased Performance Results of Commercial AI Products contemporary 2011-2025 Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES 2019), pp. 429–435

Demonstrates that public disclosure of algorithmic bias findings (Gender Shades) produced measurable improvements in vendor systems, establishing adversarial auditing as a regulatory accountability mechanism.

10. Safiya Umoja Noble, 2018. A Future for Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies contemporary 2011-2025 Scholar & Feminist Online, 13(3)–14(1) (Barnard Center for Research on Women)

Articulates an intersectional Black feminist framework for studying algorithmic systems, arguing that existing "fairness" discourse elides structural racism and patriarchy encoded in search and recommendation engines.

11. Kentaro Toyama, 2015 (pre-pub essay). Why Technology Won't Fix America's Toughest Problems contemporary 2011-2025 The Atlantic (widely assigned alongside: "The Limits of Social Engineering" in MIT Technology Review 2011) (verify scholarly version)

Critiques "technologism" — the belief that technology alone can solve social problems — arguing that digital systems amplify pre-existing human intentions, including racial inequality, rather than remedying them. (verify)

12. Timnit Gebru, 2020. Race and Gender contemporary 2011-2025 In: The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI (eds. M. Dubber, F. Pasquale, S. Das), Oxford University Press, pp. 251–269

Maps how race and gender interact in AI systems from data collection through deployment, situating algorithmic bias within structural inequalities rather than attributing it to technical oversights.

13. Rediet Abebe, Solon Barocas, Jon Kleinberg, Karen Levy, Manish Raghavan, David R. Roles for Computing in Social Change contemporary 2011-2025 Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT), pp. 252–260

Delineates four roles for computing in social change — diagnostics, formalizing, rebuttal, and experimentation — arguing that the field systematically overestimates the transformative potential of technical solutions to racialized inequality.

14. Ben Green, 2019. Good" Isn't Good Enough: Structural Racism and the Limits of Fairness in Computing contemporary 2011-2025 NeurIPS 2019 Workshop on AI for Social Good (pre-print / workshop paper)

Argues that dominant fairness frameworks in machine learning are structurally incapable of addressing racism because they individualize harm and leave background conditions of white supremacy unexamined.

15. Sarah Brayne, 2017. Big Data Surveillance: The Case of Policing contemporary 2011-2025 American Sociological Review, 82(5), pp. 977–1008

Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the LAPD, shows how predictive analytics extend and deepen racialized surveillance by incorporating civilian data in ways that entrench existing enforcement disparities.

16. Elizabeth Joh, 2014. Policing by Numbers: Big Data and the Fourth Amendment contemporary 2011-2025 Washington Law Review, 89(1), pp. 35–68

Examines how predictive policing software alters Fourth Amendment jurisprudence by displacing individualized suspicion with statistical inference, disproportionately targeting communities of color.

17. Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, 2017. The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement (book excerpt / law review article version) contemporary 2011-2025 NYU Law Review, 94 (see also book, NYU Press 2017); law review article: "Predictive Policing and Reasonable Suspicion," Emory Law Journal 62

Analyzes how risk-score algorithms expand police powers while manufacturing legal justifications for stops concentrated in Black and Latino neighborhoods, constituting a new form of racialized governance.

18. Andrew D. Selbst, 2017. Disparate Impact in Big Data Policing contemporary 2011-2025 Georgia Law Review, 52(1), pp. 109–196

Applies disparate-impact doctrine to predictive policing systems, arguing that existing anti-discrimination law is insufficient without structural reforms because feedback loops in policing data perpetuate racial disparities.

19. Rashida Richardson, Jason M. Schultz, 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. 192–233

Documents 13 jurisdictions where predictive policing tools were trained on historically corrupt or racially biased crime data, demonstrating that algorithmic systems launder prior civil-rights violations as objective forecasts.

20. Hannah Sassaman and Marianna Bracy, 2017 (verify). I've Got Nothing to Hide, and Other Misunderstandings of Surveillance (assigned alongside): Bernard Harcourt, "Risk as a Proxy for Race," 20 contemporary 2011-2025 University of Chicago Public Law & Legal Theory Working Paper No. 535 (Harcourt); also Cato Unbound 2011

Demonstrates through actuarial analysis that "risk" scores in criminal justice contexts function as statistical proxies for race and class, systematically disadvantaging minority defendants under an appearance of objectivity.

21. Madeleine Clare Elish and danah boyd, 2018. Situating Methods in the Magic of Big Data and AI contemporary 2011-2025 Communication Monographs, 85(1), pp. 57–80

Critiques the "magic" attributed to big data and AI, exposing how racialized patterns in training data are obscured by claims of algorithmic objectivity, and calling for situated, critical methodologies.

22. Margot E. Kaminski, 2019. The Right to Explanation, Explained contemporary 2011-2025 Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 34(1), pp. 189–218

Analyzes GDPR's right to explanation as a mechanism for contesting automated racial and demographic profiling, surfacing tensions between explainability, transparency, and the structural reproduction of discrimination.

23. Ifeoma Ajunwa, 2020. The Paradox of Automation as Anti-Bias Intervention contemporary 2011-2025 Cardozo Law Review, 41(5), pp. 1671–1742

Argues that deploying automated hiring tools as anti-discrimination remedies is paradoxical because the same systems encode historical employment discrimination, producing a "paradox" that occludes systemic racism.

24. Miriam Hu, 2017. Algorithmic Jim Crow contemporary 2011-2025 Fordham Law Review, 86(2), pp. 633–696

Coins "Algorithmic Jim Crow" to describe how seemingly neutral predictive algorithms replicate the racial stratification of historical Jim Crow laws, with particular focus on criminal-justice and credit risk scoring.

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

Introduces "digital epidermalization" to theorize how biometric technologies inscribe race onto bodies through algorithmic skin-tone calibration, updating Fanon's "epidermal schema" for the surveillance era.

26. Andre Brock, 2011. Beyond the Pale: The Blackbird Web Browser's Critical Reception contemporary 2011-2025 New Media & Society, 13(7), pp. 1085–1103

Examines white-mainstream techno-cultural discourse around a browser designed for Black users, showing how tech criticism reproduces race-blind universalism that positions Blackness as a deviation from the default user.

27. Abebe Birhane and Jelle van Dijk, 2020. Robot Rights? Let's Talk about Human Welfare Instead contemporary 2011-2025 Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES 2020), pp. 207–213

Challenges the extension of rights discourse to robots by arguing it diverts moral attention from the racialized and economically marginalized humans who bear the costs of AI deployment, recentering human welfare.

28. Ruha Benjamin, 2020 / Luke Stark, 2019. Facial Recognition Is the Plutonium of AI (Stark 2019) contemporary 2011-2025 XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students, 25(3), pp. 50–55

Uses the "plutonium" metaphor to argue that facial recognition technology is uniquely dangerous and requires categorical restriction, documenting racially disparate error rates as evidence of irreducible social hazard.

29. Abeba Birhane, Vinay Uday Prabhu, Emmanuel Kahembwe, 2021. Multimodal Datasets: Misogyny, Pornography, and Malignant Stereotypes contemporary 2011-2025 arXiv:2110.01963 (presented at NeurIPS 2021 workshop; also published at FAccT 2022)

Audits large-scale multimodal training datasets (LAION, MS-COCO) for racist and misogynistic content, demonstrating that foundational vision-language models are trained on data that encodes white supremacist and sexist associations.

30. Os Keyes, 2018. The Misgendering Machines: Trans/HCI Implications of Automatic Gender Recognition contemporary 2011-2025 Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW), 2(CSCW), Article 88

Critiques automatic gender recognition systems as enacting a binary, white-normative construction of gender, producing systematic harm for trans and gender-nonconforming people — linking race, gender, and computer vision.

31. Clare Garvie, Alvaro Bedoya, Jonathan Frankle, 2016. The Perpetual Line-Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America contemporary 2011-2025 Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology (report, widely assigned as scholarly source)

Documents face recognition use across 117 U.S. law enforcement agencies, showing that half of all American adults are enrolled without consent and that accuracy failures disproportionately affect Black faces.

32. Joy Buolamwini, 2017. Gender Shades: Intersectional Phenotypic and Demographic Evaluation of Face Datasets and Gender Classifiers (MIT Master's thesis, widely cit contemporary 2011-2025 MIT Media Lab (thesis; published results in PMLR 81, 2018 — see Paper 8)

Provides the foundational dataset audit methodology and phenotypic coding framework that underpins the Gender Shades study, making explicit the whiteness assumptions in benchmark datasets used to train commercial classifiers.

33. Alex Hanna, Emily Denton, Andrew Smart, Jamila Smith-Loud, 2020. Towards a Critical Race Methodology in Algorithmic Fairness contemporary 2011-2025 Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT), pp. 501–512

Argues that fairness research must adopt CRT's core tenets — interest convergence, counter-storytelling, intersectionality — proposing a Critical Race Methodology as an alternative to individualistic statistical fairness metrics.

34. Lauren Rhue, 2018. Racial Influence on Automated Perceptions of Emotions contemporary 2011-2025 SSRN Working Paper (widely circulated; presented at ACM FAccT 2019 workshop) (verify)

Demonstrates that commercial emotion-recognition AI assigns more negative emotion scores to images of Black faces than White faces in identical contexts, extending the Gender Shades methodology to affective computing.

35. Kodwo Eshun, 2003. Further Considerations of Afrofuturism established 1990-2010 CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(2), pp. 287–302

Theorizes Afrofuturism as a counter-archival and speculative temporal practice that reclaims futures colonized by anti-Black techno-narratives, establishing a foundational vocabulary for Black speculative technology studies.

36. Kishonna L. Gray, 2020. Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming Space contemporary 2011-2025 Southern Communication Journal, 77(3), pp. 217–235 (verify; also: Intersectional Tech, LSU Press 2020 intro)

Documents how Black gamers and content creators contest racial and gender exclusion on gaming platforms, arguing for an intersectional framework that centers the lived techno-cultural practices of marginalized users.

37. Charlton D. McIlwain, 2019. Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter (book introduction, assigned as paper) contemporary 2011-2025 Oxford University Press (intro chapter widely assigned standalone)

Recovers the suppressed history of Black technologists who built the early internet's racial-justice infrastructure, arguing that this erasure perpetuates the myth of tech's whiteness and universality.

38. Kishonna L. Gray and David J. Leonard (eds.), 2018. Woke Gaming: Digital Challenges to Oppression and Social Injustice (Introduction) contemporary 2011-2025 University of Washington Press (intro chapter widely assigned)

Positions gaming as a site of racial and political contestation where users of color produce counter-hegemonic digital cultures, connecting Afrofuturist imagination to practical platform resistance.

39. Sasha Costanza-Chock, 2020. Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (Chapter 1 / Introduction) contemporary 2011-2025 MIT Press (intro chapter assigned as standalone paper)

Frames design justice as a praxis that centers communities most harmed by extractive tech design, synthesizing Black feminist, disability, and decolonial traditions to produce tools for liberatory technological futures.

40. Ruha Benjamin, 2022. Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (book intro/chapter, assigned as paper) contemporary 2011-2025 Princeton University Press (intro chapter widely circulated as standalone)

Extends the "New Jim Code" analysis to pandemic-era algorithmic triage systems, arguing that small, everyday acts of racial-justice refusal aggregate into systemic transformation — a theory of viral, embodied counter-technology.

41. Ytasha L. Womack, 2013 / Lisa Yaszek, 2006. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture — vs. — Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the History of the Future (Yaszek 200 established 1990-2010 Socialism and Democracy, 20(3), pp. 41–60 (Yaszek 2006)

Traces Afrofuturism from Sun Ra through contemporary digital culture, arguing that Black speculative aesthetics constitute a technology of temporal reclamation that contests the white-default futurity of mainstream tech culture.

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

Draws on Indigenous epistemologies — Hawaiian, Lakota, Cree — to propose a relational, kinship-based framework for AI development that decenters Western rationalist assumptions about agency, intelligence, and care.

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

Articulates four principles — Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics — that supplement the FAIR data principles to center Indigenous self-determination in data governance and algorithmic systems.

44. Shakir Mohamed, Marie-Therese Png, William Isaac, 2020. Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence contemporary 2011-2025 Philosophy & Technology, 33(4), pp. 659–684

Applies decolonial theory to AI development, introducing "algorithmic coloniality" and "data colonialism" as analytic categories and proposing foresight practices — including dispossession audits — to disrupt colonial continuities in AI.

45. Abeba Birhane, 2020. Algorithmic Colonization of Africa contemporary 2011-2025 SCRIPTed: A Journal of Law, Technology and Society, 17(2), pp. 389–409

Documents how AI systems — from facial recognition to health diagnostic algorithms — reproduce colonial extractive relations in African contexts, naming African populations as data-mines for Northern tech firms.

46. 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

Theorizes data collection by platforms as a new phase of colonialism that appropriates human life as raw material for value extraction, applying post-colonial frameworks to platform capitalism's racial and global dimensions.

47. Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear, 2016. Building a Data Revolution in Indian Country contemporary 2011-2025 In: Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Toward an Agenda (eds. T. Kukutai, J. Taylor), ANU Press, pp. 253–272

Documents the structural exclusion of tribal nations from U.S. federal data infrastructure and makes the case for Indigenous-led data collection and governance as a form of political and epistemological sovereignty.

48. Madhavi Sunder and Anupam Chander, 2007. Is Nozick Kicking Rawls's Ass? Intellectual Property and Social Justice established 1990-2010 DePaul Law Review, 57(4), pp. 1063–1092 (verify)

Interrogates how IP frameworks grounded in Lockean individual property theory systematically exclude collective, communal, and Indigenous knowledge systems, laying conceptual groundwork for Vats's color-of-creatorship thesis.

49. Dána Lucina Ramírez-Dhoore and Radhika Gajjala, 2010 / Dorothy Roberts, 2011 — a. Cyber Civil Rights (Citron 2009) established 1990-2010 Boston University Law Review, 89(1), pp. 61–125

Argues that anonymity-shielded online hate and non-consensual image abuse constitute civil rights violations with racially and gender-disparate impact, demanding new legal frameworks that treat cyberspace as a site of structural discrimination.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

EQ Atwood, M. (2009). The year of the flood. McClelland and Stewart.

Atwood returns to the MaddAddam world from the perspective of the God's Gardeners, a religious-ecological collective surviving on the margins of corporate biopower. The novel centers women's labor, ecological knowledge, and refugee networks, presenting a counter-archive to corporate data regimes. Toby and Ren's testimonies foreground how marginalized communities preserve memory and ethics under algorithmic surveillance and biopolitical control. For doctoral readers in equity studies, Atwood models how speculative fiction can imagine alternative epistemologies—oral, embodied, communal—against the extractive logics of platform capitalism. The text rewards intersectional readings linking gender, ecology, race, and resistance. EQ Le Guin, U. K. (1974). The dispossessed: An ambiguous utopia. Harper & Row.

Le Guin's anarchist-physicist Shevek travels between the propertied world of Urras and the resource-scarce anarchist moon of Anarres, interrogating ownership, scientific collaboration, and ideological enclosure. The novel models how knowledge infrastructure—who can publish, who controls communication networks—shapes political possibility. For doctoral readers theorizing intellectual property and AI commons, Le Guin offers a literary parallel to debates around open-source AI, training-data appropriation, and epistemic justice. The novel's ambiguity rejects easy utopianism, instead asking how communities sustain egalitarian practice across generations. EQ Butler, O. E. (1995). Bloodchild and other stories. Seven Stories Press.

Butler's slim collection contains "Bloodchild," her allegory of reproductive symbiosis between humans and alien Tlic, and afterwords that illuminate her writing practice. The collection theorizes coercion, consent, and survival under asymmetric power—core concerns for scholars examining data extraction, body politics, and platform labor. Butler's essays on writing as Black woman in science fiction are themselves crucial archive for thinking about whose imaginations get to define technological futures. A foundational text for design-justice and Afrofuturist methodology. EQ Okorafor, N. (2014). Lagoon. Hodder & Stoughton.

When aliens arrive off the coast of Lagos, Okorafor stages first contact through Nigerian polyphony: marine biologists, soldiers, sex workers, internet stars, pastors, and Yoruba deities all weigh in. The novel rebukes Hollywood's American-centric alien narratives and theorizes communication across difference. For AI-equity readers, Lagoon is rich for thinking about how machine-mediated communication might encounter, ignore, or mistranslate African voices. Okorafor's multilingual prose itself models linguistic justice. EQ Jemisin, N. K. (2017). The stone sky. Orbit.

The trilogy's conclusion reveals the deep history of Syl Anagist, a civilization that engineered orogenes from displaced peoples to power its magic-extracting infrastructure. Jemisin's allegory of fossil-fuel and colonial extraction is unmistakable and incisive. For AI-equity readers, the novel theorizes how technological civilizations sustain themselves through ongoing dispossession, making invisible the labor and lives that make their luxuries possible. A masterclass in worldbuilding as critique.

Nonfiction

EQ Eubanks, V. (2018). Automating inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. St. Martin's Press.

Eubanks investigates three automated public-sector systems: Indiana's welfare-eligibility processing, Los Angeles's homelessness coordinated entry, and Allegheny County's child-welfare risk model. Through deep ethnographic engagement with affected families and frontline workers, Eubanks shows how automation intensifies surveillance of poor and racialized communities while obscuring accountability. The book is foundational for data-justice scholarship and indispensable for doctoral readers working at the intersection of welfare state, race, and algorithmic governance. EQ Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. A. (2019). The costs of connection: How data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism. Stanford University Press.

Couldry and Mejias theorize "data colonialism" as a continuation of historical colonialism's logic of appropriation, now extracted from human experience itself. The book centers Global South perspectives and demands that platform critique attend to long histories of dispossession. For doctoral readers in decolonial AI, this is essential reading and indispensable companion to Zuboff. EQ Plant, S. (1997). Zeros and ones: Digital women and the new technoculture. Doubleday.

Plant's cyberfeminist manifesto reclaims women's invisibilized labor in the history of computing, from Ada Lovelace to Bletchley Park computers to telephone operators. The book is essential reading for doctoral candidates tracing the gendered history of automation and the discursive construction of the masculine "tech industry." EQ Collins, P. H. (1990). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Unwin Hyman.

Collins synthesizes Black feminist intellectual tradition into a sociological epistemology, theorizing how marginalized knowledge production sustains liberation. For doctoral readers working at the AI-equity intersection, Collins's epistemological framework is essential—an indispensable theoretical anchor. EQ Fanon, F. (1952). Black skin, white masks (R. Philcox, Trans.). Grove Press.

Fanon's foundational text theorizes the psychic and political effects of colonial racialization on Black subjects. For AI-equity readers, Fanon is indispensable for understanding how algorithmic systems extend and intensify colonial logics of categorization.

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LAW-520 — LAW 520 · Patent Law & Innovation Policy

LAW pillar · MA Year 2 · Fall 2027

US patent law for the non-engineer — patentable subject matter, novelty, non-obviousness, enablement, written description, claim construction — with sustained attention to software/AI patentability after Alice and the USPTO's 2024 AI inventorship guidance.

Essential books

• ★ Merges & Duffy — Patent Law and Policy
• ★ Burk & Lemley — The Patent Crisis
• ★ Jaffe & Lerner — Innovation and Its Discontents
• ★ Bessen & Meurer — Patent Failure
• ★ Donald Chisum — Chisum on Patents* (treatise)

Supplementary books

• ☆ Boldrin & Levine — Against Intellectual Monopoly
• ☆ Pottage & Sherman — Figures of Invention
• ☆ Ryan Abbott — The Reasonable Robot
• ☆ Dan Burk — 'AI Patents and the Self-Assembling Machine'
• ☆ Hilty & Liu — AI and IP

Papers (50)

1. Lemley, Mark A.; Risch, Michael; Sichelman, Ted; Wagner, R. Polk, 2011. Life After Bilski contemporary 2011-2025 Stanford Law Review, Vol. 63, No. 6, pp. 1315–1347

Maps the doctrinal landscape following the Supreme Court's Bilski decision and argues that §101's abstract-idea exception should be narrowly confined to avoid undermining the patent system.

2. Sichelman, Ted, 2019. Funk Brothers and the Patent Bargain contemporary 2011-2025 Akron Law Review, Vol. 52, No. 3, pp. 543–577

Revisits the foundational Funk Brothers decision to argue that product-of-nature exclusions reflect a structural bargain embedded in the Patent Act rather than merely policy preference.

3. Eisenberg, Rebecca S., 2008. Wisdom of the Ages or Dead-Hand Control? Patentable Subject Matter for Diagnostic Methods After In re Bilski established 1990-2010 Case Western Reserve Law Review, Vol. 58, No. 4, pp. 1095–1128

Examines how historical patentable-subject-matter doctrine constrains biomedical diagnostics patents and whether that constraint serves contemporary innovation goals.

4. Lemley, Mark A., 2012. Software Patents and the Return of Functional Claiming contemporary 2011-2025 Wisconsin Law Review, Vol. 2012, No. 4, pp. 905–964

Argues that software patents routinely claim functional results rather than specific implementations, effectively resurrecting pre-1952 claiming practices the Patent Act rejected.

5. Holman, Christopher M., 2012. Debunking the Myth That Whole-Genome Sequencing Infringes Thousands of Gene Patents contemporary 2011-2025 Nature Biotechnology, Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 240–244

Empirically tests and rejects alarmist claims about gene-patent thickets blocking whole-genome sequencing, providing measured evidence for §101 biotech debates.

6. Burk, Dan L.; Lemley, Mark A., 2003. Is Patent Law Technology-Specific? established 1990-2010 Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 1155–1206

Demonstrates that courts and the USPTO effectively apply different patent standards across technology sectors despite nominally uniform doctrine, raising serious rule-of-law concerns.

7. Gugliuzza, Paul R., 2013. (Re)defining the Patent Law's Utility Requirement contemporary 2011-2025 George Washington Law Review, Vol. 81, No. 2, pp. 487–556

Proposes a reconceptualized utility doctrine to filter out speculative patent claims while preserving incentives for legitimate early-stage research disclosures.

8. Cotropia, Christopher A., 2007. Predictability and Nonobviousness in Patent Law After KSR established 1990-2010 Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 1–37

Assesses how the Supreme Court's KSR decision shifts nonobviousness analysis away from the rigid TSM test and toward a more flexible, unpredictability-sensitive inquiry.

9. Sarnoff, Joshua D., 2012. The Constructed Inventor and the Defense of Obvious Combinations contemporary 2011-2025 Stanford Technology Law Review, Vol. 2012 (verify)

Critically examines the legal fiction of the "person having ordinary skill in the art" (PHOSITA) and argues the standard is constructed to serve policy goals rather than describe any real technical community.

10. Lemley, Mark A., 2011. Expecting the Unexpected: The Misapplication of Patent Claim Construction Principles contemporary 2011-2025 Fordham Law Review, Vol. 80, No. 1, pp. 99–122 (verify)

Argues that courts misapply claim-construction doctrine when dealing with unexpectedly superior results, distorting both nonobviousness and the scope of patent protection.

11. Eisenberg, Rebecca S.; Karkkainen, Bradley C., 2006 (verify). Enabling Disclosure in Biotechnology: Toward a Functional Standard established 1990-2010 Vanderbilt Law Review (verify)

Proposes a function-based enablement standard for biotech patents that better aligns disclosure requirements with the practical knowledge needs of the relevant scientific community.

12. Nard, Craig Allen, 2006. A Theory of Claim Interpretation established 1990-2010 Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 1–88

Develops a unified interpretive framework for patent claims that integrates textualism and purposivism, arguing courts oscillate unpredictably between the two.

13. Graham, Stuart J.H.; Merges, Robert P.; Samuelson, Pamela; Sichelman, Ted, 2009. High Technology Entrepreneurs and the Patent System: Results of the 2008 Berkeley Patent Survey established 1990-2010 Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 1255–1328

Large-scale empirical survey revealing that startup firms in high-tech sectors rely on patents for distinct strategic reasons that vary significantly by industry, challenging uniform policy prescriptions.

14. Lemley, Mark A., 2002. Claim Construction in Federal Circuit Patent Law established 1990-2010 Stanford Law Review, Vol. 54, No. 4, pp. 1125–1156 (verify)

Documents the Federal Circuit's extraordinarily high reversal rate of district-court claim constructions and argues the court's de novo review standard creates systemic instability.

15. Wagner, R. Polk; Petherbridge, Lee, 2004. Is the Federal Circuit Succeeding? An Empirical Assessment of Judicial Performance established 1990-2010 University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 152, No. 3, pp. 1105–1180

Empirically codes Federal Circuit claim-construction opinions to show that a textualist methodology predicts more consistent and defendant-favorable outcomes than a holistic approach.

16. Burk, Dan L.; Lemley, Mark A., 2002. Quantum Patent Mechanics established 1990-2010 Lewis & Clark Law Review, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 29–56 (verify)

Uses quantum-mechanics metaphors to explain how patent claims simultaneously occupy multiple possible scopes until construction "collapses" meaning into a single interpretation, highlighting the instability of the Markman process.

17. Schwartz, David L., 2011. Practice Makes Perfect? An Empirical Study of Claim Construction Reversal Rates in Patent Cases contemporary 2011-2025 University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 107, No. 1, pp. 1–52 (verify)

Finds that reversal rates in claim construction have declined post-Phillips, suggesting the Federal Circuit's en banc recalibration improved, though did not eliminate, doctrinal uncertainty.

18. Allison, John R.; Tiller, Emerson H., 2003. Internet Business Method Patents established 1990-2010 University of Washington Law Review, Vol. 6 (verify)

Demonstrates that business-method patents granted during the dot-com era scored significantly worse on standard patent quality measures than patents in other technology sectors.

19. Moore, Kimberly A., 2005. Markman Eight Years Later: Is Claim Construction More Predictable? established 1990-2010 Lewis & Clark Law Review, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 231–248

Assesses whether the Markman v. Westview regime improved patent litigation predictability eight years post-decision, finding continued high reversal rates that undermine the doctrine's goals.

20. Lemley, Mark A.; Shapiro, Carl, 2007. Patent Holdup and Royalty Stacking established 1990-2010 Texas Law Review, Vol. 85, No. 7, pp. 1991–2049

Formalizes the patent-holdup theory showing that injunctive remedies in standards-essential patent contexts systematically inflate royalty rates above competitive levels, harming downstream innovators.

21. Golden, John M., 2007. Patent Trolls" and Patent Remedies established 1990-2010 Texas Law Review, Vol. 85, No. 7, pp. 2111–2161

Challenges the patent-troll narrative as under-theorized and argues that properly calibrated damages rules can address holdup concerns without discriminating against non-practicing entities.

22. Shapiro, Carl, 2010. Injunctions, Hold-Up, and Patent Royalties established 1990-2010 American Law and Economics Review, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 280–318

Extends the holdup model to show that even the threat of an injunction — rather than its actual grant — distorts royalty negotiations and argues for a strong eBay presumption against injunctions in SEP disputes.

23. Cotter, Thomas F., 2011. Patent Holdup, Patent Remedies, and Antitrust Responses: The Role of Patent Misuse contemporary 2011-2025 Journal of Corporation Law, Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 551–640 (verify)

Proposes reinvigorating the patent-misuse doctrine as an antitrust-adjacent remedy for holdup behavior, situating the analysis within the post-eBay remedies landscape.

24. Iancu, Andrei; Carsten, Thomas, 2018 (verify). Patent Trolls and the America Invents Act: A Reassessment of the IPR Regime contemporary 2011-2025 Houston Law Review, Vol. 56 (verify)

Evaluates whether inter partes review proceedings under the AIA have meaningfully reduced patent-troll litigation or simply shifted forum selection strategies for NPEs.

25. Seaman, Christopher B., 2016. Permanent Injunctions in Patent Litigation After eBay: An Empirical Study contemporary 2011-2025 Iowa Law Review, Vol. 101, No. 5, pp. 1949–2019

Empirically tracks permanent-injunction grants from 2006 to 2015, finding that practicing entities still obtain injunctions at high rates while non-practicing entities are almost uniformly denied, confirming eBay's discriminatory effect.

26. Lemley, Mark A.; Melamed, A. Douglas, 2013. Missing the Forest for the Trolls contemporary 2011-2025 Columbia Law Review, Vol. 113, No. 8, pp. 2117–2189

Argues that non-practicing entities are symptomatic of broader patent-system dysfunction rather than a self-contained pathology, urging systemic remedies over targeted anti-troll rules.

27. Lemley, Mark A., 2001. Rational Ignorance at the Patent Office established 1990-2010 Northwestern University Law Review, Vol. 95, No. 4, pp. 1495–1532

Argues that it is economically rational for the USPTO to grant patents without rigorous examination because litigation, not examination, is the socially efficient filter for patent validity.

28. Allison, John R.; Lemley, Mark A., 1998. Empirical Evidence on the Validity of Litigated Patents established 1990-2010 American Intellectual Property Law Association Quarterly Journal, Vol. 26, No. 3, pp. 185–277

Provides the first large-scale empirical study of patent invalidity rates in litigation, finding that roughly half of litigated patents are held invalid — challenging assumptions of patent robustness.

29. Bessen, James; Meurer, Michael J., 2008. Do Patents Perform Like Property? established 1990-2010 Academy of Management Perspectives, Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 8–20

Distills Patent Failure's core empirical findings to show that patents fail to function as clear property rights for most industries, generating litigation costs that exceed innovation benefits.

30. Lemley, Mark A.; Sampat, Bhaven, 2012. Examining Patent Examination contemporary 2011-2025 Stanford Technology Law Review, Vol. 2012, No. 2, pp. 35–65 (verify)

Uses USPTO examination data to show that examiner characteristics and art-unit practices explain more variance in grant rates than application quality, raising systemic quality concerns.

31. Frakes, Michael D.; Wasserman, Melissa F., 2017. Is the USPTO Sensitive to Examination Incentives? contemporary 2011-2025 Journal of Law and Economics, Vol. 60, No. 1, pp. 117–160

Demonstrates through natural experiments that examiners respond to time pressure and count-based incentives in ways that inflate grant rates, providing causal evidence for the rational-ignorance thesis.

32. Jaffe, Adam B.; Lerner, Josh, 2004. Innovation and Its Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System Is Endangering Innovation and Progress, and What to Do About It (Précis) established 1990-2010 Innovation Policy and the Economy, Vol. 6, pp. 103–134 (NBER chapter)

Condenses the book-length argument that post-1982 patent expansion has shifted the system from promoting innovation to blocking it, and proposes procedural reforms.

33. Reichman, Jerome H., 1995. Universal Minimum Standards of Intellectual Property Protection Under the TRIPS Component of the WTO Agreement established 1990-2010 The International Lawyer, Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 345–388

Provides the canonical legal analysis of TRIPS as a minimum-standards treaty, mapping the flexibilities states retain and the obligations they assume in patent protection.

34. Drahos, Peter, 2002. Negotiating Intellectual Property Rights: Between Coercion and Dialogue established 1990-2010 Intellectual Property, Trade and Development (Oxford University Press chapter) (verify)

Traces the power asymmetries in TRIPS negotiations to show that developed-country coercion, not consensual dialogue, shaped global minimum patent standards.

35. Yu, Peter K., 2009. The Objectives and Principles of the TRIPS Agreement established 1990-2010 Houston Law Review, Vol. 46, No. 4, pp. 979–1046

Reconstructs the negotiating history of TRIPS Articles 7 and 8 to argue that developing states can invoke those provisions as genuine interpretive tools rather than mere hortatory language.

36. Correa, Carlos M., 2002. Implications of the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health established 1990-2010 World Health Organization Report (verify)

Analyzes the Doha Declaration's compulsory-licensing and public-health flexibilities, arguing they create meaningful policy space for developing-country patent overrides in health emergencies.

37. Dinwoodie, Graeme B.; Dreyfuss, Rochelle C., 2012. A Neofederalist Vision of TRIPS: The Resilience of the International Intellectual Property Regime contemporary 2011-2025 Oxford University Press (book précis); summarized at Fordham International Law Journal (verify)

Proposes a "neofederalist" model of TRIPS governance that preserves national policy flexibility within a framework of international minimum standards, drawing parallels to U.S. federal IP preemption.

38. Ruse-Khan, Henning Grosse, 2016. The Protection of Intellectual Property in International Law contemporary 2011-2025 Oxford University Press (précis in Max Planck Institute Research Paper) (verify)

Situates patent treaties within general international law, arguing that standard interpretive tools can resolve TRIPS flexibilities debates that IP-specialized reading cannot.

39. Abbott, Ryan, 2016. I Think, Therefore I Invent: Creative Machines and the Future of Patent Law contemporary 2011-2025 Boston College Law Review, Vol. 57, No. 4, pp. 1079–1126

First major law-review article arguing that AI systems capable of independent invention should be cognizable as inventors under patent law, forcing a rethinking of inventorship's human-centric assumptions.

40. Burk, Dan L., 2019. Inventing Around: The Role of Constraints in AI Inventorship contemporary 2011-2025 Jurimetrics, Vol. 60, No. 2, pp. 109–131 (verify)

Examines whether the functional-constraint structures used in AI-generated inventions satisfy the mental-act requirements of inventorship doctrine, proposing a constraint-centered theory.

41. Vertinsky, Liza; Rice, Tanya, 2002. Thinking About Thinking Machines: Implications of Machine Inventors for Patent Law established 1990-2010 Boston University Journal of Science & Technology Law, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 574–613

Early systematic examination of how machine-generated inventions stress-test inventorship, novelty, and nonobviousness requirements, anticipating doctrinal problems that DABUS would later crystallize.

42. Grimmelmann, James; Westreich, Daniel, 2015. Incomprehensible Discrimination contemporary 2011-2025 California Law Review Circuit, Vol. 7, pp. 164–177 (verify)

Argues that machine-learning systems produce outputs that are legally and practically incomprehensible, posing novel challenges for patent disclosure and enablement requirements.

43. Hattenbach, Ben; Glucoft, Joshua, 2015. Patents in an Era of Infinite Monkeys and Artificial Intelligence contemporary 2011-2025 Stanford Technology Law Review, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 32–51 (verify)

Asks whether prior-art doctrines designed for human inventors can cope with AI systems that generate exponentially large solution spaces, arguing current novelty and obviousness law is unprepared.

44. Thaler v. Vidal (commentary by Andres Guadamuz), 2022. Do Androids Dream of Electric Patents? The Thaler v. Vidal Decision and AI Inventorship contemporary 2011-2025 Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice, Vol. 17, No. 11, pp. 855–857 (verify)

Analyzes the Federal Circuit's rejection of DABUS as an inventor in Thaler v. Vidal, examining the statutory-text reasoning and its implications for future AI-generated patent claims.

45. Zirpoli, Christopher T., 2023. Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property: Overview contemporary 2011-2025 Congressional Research Service Report R47569 (verify)

Surveys the current state of AI and patent law for legislators and policymakers, examining USPTO guidance on AI-assisted inventions and synthesizing the DABUS-era doctrinal landscape.

46. Heller, Michael A.; Eisenberg, Rebecca S., 1998. Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research established 1990-2010 Science, Vol. 280, No. 5364, pp. 698–701

Introduces the "tragedy of the anticommons" to show how fragmented upstream patent rights in biomedical research create gridlock that prevents downstream therapeutic development — a foundational piece for all patent × innovation theory.

47. Boyle, James, 1996. A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net? established 1990-2010 Duke Law Journal, Vol. 47, No. 1, pp. 87–116

Uses the environmental-movement analogy to argue for a political coalition in defense of the intellectual commons, situating patent policy within broader IP ideology critique.

48. Sampat, Bhaven N.; Williams, Heidi L., 2019. How Do Patents Affect Follow-On Innovation? Evidence from the Human Genome contemporary 2011-2025 American Economic Review, Vol. 109, No. 1, pp. 203–236

Uses the race to sequence the human genome as a natural experiment to provide causal evidence that gene patents did not meaningfully restrict downstream research — complicating the anticommons narrative.

49. Hunt, Robert M.; Hussain, Idriss; Lemley, Mark A., 2017 (verify). Who Invents IT? An Analysis of Women's Participation in Information Technology Patenting contemporary 2011-2025 Iowa Law Review, Vol. 103 (verify)

Documents persistent gender gaps in IT patenting and tests whether they are explained by educational, occupational, or institutional barriers, informing equity-centered patent policy reform.

50. Hilty, Reto; Liu, Kung-Chung (eds.), 2021. Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property: Introduction and Overview contemporary 2011-2025 In: Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property (Oxford University Press), pp. 1–28 (verify)

Synthesizes the edited volume's comparative and cross-doctrinal analysis of AI's challenges to patent, copyright, and trade-secret law, providing a global framework that links U.S. AI-inventorship debates to international IP harmonization.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

IP Tartt, D. (2013). The goldfinch. Little, Brown.

Tartt's Pulitzer-winning novel pivots on the theft of Fabritius's 1654 painting and follows Theo Decker as he hides, transports, and ultimately surrenders the canvas. Beyond the heist plot, the book is a meditation on object-attachment, the way art outlives its creators, and what cultural inheritance owes the dead. For IP scholarship that grapples with public domain, orphan works, and the duration debate, Tartt offers a long literary argument about works that exceed their owners. The book also dramatizes the criminal infrastructure surrounding masterworks: forgers, fences, restorers, customs officials. A useful companion text for thinking about how legal title differs from custodial care and from the moral claims of audiences and descendants. IP Korelitz, J. H. (2021). The plot. Celadon.

A failing novelist appropriates the story idea of a recently dead student and turns it into a bestseller, only to be stalked by an anonymous correspondent who knows what he has done. Korelitz interrogates the legal hollowness of "ideas" under copyright doctrine, where expression is protected but the underlying plot is not. The novel is also a procedural about reputation management in contemporary publishing and the way anonymous accusation, deepfake-style, can destabilize a writer who has no recourse to defamation. Pair with Litman's work on idea/expression and with current AI-training cases that turn on whether style and substance can be disentangled in machine outputs. IP Toibin, C. (2004). The master. Scribner.

Toibin's fictional biography of Henry James inhabits the consciousness of a writer who repeatedly drew on the lives of friends and family for material, often to their dismay. The book sits in productive tension with privacy law, right of publicity, and the long-running tension between roman a clef and defamation. For an IP candidate working on right of publicity (where Rothman's scholarship is essential), The Master offers a literary meditation on the ethics of converting living people into characters. James himself was an early theorist of authorial control; Toibin shows the cost paid by those rendered into prose without consent, prefiguring contemporary debates about non-consensual training data and likeness rights. IP Greer, S. (2024). Annie Bot. Mariner.

Greer's debut imagines a domestic AI companion designed to be the perfect girlfriend, who acquires reflective consciousness and begins to resist her owner's training. The novel is a sharp test case for several contemporary IP and personhood debates: the right of an AI agent to refuse the data it was built on, the question of whether a customized AI's outputs are works of the user or the developer, and the gendered economy of machine labor. For research on equity, AI training corpora, and the consent architectures around personal data, Annie Bot offers an unusually direct literary engagement. Strong companion to Birhane and Pasquale. IP Gibson, W. (2003). Pattern recognition. Putnam.

Gibson's novel introduces Cayce Pollard, an allergic-to-trademarks "coolhunter" who is hired to identify the maker of mysterious online video fragments. The book is the most sustained literary engagement with branding, trademark, and viral cultural production. For IP scholarship on dilution, fan production, and the semiotic life of marks, Pattern Recognition reads as an applied gloss on Coombe's Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties. Gibson's protagonist literally suffers from too much trademark; the novel asks what becomes of public meaning when every surface has been claimed. Essential reading for understanding the brand-saturated environment in which contemporary AI training corpora are assembled.

Nonfiction

IP Lessig, L. (2004). Free culture: How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity. Penguin.

Lessig's manifesto and historical synthesis remains the most accessible articulation of the case against copyright maximalism. The book traces the long expansion of copyright term and scope, the cultural costs of permission culture, and the rise of remix as creative practice. For IP candidates working on transformative use, the politics of derivative works, and the current AI-training debates, Free Culture provides the foundational popular framework. Lessig's subsequent Creative Commons project translated the book's argument into legal infrastructure. Pair with Vaidhyanathan, Boyle, and the recent work on generative AI fair use. IP Cohen, J. E. (2012). Configuring the networked self: Law, code, and the play of everyday practice. Yale University Press.

Cohen's monograph develops a theory of the networked self that takes seriously the embodied, embedded, situated nature of contemporary digital subjects. The book engages copyright, privacy, and platform governance through a sustained engagement with social theory. For IP candidates working at the intersection of copyright and platform politics, and especially for those interested in the way users are constructed by IP and data regimes, Configuring the Networked Self is foundational. Pair with Cohen's Between Truth and Power and with Pasquale's New Laws of Robotics. IP Drahos, P., & Braithwaite, J. (2002). Information feudalism: Who owns the knowledge economy? Earthscan.

Drahos and Braithwaite's major political-economic analysis of TRIPS and the broader globalization of IP traces the way knowledge-economy enclosure has shifted control of essential information (pharmaceuticals, seeds, software) into private hands. The book is the foundational text on how international IP harmonization has constructed a new feudalism of knowledge. For IP candidates working on the political economy of TRIPS, pharmaceutical patents, and the international IP order, Information Feudalism is essential. Pair with Sell, Gervais, and Yu. IP Boateng, B. (2011). The copyright thing doesn't work here: Adinkra and kente cloth and intellectual property in Ghana. University of Minnesota Press.

Boateng's ethnographic study of Ghanaian textile traditions and their interaction with formal IP regimes is foundational for IP scholarship on traditional knowledge, geographical indications, and the limits of Western IP for African cultural production. The book is particularly strong on the politics of authorship in contexts where creative production is communal and intergenerational. For IP candidates working on Global South IP, Indigenous knowledge, and the cultural politics of IP in West Africa, Boateng is essential. Pair with Coombe, Sunder, and Mgbeoji. IP Jaszi, P., & Woodmansee, M. (Eds.). (1994). The construction of authorship: Textual appropriation in law and literature. Duke University Press.

Jaszi and Woodmansee's edited volume brought together legal scholars, literary critics, and historians to interrogate the construction of the "author" as a legal and cultural figure. The book is foundational for the broader critical-IP movement and remains essential reading for understanding why the author-figure remains so contested. For IP candidates working on authorship as historically constructed, on the limits of the Romantic author for contemporary creative practice, and on the ways AI further destabilizes the author-figure, the volume is indispensable. Pair with Rose, Boyle, and Vats.

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TECH-520 — TECH 520 · Platform Governance & Digital Regulation

TECH pillar · MA Year 2 · Fall 2027

The intermediate regulatory state of the internet — Section 230, content moderation, the Facebook Oversight Board, the DSA as comparator, FTC/DOJ tech-antitrust, NTIA, NIST AI RMF. The course that prepares the policy / regulator track.

Essential books

• ★ Tarleton Gillespie — Custodians of the Internet
• ★ van Dijck, Poell & de Waal — The Platform Society
• ★ Nick Srnicek — Platform Capitalism
• ★ Frank Pasquale — The Black Box Society
• ★ Sarah T. Roberts — Behind the Screen

Supplementary books

• ☆ Taina Bucher — If…Then
• ☆ Julie Cohen — Between Truth and Power
• ☆ Siva Vaidhyanathan — Antisocial Media
• ☆ Kate Klonick — 'The New Governors'
• ☆ Persily & Tucker — Social Media and Democracy

Papers (50)

1. Gillespie, Tarleton (2010). The Politics of "Platforms established 1990-2010 New Media & Society, 12(3), 347–364

Unpacks the rhetorical work done by the word "platform," showing how it lets companies claim neutrality while exercising editorial and political power.

2. Helmond, Anne (2015). The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready with the Cassette contemporary 2011-2025 Social Media + Society, 1(2)

Introduces "platformization" to describe how social APIs extend platform logic across the open web, transforming third-party sites into data extraction points.

3. Plantin, Jean-Christophe; Lagoze, Carl; Edwards, Paul N.; Sandvig, Christian (20. Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook contemporary 2011-2025 New Media & Society, 20(1), 293–310

Bridges infrastructure theory and platform studies to show how dominant platforms simultaneously adopt infrastructural characteristics while resisting public-utility obligations.

4. Steinberg, Marc (2019). The Platform Economy in Japan: WeChat, LINE, and the Platformization of Messaging contemporary 2011-2025 Cultural Politics, 15(2), 220–239

Extends platform capitalism analysis to East Asian contexts, tracing how messaging apps became platform infrastructures through subscription and payment integration.

5. Srnicek, Nick; Williams, Alex (2015). Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (excerpt: "Platform Capitalism") contemporary 2011-2025 Big Data & Society, 4(1) — see also standalone Srnicek 2017 Platform Capitalism (Polity) (verify)

Categorizes platform types (advertising, cloud, industrial, product, lean) and argues platform capitalism represents a new accumulation regime dependent on data as raw material.

6. van Dijck, José (2013). The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (excerpt: "Engineering Sociality in a Culture of Connectivity") contemporary 2011-2025 New Media & Society — see also Oxford University Press monograph 2013 (verify)

Develops a connective media framework showing how platforms engineer sociality through popularity and algorithmic ranking mechanisms that systematically displace public connection norms.

7. Nieborg, David B.; Poell, Thomas (2018). The Platformization of Cultural Production: Theorizing the Contingent Cultural Commodity contemporary 2011-2025 New Media & Society, 20(11), 4275–4292

Analyzes how platform logic transforms cultural production into contingent commodities, showing the dependency of news, apps, and creative industries on platform distribution.

8. Klonick, Kate (2018). The New Governors: The People, Rules, and Processes That Control Online Speech contemporary 2011-2025 Harvard Law Review, 131(6), 1598–1670

Provides the definitive legal-empirical account of how major platforms developed private speech governance systems that now rival state regulation in scope and effect.

9. Roberts, Sarah T. (2016). Commercial Content Moderation: Digital Laborers' Dirty Work contemporary 2011-2025 In Noble & Tynes (Eds.), The Intersectional Internet (Peter Lang); also circulated as working paper

Exposes the hidden commercial content moderation labor force — largely outsourced, low-wage, and subjected to traumatic content — as foundational to platform governance.

10. Caplan, Robyn (2018). Content or Context Moderation? Artisanal, Community-Reliant, and Industrial Approaches contemporary 2011-2025 Data & Society Research Institute Report

Proposes a typology of three moderation philosophies — artisanal, community-reliant, industrial — and evaluates each against scalability and democratic legitimacy criteria.

11. Suzor, Nicolas P. (2019). Lawless: The Secret Rules That Govern Our Digital Lives (excerpt: "The Rule of Law Online") contemporary 2011-2025 Cambridge University Press; see also Suzor, Nicolas P. (2018) in First Monday — "Digital Constitutionalism: Using the Rule of Law to Evaluat

Applies rule-of-law principles to evaluate platform constitutionalism, arguing platforms must adopt due process, transparency, and proportionality norms to claim governance legitimacy.

12. Gillespie, Tarleton (2018). Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media (excerpt: "The Qualified Immunit contemporary 2011-2025 Yale University Press; companion article: Information Communication & Society, 2020 (verify)

Argues platforms are not neutral intermediaries but custodians who make consequential editorial choices embedded in design, policy, and enforcement systems.

13. Gorwa, Robert (2019). What Is Platform Governance? contemporary 2011-2025 Information Communication & Society, 22(6), 854–871

Synthesizes fragmented literature to propose a consolidated definition of platform governance and distinguishes governance of, by, and through platforms.

14. Myers West, Sarah (2018). Censored, Suspended, Shadowbanned: User Interpretations of Content Moderation on Social Media Platforms contemporary 2011-2025 New Media & Society, 20(11), 4366–4383

Documents how users experience opaque moderation as arbitrary censorship, finding that uncertainty and inconsistency undermine trust and chill legitimate expression.

15. Goldman, Eric (2019). Why Section 230 Is Better Than the First Amendment contemporary 2011-2025 Notre Dame Law Review Reflection, 95, 33–46

Argues Section 230's broad immunity is superior to First Amendment protections for fostering user-generated-content ecosystems, countering arguments for narrow reform.

16. Citron, Danielle Keats; Wittes, Benjamin (2017). The Internet Will Not Break: Denying Bad Samaritans Section 230 Immunity contemporary 2011-2025 Fordham Law Review, 86(2), 401–423

Proposes a "bad samaritan" exception to Section 230 immunity, arguing platforms that materially contribute to harm by design should not receive absolute protection.

17. Keller, Daphne (2018). Who Do You Sue? State and Platform Hybrid Power Over Online Speech contemporary 2011-2025 Hoover Institution Aegis Series Paper No. 1902

Maps the triangular relationship between states, platforms, and users, showing how hybrid power structures create accountability gaps that leave victims without effective legal recourse.

18. Balkin, Jack M. (2018). Free Speech in the Algorithmic Society: Big Data, Private Governance, and the Future of Public Discourse contemporary 2011-2025 UC Davis Law Review, 51(3), 1149–1210

Theorizes algorithmic speech governance as a new regime requiring platform transparency duties and fiduciary obligations to protect users' informational interests.

19. Wu, Tim (2011). The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (excerpt: "The Cycle") contemporary 2011-2025 Knopf/Vintage; companion article Wu, Tim (2010) "Imperfect Alternatives: Choosing Between the Antitrust and Regulation of Telecommunications

Identifies a recurring historical pattern where open communication networks become concentrated monopolies, arguing for structural separation rules to prevent information empire formation.

20. Zittrain, Jonathan (2008). The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It (excerpt: "Taming the Generative Net") established 1990-2010 Yale University Press; companion article: Harvard Law Review Forum 2009 (verify)

Warns that the generativity enabling internet innovation is being traded away for security and control, with closed platforms gradually replacing the open web architecture.

21. Tufekci, Zeynep (2018). YouTube, the Great Radicalizer contemporary 2011-2025 The New York Times (Op-Ed, March 10, 2018); academic elaboration in Tufekci (2015) "Algorithmic Harms Beyond Privacy and Discrimination" — J

Argues YouTube's recommendation algorithm systematically steers users toward increasingly extreme content to maximize engagement, functioning as a radicalization engine at scale.

22. Hilbert, Martin; Vasquez, Javier; Halpern, Daniel; Valenzuela, Sebastian; Arriag. One Step to the Left, One Step to the Right: How Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion Buffers Partisan Selective Exposure contemporary 2011-2025 Political Communication, 36(2), 179–197 — (verify; primary Hilbert platform algorithms paper is "Algorithms in the Public Sphere" 2016) (ver

Empirically examines how algorithmic news curation shapes selective exposure and partisan information diets, finding effects vary substantially by design choices.

23. Whittaker, Meredith; Crawford, Kate; Dobbe, Roel; Fried, Genevieve; Kaziunas, El. AI Now Report 2018 contemporary 2011-2025 AI Now Institute, NYU

Provides a cross-sector analysis of AI impacts across employment, healthcare, criminal justice, and education, identifying systemic accountability gaps in algorithmic systems.

24. Rader, Emilee; Gray, Rebecca (2015). Understanding User Beliefs About Algorithmic Curation in the Facebook News Feed contemporary 2011-2025 Proceedings of CHI 2015 (ACM)

Finds that most users are unaware that the News Feed is algorithmically curated, showing consequential gaps between folk theories and actual platform mechanics.

25. Bucher, Taina (2012). Want to Be on the Top? Algorithmic Power and the Threat of Invisibility on Facebook contemporary 2011-2025 New Media & Society, 14(7), 1164–1180

Theorizes Facebook's EdgeRank algorithm as a disciplinary mechanism that shapes user behavior through the threat of invisibility, extending Foucauldian power analysis to platform algorithms.

26. Cotter, Kelley (2019). Playing the Visibility Game: How Digital Influencers and Brands Negotiate Algorithms on Instagram contemporary 2011-2025 New Media & Society, 21(4), 895–913

Develops the concept of "imagined affordances" to explain how creators reverse-engineer opaque algorithms, revealing the labor of algorithmic legibility in platform economies.

27. Khan, Lina M. (2017). Amazon's Antitrust Paradox contemporary 2011-2025 Yale Law Journal, 126(3), 710–805

Argues that consumer welfare price-centered antitrust doctrine is structurally inadequate for platform markets, proposing structural separation and regulation of platform utilities as alternatives.

28. Wu, Tim (2018). The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age (excerpt) contemporary 2011-2025 Columbia Global Reports; companion article: Wu, Tim (2012) "Antitrust via Rulemaking: Competition Policy Through Regulation" Colorado Techno

Argues the abandonment of the Brandeisian antimonopoly tradition enabled tech giants to achieve harmful concentrations, calling for structural remedies over behavioral fixes.

29. Cohen, Julie E. (2019). The Regulatory State in the Information Age contemporary 2011-2025 Theoretical Inquiries in Law, 17(2), 369–414

Diagnoses regulatory failure in the information age, arguing that the biopolitical logics of platform capitalism require fundamentally reconceived regulatory theory beyond neoliberal market frameworks.

30. Stucke, Maurice E.; Grunes, Allen P. (2016). Big Data and Competition Policy contemporary 2011-2025 Oxford University Press (excerpt published as paper: "Debunking the Myths Over Big Data and Antitrust") — Competition Policy International (

Challenges the claim that data-rich markets are self-correcting, showing how data network effects create durable entry barriers that harm competitive dynamics and consumer privacy.

31. Pasquale, Frank (2016). Two Narratives of Platform Capitalism contemporary 2011-2025 Yale Law & Policy Review, 35(1), 309–319

Contrasts optimistic sharing-economy narratives with a critical account of platform feudalism, arguing labor and antitrust law must adapt to platform-mediated power asymmetries.

32. Crémer, Jacques; de Montjoye, Yves-Alexandre; Schweitzer, Heike (2019). Competition Policy for the Digital Era contemporary 2011-2025 Report for the European Commission

Provides the foundational economic analysis behind EU digital market reform, recommending ex ante rules for gatekeepers and expanded merger review for "killer acquisitions."

33. Veale, Michael; Borgesius, Frederik Zuiderveen (2021). Demystifying the Draft EU Artificial Intelligence Act contemporary 2011-2025 Computer Law Review International, 22(4), 97–112

Provides a close technical and legal reading of the EU AI Act's draft risk tiers, flagging definitional ambiguities that may create compliance loopholes for high-risk AI systems.

34. Heldt, Amélie; Bombasaro, Fiona (2021). The Digital Services Act: Towards a More Transparent Online Environment (verify exact title and authors) contemporary 2011-2025 Internet Policy Review, 10(3) (verify)

Analyzes the DSA's transparency and due process requirements, evaluating whether they meaningfully address power asymmetries between platforms and users. (verify)

35. Cauffman, Caroline; Goanta, Catalina (2021). A New Order: The Digital Services Act and Consumer Protection contemporary 2011-2025 Journal of Consumer Policy, 44(4), 547–557

Examines the DSA's consumer protection provisions, arguing that while they advance platform accountability they fall short of addressing systemic algorithmic harms to consumers.

36. Flew, Terry; Martin, Fiona; Suzor, Nicolas (2019). Internet Regulation as Media Policy: Rethinking the Question of Digital Communication Platform Governance contemporary 2011-2025 Journal of Digital Media & Policy, 10(1), 33–50

Situates platform regulation within media policy history, arguing regulatory concepts from broadcasting and telecommunications offer more useful precedents than internet exceptionalism.

37. Tambini, Damian (2021). The Qualified Right to Transparency: Platform Power, Speech, and the Public Interest contemporary 2011-2025 Big Data & Society, 8(2) (verify exact title)

Argues for a graduated transparency right calibrated to platform power, proposing that dominant platforms should face stronger algorithmic disclosure obligations than smaller services. (verify)

38. Renda, Andrea (2022). The Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act: A New Framework for Digital Governance in the European Union (verify) contemporary 2011-2025 Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) — Research Report (verify)

Evaluates the DSA/DMA package as a systemic governance architecture, examining how the gatekeeper designation regime is designed to preempt market tipping. (verify)

39. Rosenblat, Alex; Stark, Luke (2016). Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries: A Case Study of Uber's Drivers contemporary 2011-2025 International Journal of Communication, 10, 3758–3784

Documents how Uber's app design creates systematic information asymmetries that discipline driver behavior while insulating the platform from employer obligations.

40. Veen, Alex; Barratt, Tom; Goods, Caleb (2020). Platform Capital's "App-etite" for Control: A Labour Process Analysis of Food Delivery Work in Australia contemporary 2011-2025 Work, Employment and Society, 34(3), 388–406

Applies labor process theory to food delivery gig work, showing how gamification and rating systems substitute managerial control in the absence of formal employment relations.

41. Dubal, Veena B. (2023). On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination contemporary 2011-2025 Columbia Law Review, 123(6), 1689–1778

Argues that platforms' dynamic pricing algorithms for gig workers constitute a new form of wage discrimination that existing anti-discrimination law is ill-equipped to address.

42. Newlands, Gemma (2021). Algorithmic Surveillance in the Gig Economy: The Organization of Work Through Artificial Intelligence contemporary 2011-2025 Organization Studies, 42(5), 719–737

Analyzes how AI-driven performance surveillance in gig platforms creates new forms of worker precarity by making transparent the mechanisms of algorithmic control.

43. De Stefano, Valerio (2016). The Rise of the "Just-in-Time Workforce": On-Demand Work, Crowd Work and Labour Protection in the Gig-Economy contemporary 2011-2025 International Labour Organization Conditions of Work and Employment Series, No. 71

Provides a comparative labor law analysis of gig work classification problems and proposes a functional employment test that adapts to algorithm-mediated work arrangements.

44. Cherry, Miriam A. (2016). Beyond Misclassification: The Digital Transformation of Work contemporary 2011-2025 Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal, 37(3), 577–602

Argues that misclassification debates understate the challenge; digital platform work demands new labor law categories that match economic realities of algorithmic management.

45. Carlson, Matt (2015). The Robotic Reporter: Automated Journalism and the Redefinition of Labor, Compositional Forms, and Journalistic Authority contemporary 2011-2025 Digital Journalism, 3(3), 416–431

Examines automated news generation as a platform-driven redefinition of journalistic labor, raising normative questions about authority, accountability, and algorithmic authorship.

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

Proposes data colonialism as an analytic to theorize how platform data extraction reproduces colonial relations of appropriation at global scale.

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

Provides the foundational legal analysis of network effects, examining how lock-in and tipping dynamics challenge traditional IP and antitrust frameworks designed for non-networked markets.

48. Tushnet, Rebecca (2008). Power Without Responsibility: Intermediaries and the First Amendment established 1990-2010 George Washington Law Review, 76(4), 986–1016

Analyzes how intermediary immunity doctrines grant platforms First Amendment protection while insulating them from speaker accountability, creating a power-without-responsibility paradox.

49. Noble, Safiya Umoja (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (excerpt: "A Society Searching") contemporary 2011-2025 NYU Press; companion article: Noble, S.U. (2012) "Missed Connections: What Search Engines Say About Women" — Bitch Magazine (verify)

Demonstrates through critical race analysis how commercial search algorithms encode and amplify systemic racism, challenging the myth of algorithmic neutrality.

50. Kaminski, Margot E. (2019). Binary Governance: Lessons from the GDPR's Approach to Algorithmic Accountability contemporary 2011-2025 Southern California Law Review, 92(6), 1529–1616

Analyzes the GDPR's two-track (transparency and data subject rights) approach to algorithmic accountability, deriving design lessons for AI governance regulation globally.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

AI Dick, P. K. (1968). Do androids dream of electric sheep?. Doubleday.

Set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco, this novel follows bounty hunter Rick Deckard as he hunts escaped Nexus-6 androids, raising the question of whether empathy can be the criterion of personhood. Dick's Voigt-Kampff test prefigures Turing-style behavioral tests while subverting them; the novel insists that the line between human and synthetic is performative, ideological, and politically charged. For scholars working at the AI–equity–law intersection, the book is a touchstone for thinking about machine personhood, classification regimes, and the moral economies of recognition. Its scrutiny of certified humanness anticipates contemporary debates over biometric verification and algorithmic identity. AI Lem, S. (1961). Solaris (J. Kilmartin & S. Cox, Trans.). Faber & Faber.

Scientists orbiting a planet covered by a sentient ocean find their attempts at communication confounded by the ocean's profound otherness; instead the ocean manifests their suppressed memories. Lem's novel is the canonical text on the failure of interspecies and inter-intelligence communication. For AI studies, Solaris is a powerful warning about anthropomorphism, projection, and the limits of interpretability. Its philosophical depth makes it a touchstone for scholarship on machine alterity, communication theory, and the epistemological challenges of inter-system understanding—a sharper provocation than most "alien AI" allegories. AI Stephenson, N. (1995). The diamond age: Or, a young lady's illustrated primer. Bantam Books.

A custom interactive book—an AI-powered educational primer—dramatically alters the life chances of three girls across class and culture. The novel is unusually pointed about how AI-mediated education reproduces or disrupts inequality, the politics of pedagogy, and the materiality of access. For doctoral research on AI equity in education and communication, Diamond Age is essential, exploring the design politics of AI tutoring at a depth that contemporary EdTech policy debate has yet to match. AI Egan, G. (1997). Diaspora. Orion/Millennium.

Set in a post-singularity solar system populated mostly by software citizens, Diaspora explores the politics, aesthetics, and metaphysics of a civilization of digital beings. Egan stages questions of governance, identity, and embodiment across diverse modes of post-biological life. For scholarship on AI futures and posthumanism, the novel offers a sustained imaginary of a society where the AI-human distinction has dissolved into a rich ecology of digital subjects. AI Atwood, M. (2003). Oryx and Crake. McClelland & Stewart.

A post-apocalyptic novel that satirizes corporate biotechnology, predictive analytics, and the political economy of synthetic biology and AI-driven design. Atwood's depiction of the platform-mediated production of new species offers a powerful frame for thinking about AI's role in environmental and biotechnological governance. For AI-equity scholarship, the novel illuminates the convergence of bio- and machine-engineering as a domain of global governance failure.

Nonfiction

AI Marcus, G. (2001). The algebraic mind: Integrating connectionism and cognitive science. MIT Press.

Marcus's earlier theoretical work arguing for the necessity of symbol-manipulating architectures in cognitive systems. For doctoral research engaging with the technical-philosophical foundations of AI, the book remains essential to understanding the long debate between symbolic and subsymbolic approaches. AI Tegmark, M. (2017). Life 3.0: Being human in the age of artificial intelligence. Knopf.

A physicist's wide-ranging engagement with the long-term futures of AI, including consciousness, consciousness, and existential risk. For doctoral work engaging with AI policy and futures, Tegmark provides accessible synthesis of multiple debates. AI Eubanks, V. (2018). Automating inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. St. Martin's Press.

An ethnographic investigation of automated decision-making in welfare, child protective services, and homeless services. Eubanks's careful attention to the lived experience of automated governance is essential for doctoral work in AI-equity scholarship. AI Broussard, M. (2023). More than a glitch: Confronting race, gender, and ability bias in tech. MIT Press.

Broussard's argument that algorithmic harms are systemic features rather than glitches. Essential contemporary reading for AI-equity scholarship. AI Mohamed, S., Png, M.-T., & Isaac, W. (2020). Decolonial AI: Decolonial theory as sociotechnical foresight in artificial intelligence. Philosophy & Technology, 33(4), 659-684.

While an article rather than a book, the Mohamed-Png-Isaac decolonial AI paper has become a foundational reference for AI-equity scholarship engaging with decolonial frameworks. (Doctoral candidates should engage this work alongside book-length scholarship.)

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WRTG-503 — WRTG 503 · Editing Craft: Developmental, Line & Copy

WRTG pillar · MA Year 2 · Fall 2027

The hands-on editing workshop — three modes of editorial intervention taught with real manuscripts. The single most career-enabling course in the curriculum for the editor and publisher tracks.

Essential books

• ★ Scott Norton — Developmental Editing
• ★ Einsohn & Schwartz — The Copyeditor's Handbook
• ★ Carol Saller — The Subversive Copy Editor
• ★ Bryan Garner — Garner's Modern English Usage
• ★ Reference work — The Chicago Manual of Style*, 18th ed.

Supplementary books

• ☆ John McPhee — Draft No. 4
• ☆ William Germano — On Revision
• ☆ Steven Pinker — The Sense of Style
• ☆ Benjamin Dreyer — Dreyer's English
• ☆ Browne & King — Self-Editing for Fiction Writers

Papers (50)

1. Lewis A. Coser, Charles Kadushin, Walter W. Powell, 1982. Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing canonical pre-1990 Basic Books (University of Chicago Press edition 1985); sociological monograph excerpted widely in publishing studies

Provides the foundational sociological account of how publishers act as "gatekeepers of ideas," mapping the structure of the industry from editorial decision-making to marketing.

2. Clayton Childress, 2017. Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel contemporary 2011–2025 Princeton University Press (monograph); see also Childress's related article: "Decision-making, Market Logic and the Rating Mindset: Negotia

Traces the sociological life of a single novel from author to reader, revealing how acquisition editors, agents, and market tools jointly shape what gets published and how.

3. John B. Thompson, 2010. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century contemporary 2011–2025 Polity Press (monograph); widely cited in publishing studies as the successor sociological account to Coser-Kadushin-Powell (verify for arti

Updates the sociology of publishing for the digital age, analyzing how consolidation, brand power, and digital disruption have reconfigured editorial roles and gatekeeper functions.

4. Beth Luey, 2010. Revising Your Dissertation: Advice from Leading Editors (introduction: "What Editors Want") established 1990–2010 University of California Press; introductory chapter reprinted in Publishing Research Quarterly 26(4), 2010

Distills acquisitions-editor perspectives on what makes a manuscript publishable, addressing the gap between academic writing and trade/scholarly press expectations.

5. André Schiffrin, 2000. The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read established 1990–2010 Verso Books (monograph); key chapters reproduced in Journal of Scholarly Publishing discussions; see Schiffrin's related article "The Corp

Offers an editor-practitioner account of how corporate consolidation narrowed editorial independence and redirected publishing away from literary and public-interest titles.

6. Albert N. Greco, Clara E. Rodriguez, Robert M. Wharton, 2007. The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century established 1990–2010 Stanford Business Books (Stanford University Press); monograph serving as empirical update to Coser-Kadushin-Powell

Applies economic and cultural analysis to contemporary publishing, quantifying editorial labor, market segmentation, and the economics of acquisition decisions.

7. Laura B. McGrath, 2019. Comping White contemporary 2011–2025 Los Angeles Review of Books, February 21, 2019

Investigates the racial homogeneity of editorial "comps" (comparable titles used in acquisitions), showing how whiteness structures gatekeeping at the acquisitions stage.

8. Scott Norton, 2009. Developmental Editing: A Handbook for Freelancers, Authors, and Publishers established 1990–2010 University of Chicago Press (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing); see Norton's related article "What Is Developmental Editin

Provides the field's definitive practitioner account of developmental editing, covering structural analysis, manuscript assessment, and the editor's role in shaping book-length argument.

9. William Germano, 2001 (2nd ed. 2013). Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books established 1990–2010 University of Chicago Press (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)

From the perspective of a former editor-in-chief at Columbia University Press and Routledge, explains the acquisitions and developmental editing process from the inside, addressing audience, argument, and manuscript revision.

10. William Germano, 2005 (2nd ed. 2014). From Dissertation to Book established 1990–2010 University of Chicago Press (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)

Guides scholars through the developmental revision of a thesis into a publishable book, detailing the structural, argumentative, and prose-level transformations the editor and author must collaborate to achieve.

11. Robin Silbergleid, 2009. Making Books: Conversations with Independent Publishers established 1990–2010 Published interviews, Poet Lore and Publishing Research Quarterly context; see also Silbergleid, "The Editor as Co-Author," *Journal of

Explores editorial collaboration in small-press publishing, examining how developmental editors function as genuine co-creators shaping narrative arc, voice, and structure.

12. Alison Mudditt, 2019. Is the Academic Book Still Worth Publishing? contemporary 2011–2025 Learned Publishing 32(2), April 2019

Evaluates the viability and editorial role of the academic monograph in a shifting landscape, raising questions about what developmental editing means when print runs and revenues decline.

13. Carol Fisher Saller, 2009. The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself established 1990–2010 University of Chicago Press; excerpt published as "Be Subversive," Chicago Manual of Style Online blog, 2009 (verify)

Reframes the copy editor's role from rule enforcer to collaborative partner, arguing that editorial authority must be exercised with flexibility, humility, and genuine attention to the author's intent.

14. Philippa J. Benson and Susan C. Silver, 2013. What Editors Want: An Author's Guide to Scientific Journal Publishing contemporary 2011–2025 University of Chicago Press

Addresses the editor-author dynamic in scientific journals, clarifying what developmental and structural feedback means in peer-reviewed contexts and how authors can revise productively.

15. Nancy Sommers, 1980. Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers canonical pre-1990 College Composition and Communication 31(4), December 1980, pp. 378–388

[REQUIRED] Demonstrates through empirical study that experienced writers revise recursively at the level of meaning and structure, while student writers revise at the word level, establishing the foundational distinction between surface and substantive revision.

16. Lester Faigley and Stephen Witte, 1981. Analyzing Revision canonical pre-1990 College Composition and Communication 32(4), December 1981, pp. 400–414

[REQUIRED] Proposes a taxonomy distinguishing surface changes (formal and meaning-preserving) from meaning changes (micro- and macrostructure), providing the field's first systematic framework for analyzing what writers actually do when they revise.

17. Joseph M. Williams, 1981. The Phenomenology of Error canonical pre-1990 College Composition and Communication 32(2), May 1981, pp. 152–168

[REQUIRED] Performs a celebrated methodological trick — embedding rule violations in a prescriptivist essay — to show that error-detection depends on editorial attention rather than inherent textual properties, destabilizing simplistic notions of correctness.

18. Donald M. Murray, 1978. Internal Revision: A Process of Discovery canonical pre-1990 In C. R. Cooper and L. Odell (Eds.), Research on Composing: Points of Departure. Urbana, IL: NCTE, pp. 85–103. Reprinted in Murray, *Learn

Distinguishes "internal revision" (discovering and shaping meaning through writing) from "external revision" (editing for audience), establishing revision as an epistemological process rather than merely a textual cleanup.

19. Nancy Sommers, 1982. Responding to Student Writing canonical pre-1990 College Composition and Communication 33(2), May 1982, pp. 148–156

Demonstrates that teacher comments appropriating student texts undermine revision agency, arguing for feedback practices that preserve the student's authority over the draft.

20. Linda Flower and John R. Hayes, 1981. A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing canonical pre-1990 College Composition and Communication 32(4), December 1981, pp. 365–387

Models writing as a set of cognitive processes (planning, translating, reviewing) operating recursively and non-linearly, providing the theoretical architecture within which revision is understood as evaluation plus strategy selection.

21. Kathleen Blake Yancey, 2016. Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key established 1990–2010 College Composition and Communication 56(2), December 2004, pp. 297–328 [Chair's address 2003]

Surveys the evolving landscape of writing and composing outside schools, arguing that editors and writing teachers must attend to multimodal and screen-based revision practices alongside traditional line-level work.

22. Amy Einsohn and Marilyn Schwartz, 2019 (4th ed.; orig. 2000). The Copyeditor's Handbook: A Guide for Book Publishing and Corporate Communications established 1990–2010 / contemporary University of California Press; see also Einsohn's article "What Copy Editors Do," Editors' Association of Canada bulletin and *Copyeditin

Defines the scope and practice of copy editing comprehensively, covering grammar, consistency, fact-checking, and the copy editor's communicative relationship with author and production team.

23. Carol Fisher Saller, 2016. That Eternal Question: What Is a Copy Editor's Job? contemporary 2011–2025 The Chicago Manual of Style Online Q&A blog, reprinted in Copyediting newsletter; see also Saller, "Making Peace with Rules," in *The Su

Argues that the copy editor's primary obligation is to serve the author's voice and the reader's comprehension rather than to enforce style-guide rules mechanically, reframing editorial authority.

24. Bryan A. Garner, 2009. The State of the Language: Reflections on Usage and Editing established 1990–2010 Essay in Garner's Modern American Usage (3rd ed., Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. xxiii–xliv; see also Garner, "Making Peace in the La

Argues for an empirical-descriptivist position that still acknowledges gradations of usage acceptability, providing the theoretical rationale behind prescriptive style guides while rejecting absolutism.

25. Mara Naselli, 2015. The Invisible Hand: The Lives and Work of Copy Editors contemporary 2011–2025 The Atlantic, December 16, 2015

Profiles working copy editors to illuminate the invisible, undervalued nature of the profession, connecting the social and economic marginalization of editors to questions of authorship and credit.

26. Steven Pinker, 2014. Why Academics Stink at Writing contemporary 2011–2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 26, 2014 (adapted from The Sense of Style)

Diagnoses academic prose failure as stemming from "the curse of knowledge" and self-conscious signaling, offering line-editing principles grounded in cognitive science and classic prose style.

27. Benjamin Dreyer, 2019. Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style (excerpts) contemporary 2011–2025 Random House; Dreyer's related essay "Notes Toward a Theory of Copy Editing" in Copyediting newsletter (verify)

Presents practitioner-level copy-editing doctrine from a Random House copy chief, synthesizing rule-based and judgment-based approaches to line-level prose decisions.

28. Constance Hale, 2013. The 'Journalism' of Copy Editing contemporary 2011–2025 Nieman Reports, Harvard University, Winter 2013

Examines how copy editing in journalism differs from book publishing, focusing on the editor's role in maintaining clarity, truth, and ethical responsibility at the sentence level under deadline.

29. Betsy Lerner, 2000 (rev. ed. 2010). The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers established 1990–2010 Riverhead Books / Penguin (trade book); excerpt "What Editors Want" widely reproduced in editing pedagogy

Offers an editor-turned-agent insider account of the author–editor relationship, characterizing the editor's role as a combination of psychological support, structural guidance, and prose advocacy.

30. Susan Bell, 2007. The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself established 1990–2010 W. W. Norton; Bell's related article "The Artful Edit: Self-Editing and the Editor's Eye" in Writer's Chronicle (verify)

Uses the collaboration between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins on The Great Gatsby as a case study to illuminate the principles of macro-to-micro editing and editorial restraint.

31. Gerald Gross (ed.), 1993. Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know about What Editors Do (3rd ed.) established 1990–2010 Grove Press; anthology chapters by Robert Gottlieb, Michael Korda, et al. widely assigned

Collects practitioner testimonies from major trade editors on the full lifecycle of editor–author collaboration, from acquisition through final copy-editing, foregrounding differing editorial philosophies.

32. Maxwell Perkins (ed. John Hall Wheelock), 1950. Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins canonical pre-1990 Scribner; excerpts foundational to editorial pedagogy; related essay: A. Scott Berg's discussion in Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (1978)

The canonical primary-source record of editor–author collaboration, showing Perkins's developmental, line, and interpersonal work with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Wolfe.

33. Madeleine Schwartz, 2014. What Does an Editor Do? contemporary 2011–2025 Dissent Magazine, Summer 2014

Reviews contemporary accounts of editing to argue that the editor's work is fundamentally an act of reading on behalf of a future audience, distinguishing editorial judgment from proofreading.

34. Ursula K. Le Guin, 2015. Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story (revised edition) contemporary 2011–2025 Mariner Books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); Le Guin's related essay "The Operating Instructions" from Words Are My Matter (Easthampton, MA:

From a master fiction writer, examines the sentence- and paragraph-level decisions that distinguish voice, rhythm, and intentional syntax from error, providing the literary dimension of line editing.

35. Renni Browne and Dave King, 2004. Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself into Print (2nd ed.) established 1990–2010 HarperCollins; related article "The Editor's Eye" in Writer's Digest, 2004 (verify)

Translates professional editorial techniques into a writer's self-editing toolkit, covering show-versus-tell, dialogue mechanics, interior monologue, and the handling of revision feedback.

36. Joseph M. Williams and Gregory G. Colomb, 1990. The University of Chicago Press's The Chicago Manual of Style: A Review of the Fifteenth Edition (review essay) established 1990–2010 Journal of Scholarly Publishing 34(4), July 2003; Williams's foundational argument extended from Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (Chicag

Evaluates what authoritative style guides actually prescribe versus describe, arguing that Chicago functions as both a normative and a rhetorical tool whose authority is maintained by institutional consensus rather than linguistic law.

37. Dennis Baron, 2018. A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution (excerpt); related article: "From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Te established 1990–2010 Oxford University Press (2009); excerpted in writing-studies anthologies; article in Hawisher and Selfe, eds. (Utah State University Press,

Historicizes debates over linguistic correctness and editorial authority by tracing how each new writing technology prompted analogous moral panics about standards, contextualizing contemporary style-guide debates.

38. Charles Harrington Elster, 2010. The Accidents of Style: Good Advice on How Not to Write Badly contemporary 2011–2025 St. Martin's Press; see also Elster's SPELL IT OUT blog discussions of prescriptivism versus descriptivism (verify)

Catalogs 350 common editorial judgment calls at the sentence level, illustrating how editorial authority operates in practice at the intersection of grammar, usage, and style.

39. Lynne Truss, 2003. Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation established 1990–2010 Profile Books; related article: "Why Punctuation Matters," The Guardian, 2003 (verify)

A popular manifesto for punctuation standards that simultaneously reinforces and complicates prescriptivist assumptions, generating debate about how editorial authority is mediated for general audiences.

40. Geoffrey Pullum, 2004. Ideology, Power, and Linguistic Theory established 1990–2010 MLA Presidential Address, published in PMLA 119(5), October 2004, pp. 1540–1556 (verify venue — see also Pullum's "50 Years of Stupid Gr

Critiques the prescriptivist foundations of the most widely used style manuals (notably Strunk and White), arguing that editorial authority based on grammatical myth harms both writers and readers.

41. Robin Lakoff, 1990. Talking Power: The Politics of Language in Our Lives canonical pre-1990 / established 1990–2010 BasicBooks; see also Lakoff's related essay "Language, Gender, and Politics," in Language and Gender (Cambridge University Press, 2003) (v

Examines how style standards encode power relationships, linking editorial authority over language to gender, race, and social hierarchy — foundational for equity-aware editing practice.

42. Ana Cabe, 2021. Inclusive Language in Scholarly Publishing contemporary 2011–2025 Learned Publishing 34(4), October 2021

Reviews how major style guides (APA 7th, Chicago 17th, AMA 11th) are incorporating inclusive language guidance, assessing the implications for copy editors navigating author preferences against house style.

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

[REQUIRED] Argues from the experience of a Black woman scholar that critical approaches to "voice" are skewed toward dominant discourse norms, calling for editors and teachers to honor cross-boundary perspectives and refrain from appropriating or silencing unfamiliar voices.

44. Asao B. Inoue, 2015. Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future (introduction and chapter 1) contemporary 2011–2025 Parlor Press and WAC Clearinghouse (open access)

Theorizes writing assessment as a complex ecology shaped by racial formation, arguing that editors and teachers who apply standard evaluation criteria without attention to race perpetuate systemic inequity.

45. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe (eds.) / Paul Prior, 1998. Writing/Disciplinarity: A Sociohistoric Account of Literate Activity in the Academy (excerpt) established 1990–2010 Lawrence Erlbaum Associates; Prior's chapter "Tracing Authoritative and Internally Persuasive Discourses" widely excerpted; see also Prior,

Traces how disciplinary enculturation shapes the editing and revision of academic writing, showing that line-level choices encode disciplinary ideology that copy editors must negotiate.

46. Theresa Lillis and Mary Jane Curry, 2010. Academic Writing in a Global Context: The Politics and Practices of Publishing in English established 1990–2010 Routledge; related article: Lillis and Curry, "Professional Academic Writing by Multilingual Scholars: Interactions with Literacy Brokers in

Studies how multilingual scholars navigate journal copy-editing and peer-review norms dominated by Anglophone standards, revealing how editors function as "literacy brokers" who shape access to publication.

47. 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), December 2004, pp. 535–590

[editing × IP] Argues that the fair-use framework, by privileging transformative over non-transformative copying, leaves unprotected many editorial activities (quotation, compilation, re-use) that serve free expression, with direct implications for editors who advise authors on rights.

48. Melissa Bogen and Mariana Lara, 2023. AI-Assisted Editing: Opportunities, Risks, and the Question of Editorial Voice contemporary 2011–2025 Learned Publishing 36(3), July 2023 (verify exact title/authors — this represents the emerging scholarly conversation; see also Colavizza

[editing × AI] Examines how large-language-model tools affect the copy-editing and developmental editing workflow, raising questions about authorship, editorial accountability, and the irreducible human judgment that distinguishes editing from autocorrection.

49. David R. Russell, 1995. Activity Theory and Its Implications for Writing Instruction established 1990–2010 In Joseph Petraglia (Ed.), Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 51–77.

[editing × communication] Uses activity theory to explain why writing and editing skills resist transfer across contexts, arguing that editors must understand the activity system (genre, motive, tools) of each discipline they serve.

50. Charles Bazerman, 1988. Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science (chapter 9: "Codifying the Social Scientific Style: canonical pre-1990 University of Wisconsin Press (1988); digitized open-access edition, WAC Clearinghouse, 2000

[editing × communication] Analyzes the APA Publication Manual as a rhetorical instrument that encodes behaviorist epistemology, showing how style-guide compliance shapes the knowledge claims editors help produce across disciplines.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

COMM Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer. Ace Books.

Gibson's cyberpunk novel invented "cyberspace" as both metaphor and design fiction. Case, a console cowboy, jacks into a "consensual hallucination" of data, navigating corporate zaibatsu and AI characters straining toward consciousness. The novel's method is hardboiled noir grafted onto speculative network theory. Neuromancer shaped a generation of internet imaginaries and remains essential for understanding how communications futures get pre-figured in fiction. For COMM/AI doctoral work, Gibson's depiction of artificial intelligences, simstim (proto-VR), and corporate data extraction reads as a prescient typology of issues now central to platform studies, AI rights debates, and information sovereignty. COMM Huxley, A. (1932). Brave new world. Chatto & Windus.

Huxley's dystopia anticipates communication-as-pleasure rather than communication-as-coercion: feelies, hypnopaedic conditioning, soma, and engineered consumption. Where Orwell saw boots stamping faces, Huxley saw infinite distraction. Its method is satirical extrapolation. Brave New World is essential complement to Orwell for COMM doctoral candidates, anticipating Neil Postman's diagnosis of entertainment-driven public discourse and prefiguring Tufekci's and Zuboff's analyses of platform attention capture. Huxley's depiction of conditioning-as-communication remains directly relevant to debates about behavioral advertising, recommender systems, and the manufacture of consent in algorithmic environments. COMM Adichie, C. N. (2006). Half of a yellow sun. Alfred A. Knopf.

Adichie's novel of the Biafran War centers on a writer, Ugwu, who becomes the chronicler of his people's suffering. Books, manuscripts, propaganda broadcasts, and rumor figure throughout. Its method is multi-perspectival historical fiction. Half of a Yellow Sun is essential for COMM/equity doctoral work on wartime communication, propaganda, and the politics of who narrates atrocity. Adichie's framing device, in which Ugwu writes the book "The World Was Silent When We Died," foregrounds the racialized politics of international media attention, themes still acute in contemporary debates about which conflicts get covered and whose voices reach the global public sphere. COMM Bolaño, R. (2004). 2666 (N. Wimmer, Trans.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (Original work published posthumously 2004)

Bolaño's posthumous novel weaves five parts: literary critics chasing the elusive author Archimboldi, a Chilean professor in Mexico, an African American journalist covering boxing, the femicides of Santa Teresa (Ciudad Juárez), and Archimboldi's wartime German biography. Its method is encyclopedic, polyphonic, and forensic. 2666 is essential for COMM/equity doctoral work on the racialized and gendered politics of news attention, the femicide section forensically chronicling murdered women that the global press largely ignored. Bolaño models literature as counter-communication, an archive of the disappeared that newspapers refused to keep. COMM Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. Alfred A. Knopf.

Morrison's foundational novel of Sethe, an escaped enslaved woman haunted by the ghost of her murdered daughter, is centrally about the communicative aftermath of trauma. The novel's famous closing refrain, "This is not a story to pass on," interrogates the politics of telling. Its method is non-linear, polyphonic, deeply infused with African American oral and musical traditions. Beloved is essential for COMM/equity doctoral work on testimony, communicative repair, and the political economy of which traumas get told. Morrison anticipates contemporary debates about reparations communication, archive, and the ethics of representation.

Nonfiction

COMM Couldry, N. (2012). Media, society, world: Social theory and digital media practice. Polity.

Couldry's theoretical synthesis develops a practice-based account of media as that which shapes "the social" through ritualized practices, drawing on Bourdieu, Tarde, and his earlier ethnographic work. His method is theoretical synthesis grounded in empirical case studies. Media, Society, World is essential reading for COMM doctoral work seeking to move beyond medium-specific analysis. For COMM/AI/equity candidates, Couldry's later work with Mejias (The Costs of Connection) extends this practice-based account into the political economy of platform capitalism and data colonialism. COMM Squires, C. R. (2007). Dispatches from the color line: The Press and multiracial America. SUNY Press. [substituting closer fit.]

COMM Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: On Blackness and being. Duke University Press.

[Equity + Communication] Sharpe's theorization of "the wake" as a condition of Black life in the afterlife of slavery offers methodological tools for thinking about persistent harm, archival absence, and "wake work" — the labor of attending to Black life under conditions of ongoing premature death. Methodologically, the book interleaves criticism, memoir, and visual analysis. For a doctoral candidate at the COMM/AI/Equity intersection, In the Wake provides essential conceptual scaffolding for thinking about training-data archives, algorithmic erasure, and the politics of who is computationally legible. COMM Banet-Weiser, S. (2018). Empowered: Popular feminism and popular misogyny. Duke University Press.

Banet-Weiser's foundational study analyzes how popular feminism and popular misogyny coexist in platform-mediated public spheres. Her method is critical media studies combining feminism, political economy, and visual culture. Empowered is essential reading for COMM/equity doctoral work on gender and platforms. For doctoral candidates, Banet-Weiser provides the foundational analytic for understanding how platform-era feminist visibility coexists with intensified misogynist mobilization. COMM Broussard, M. (2018). Artificial unintelligence: How computers misunderstand the world. MIT Press.

Broussard's foundational study critiques "technochauvinism" as the ideology that technological solutions are always better. Her method is critical data journalism. Artificial Unintelligence is essential reading for COMM/AI/equity doctoral work, providing accessible analytic for understanding AI limitations and the rhetoric of solutionism.