PhD Year 1 · Fall 2028

Aug 28 – Dec 15, 2028 · 10 courses

Doctoral-level theory + research methods + integration seminars + comp-list build

COMM-701 — COMM 701 · Advanced Communication Theory

COMM pillar · PhD Year 1 · Fall 2028

A doctoral seminar in the high-theoretical end of the communication field — Bourdieu, Habermas, Carey re-read, Cohen's Between Truth and Power, Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism, Bratton's The Stack. The course that builds the dissertation's theoretical apparatus.

Essential books

★ Marshall McLuhan — Understanding Media
★ Walter Benjamin — The Work of Art…
★ Harold Innis — The Bias of Communication
★ Raymond Williams — Television
★ Couldry & Hepp — The Mediated Construction of Reality

Supplementary books

☆ Manuel Castells — Communication Power
☆ N. Katherine Hayles — Unthought
☆ Wendy Chun — Programmed Visions
☆ Alexander Galloway — Protocol
☆ Friedrich Kittler — Gramophone, Film, Typewriter

Papers (50)

1. McLuhan, Marshall, 1964. The Medium is the Message canonical pre-1990 Chapter 1 in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill), reprinted in various anthologies

Proposes that the form of a medium embeds itself in any message it conveys, shaping perception independently of content.

2. Innis, Harold A., 1951. A Plea for Time canonical pre-1990 University of Toronto Quarterly 19(4), pp. 1–20 (also as introduction to The Bias of Communication)

Argues that time-biased media sustain communal memory and balanced civilization against the space-bias of modern empire-building monopolies of knowledge.

3. Williams, Raymond, 1973. Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory canonical pre-1990 New Left Review I/82, pp. 3–16

Refines the base/superstructure metaphor by introducing residual, dominant, and emergent cultural formations, making Marxist theory flexible enough for media analysis.

4. Hall, Stuart, 1980 [orig. stencilled 1973]. Encoding/Decoding canonical pre-1990 Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, eds. Hall et al. (Hutchinson/CCCS), pp. 128–138

Models mass communication as a circuit of production, circulation, and consumption in which audiences decode messages through dominant, negotiated, or oppositional positions.

5. Carey, James W., 1975. A Cultural Approach to Communication canonical pre-1990 Communication 2(1), pp. 1–22

Distinguishes a ritual view of communication — sustaining society in time through shared meaning — from the dominant transmission view.

6. Kittler, Friedrich A., 1986 [trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, 19. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (introductory essay "Preface") canonical pre-1990 Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford University Press), pp. 1–19

Opens the argument that storage, transmission, and computation technologies determine the a priori conditions under which humans process the real.

7. Baudrillard, Jean, 1981 [trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, 1994]. Simulacra and Simulation (excerpt: "The Precession of Simulacra") canonical pre-1990 Simulacra and Simulation (University of Michigan Press), pp. 1–42

Theorizes that in late capitalism the sign-order has imploded, replacing reality with self-referential simulation — a foundational provocation for media philosophy.

8. Habermas, Jürgen, 1964 [trans. Sara Lennox and Frank Lennox, 1974]. The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article canonical pre-1990 New German Critique 3, pp. 49–55

Provides the canonical concise definition of the bourgeois public sphere as a domain of rational-critical discourse mediating between civil society and the state.

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

Challenges Habermas by documenting subaltern counterpublics and showing that bracketing of social inequality produces exclusion rather than universality.

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

Reconceptualizes publics as self-organized through discourse circulation rather than institutional designation, foregrounding the role of strangers and address.

11. Negt, Oskar and Kluge, Alexander, 1972 [trans. Peter Labanyi et al., 1993]. The Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (excerpt: "The Proletarian Public Sphere canonical pre-1990 Public Sphere and Experience (University of Minnesota Press), pp. 1–53 (verify)

Constructs a proletarian counter-public sphere rooted in lived social experience and labor, opposed to the abstract universalism of the bourgeois public.

12. Dahlberg, Lincoln, 2001. The Internet and Democratic Discourse: Exploring the Prospects of Online Deliberative Forums Extending the Public Sphere established 1990-2010 Information, Communication & Society 4(4), pp. 615–633

Applies Habermasian criteria to early internet forums, identifying structural limits on digital deliberation that prefigure later platform critique.

13. Dean, Jodi, 2003. Why the Net is not a Public Sphere established 1990-2010 Constellations 10(1), pp. 95–112

Argues that communicative capitalism forecloses genuine democratic publics online by absorbing political speech into endless circulation without political effect.

14. Hall, Stuart, 1980. Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms canonical pre-1990 Media, Culture & Society 2(1), pp. 57–72

Maps the divergence between culturalist (Williams, Thompson) and structuralist (Althusser, Lévi-Strauss) paradigms and stakes out cultural studies as a third space.

15. Williams, Raymond, 1961. The Analysis of Culture canonical pre-1990 Chapter 2 in The Long Revolution (Chatto and Windus), pp. 57–88; widely anthologized

Proposes three levels of culture — ideal, documentary, and social — and argues for a sociology of culture that attends to lived experience alongside texts.

16. Gilroy, Paul, 1987. There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (Chapter 1: "Civilization and Its Discontents: 'Race', Culture and National Belonging in Contemporary canonical pre-1990 There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Hutchinson), pp. 11–42

Critiques ethnic absolutism in British cultural politics, theorizing the Black Atlantic as a counter-culture of modernity that challenges nationalist media narratives.

17. hooks, bell, 1992. The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators established 1990-2010 Chapter 7 in Black Looks: Race and Representation (South End Press), pp. 115–131

Theorizes the oppositional gaze as a practice of resistance through which Black women refuse dominant cinematic and media representations.

18. Morley, David, 1993. Active Audience Theory: Pendulums and Pitfalls established 1990-2010 Journal of Communication 43(4), pp. 13–19

Reviews the active-audience paradigm after a decade, cautioning against voluntarist readings that ignore structural constraints on decoding practices.

19. Grossberg, Lawrence, 1986. On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall canonical pre-1990 Journal of Communication Inquiry 10(2), pp. 45–60

Hall explains the theory of articulation — contingent linkage rather than necessary correspondence — as the central methodological move of cultural studies.

20. Kittler, Friedrich A., 1999. There Is No Software established 1990-2010 CTheory (October 1995); reprinted in Literature, Media, Information Systems, ed. Johnston (G+B Arts), pp. 147–155

Argues that "software" is an idealist illusion masking hardware inscription, anchoring media theory in the physical layer of signal processing.

21. Krämer, Sybille, 2006. The Cultural Techniques of Time Axis Manipulation: On Friedrich Kittler's Conception of Media established 1990-2010 Theory, Culture & Society 23(7–8), pp. 93–109

Reconstructs Kittler's notion of time-axis manipulation to show how analog storage media restructure temporal experience as a media-material process.

22. Parikka, Jussi, 2012. New Materialism as Media Theory: Medianatures and Dirty Matter contemporary 2011-2025 Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9(1), pp. 95–100

Brings new materialist philosophy into dialogue with media archaeology to reframe media infrastructures as entanglements of geology, labor, and code.

23. Galloway, Alexander R., 2004. Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (excerpt: Chapter 1 "Physical Media") established 1990-2010 Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (MIT Press), pp. 1–30

Argues that internet protocols (DNS, TCP/IP) constitute a distributed form of control that is more powerful precisely because it appears open and decentralized.

24. Ernst, Wolfgang, 2013. Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus History and Narrative of Media contemporary 2011-2025 Chapter 11 in Digital Memory and the Archive (University of Minnesota Press), pp. 239–255

Develops media archaeography as a method that reads technical devices as primary archives rather than treating them through historical narrative.

25. Zielinski, Siegfried, 1999 [trans. Gloria Custance, 2006]. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Introduction: "Anarchaeology") established 1990-2010 Deep Time of the Media (MIT Press), pp. 1–15

Proposes an-archaelogy — looking for media-historical variants and ruptures rather than continuous genealogies — as a counter-method to linear media history.

26. Couldry, Nick and Hepp, Andreas, 2013. Conceptualizing Mediatization: Contexts, Traditions, Arguments contemporary 2011-2025 Communication Theory 23(3), pp. 191–202

Synthesizes Anglo-American and European mediatization research traditions, distinguishing institutional and social-constructivist approaches and proposing a common analytical framework.

27. Hjarvard, Stig, 2008. The Mediatization of Society: A Theory of the Media as Agents of Social and Cultural Change established 1990-2010 Nordicom Review 29(2), pp. 105–134

Formalizes mediatization as a macro-process whereby institutions and social practices increasingly adapt to media logic as a constitutive feature of late modernity.

28. Krotz, Friedrich, 2007. The Meta-Process of Mediatization as a Conceptual Frame established 1990-2010 Global Media and Communication 3(3), pp. 256–260

Positions mediatization as a long-run meta-process comparable to globalization and individualization, calling for historical and comparative empirical research.

29. Lundby, Knut, 2009. Media Logic: Looking for Social Interaction established 1990-2010 Chapter 8 in Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences, ed. Lundby (Peter Lang), pp. 101–119

Critically assesses Altheide and Snow's media-logic concept and reformulates it for contemporary multi-platform environments, connecting it to interaction order.

30. Silverstone, Roger, 2002. Mediapolis and the Ethics of Media established 1990-2010 Television and New Media 3(3), pp. 317–322

Introduces the concept of mediapolis — the mediated public space of global politics — and grounds media studies in an ethics of hospitality and responsibility.

31. Couldry, Nick, 2004. Theorising Media as Practice established 1990-2010 Social Semiotics 14(2), pp. 115–132

Reframes media studies around the question "what do people do in relation to media?" rather than textual analysis, connecting to Bourdieu and Schatzki's practice theory.

32. Castells, Manuel, 2000. Materials for an Exploratory Theory of the Network Society established 1990-2010 British Journal of Sociology 51(1), pp. 5–24

Synthesizes the structural logic of information networks into an exploratory social theory, arguing that power flows through networks rather than fixed institutions.

33. van Dijk, Jan, 2006. The Network Society (excerpt: Chapter 2 "The Infrastructure of the Network Society") established 1990-2010 The Network Society: Social Aspects of New Media, 2nd ed. (Sage), pp. 29–63

Maps the material and social layers of network infrastructure, distinguishing transport, service, and use layers that structure digital inequality.

34. boyd, danah m. and Ellison, Nicole B., 2007. Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship established 1990-2010 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1), pp. 210–230

Provides the canonical scholarly definition of social network sites and surveys their sociotechnical architectures, establishing a shared vocabulary for SNS research.

35. Papacharissi, Zizi, 2015. Affective Publics and Structures of Storytelling: Sentiment, Events and Mediality contemporary 2011-2025 Information, Communication & Society 19(3), pp. 307–324

Theorizes how ambient media and hashtag affordances enable affective convergence of publics that organize around feeling and storytelling rather than rational argument.

36. Terranova, Tiziana, 2000. Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy established 1990-2010 Social Text 18(2), pp. 33–58

Theorizes the exploitation of unpaid digital labor — website building, fan content, listserv moderation — as central to the political economy of the internet.

37. Srnicek, Nick, 2017. Platform Capitalism (excerpt: Chapter 2 "The Emergence of Platform Capitalism") contemporary 2011-2025 Platform Capitalism (Polity Press), pp. 36–77

Classifies platform types (advertising, cloud, industrial, product, lean) and argues that data extraction is the structural logic of contemporary digital capitalism.

38. Wiener, Norbert, 1948. Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (excerpt: Chapter 1 "Newtonian and Bergsonian Time") canonical pre-1990 Cybernetics (MIT Press/Wiley), pp. 1–39 (verify)

Establishes cybernetics as the scientific study of communication and control in both organism and machine, foundational to all information-theoretic media thinking.

39. Hayles, N. Katherine, 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (excerpt: Chapter 1 "Toward Embodied Virtuality") established 1990-2010 How We Became Posthuman (University of Chicago Press), pp. 1–24

Historicizes the information/materiality split through three waves of cybernetics, arguing that the posthuman does not require abandoning embodiment.

40. Hayles, N. Katherine, 2012. Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes contemporary 2011-2025 Profession 2007, pp. 187–199; reprinted in various collections. Also see: Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, 2017, Chap

Distinguishes hyper attention (networked, multi-tasking) from deep attention (linear, sustained), framing digital media as cognitive environment rather than mere tool.

41. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, 2016. Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (excerpt: Chapter 1 "Habits of Updating") contemporary 2011-2025 Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT Press), pp. 1–44

Argues that habitual updating produces homophily and filter bubbles as a structural feature of networked culture, not a bug but its organizing logic.

42. Galloway, Alexander R. and Thacker, Eugene, 2007. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (excerpt: Chapter 1 "Networks") established 1990-2010 The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (University of Minnesota Press), pp. 1–30

Develops a political philosophy of networks as protocological and antagonistic systems, introducing the concept of the exploit as resistance through protocol inversion.

43. Haraway, Donna J., 1985. A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s canonical pre-1990 Socialist Review 80, pp. 65–108

Uses the figure of the cyborg to deconstruct organic/technical, nature/culture dualisms, proposing a feminist politics of irony and affinity for the information age.

44. Hayles, N. Katherine, 2017. Cognitive Assemblages: Technical Agency and Human Interactions contemporary 2011-2025 Critical Inquiry 43(1), pp. 32–55

Introduces cognitive assemblages — distributed cognitive systems spanning human and technical actors — as the appropriate unit of analysis for AI-era media environments.

45. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, 2018. Querying Homophily: Race and Networks contemporary 2011-2025 Pattern Discrimination, eds. Apprich et al. (University of Minnesota Press/meson press), pp. 59–97

Connects the statistical concept of homophily to racial sorting in algorithmic systems, arguing that networks discriminate through similarity rather than explicit prejudice.

46. Coombe, Rosemary J., 1993. Tactics of Appropriation and the Politics of Recognition in Late Modern Democracies established 1990-2010 Political Theory 21(3), pp. 411–433

Theorizes cultural appropriation as a terrain of semiotic struggle in which intellectual-property regimes discipline subaltern claims to symbols and narrative.

47. Hall, Stuart, 1997. The Spectacle of the Other established 1990-2010 Chapter 4 in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Hall (Sage/Open University), pp. 223–290

Analyses how difference is constructed and Othered through media representation, combining semiotics, psychoanalysis, and discourse theory in a canonical synthesis.

48. Nakamura, Lisa, 2002. Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet established 1990-2010 works and days 13(25/26), pp. 181–193; widely reprinted (verify)

Introduces the concept of identity tourism to describe how white internet users perform racial difference as costume, exposing the racial politics of early cyberspace.

49. Couldry, Nick, 2010. Theorising Media as Practice (revised and extended) established 1990-2010 Chapter 2 in Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism (Sage), pp. 37–58

Extends practice-theory to the neoliberal media environment, arguing that voice — the capacity to give account of oneself — is the normative core of a media ethics.

50. Benjamin, Walter, 1935 [trans. Harry Zohn, 1968; revised trans. Edmund Jephcott,. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version) canonical pre-1990 Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935–1938, eds. Eiland and Jennings (Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 101–133

Argues that mechanical reproduction destroys the aura of the unique artwork, transforming reception from ritual contemplation to politicized distraction and mass collectivity.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

COMM Oyler, L. (2021). Fake accounts. Catapult.

Oyler's narrator discovers her boyfriend runs a conspiracy-theory Instagram account and flees to Berlin, where she creates fake dating profiles. The novel skewers internet sincerity, self-curation, and post-2016 political performance. Its method is acidic first-person essayistic fiction, drawing on the rhythms of online discourse. Fake Accounts dramatizes identity construction, conspiracy media, and the performative authenticity demands of platform life. For COMM/equity doctoral candidates, Oyler's novel pairs productively with disinformation scholarship (boyd, Phillips) and offers a granular account of how platform affordances reshape subjectivity, intimacy, and political belief. COMM Burgess, A. (1962). A clockwork orange. William Heinemann.

Burgess's novel deploys an invented argot, Nadsat, to render his protagonist Alex's first-person narration of ultraviolence and state-imposed behavioral conditioning. The novel makes language itself the site of struggle between individual interiority and behavioral engineering. Its method is linguistic invention as ethical estrangement. A Clockwork Orange is essential for COMM/equity doctoral work on language, conditioning, and the rhetoric of rehabilitation. Burgess's Ludovico Technique prefigures contemporary debates about behavior modification through algorithmic feedback, with implications for AI policy and the ethics of recommender systems that nudge users toward platform-determined outcomes. COMM Ngugi wa Thiong'o. (1977). Petals of blood. Heinemann.

Ngugi's novel of post-independence Kenya features a journalist, lawyer, teacher, and barmaid suspected of murder in a transforming town. The novel weaves news reportage, oral storytelling, and political tract into its texture. Its method is polyphonic Marxist-realist novel. Petals of Blood is essential for COMM/equity doctoral work on postcolonial communication, the persistence of oral traditions, and the role of journalism in political struggle. Ngugi models communication as embedded in material and political economy, anticipating Couldry and Mejias's analysis of data colonialism in contemporary platform environments. COMM Roy, A. (1997). The god of small things. Random House.

Roy's novel of the Ipe family in Kerala braids personal and political tragedy through highly mediated forms of communication: love letters, court proceedings, news reports, and the spectral genre of "love laws" governing whom Indians may speak with intimately. Its method is non-linear, lyrical, deeply intertextual. The God of Small Things is essential for COMM/equity doctoral work on caste, gendered speech regulation, and the silences inscribed in family communication. Roy models how literary form (recursive narration, fragmentation) can render trauma that resists straightforward communication, an insight relevant to media studies of representation. COMM Morrison, T. (1977). Song of Solomon. Alfred A. Knopf.

Morrison's novel of Milkman Dead's search for his ancestral story features oral tradition, family secrets, and a chase across the American South. Its method is mythic realism deeply infused with African American storytelling traditions. Song of Solomon is essential for COMM/equity doctoral work on oral tradition as historical archive, naming as communicative practice, and the politics of inherited story. Morrison models how communicative tradition encodes survival knowledge across generations, relevant to contemporary debates about indigenous communication theory and the limits of computational archives.

Nonfiction

COMM Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the network society. Blackwell.

Castells's foundational trilogy opens with this analysis of how networked information capitalism reorganizes economy, work, and identity. His method is comparative-empirical political sociology of networks. The Rise of the Network Society remains essential reading for COMM doctoral candidates, providing the macro framework for understanding networked communication's transformation of social structure. For COMM/AI/equity candidates, Castells's network analysis offers a methodological resource for thinking about platform power that complements more critical political-economic accounts (Zuboff, Srnicek). COMM Brock, A. (2020). Distributed Blackness: African American cybercultures. NYU Press.

Brock's foundational study develops "Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis" (CTDA) to analyze Black Twitter, Afrofuturism, and Black gaming cultures. His method is critical race media studies combining technology studies with linguistic and cultural analysis. Distributed Blackness is essential reading for COMM/equity/AI doctoral work, providing the most rigorous account of Black digital practice as world-making rather than mere participation. For doctoral candidates working at the platform/equity intersection, Brock offers methodological resources for analyzing minoritized digital communities on their own epistemological terms. COMM Nissenbaum, H. (2010). Privacy in context: Technology, policy, and the integrity of social life. Stanford Law Books.

Nissenbaum's foundational study develops "contextual integrity" as the theoretical framework for privacy in networked environments. Her method is philosophical-legal theory of privacy. Privacy in Context is essential reading for COMM/IP/AI doctoral work. For doctoral candidates, Nissenbaum's contextual-integrity framework offers the most rigorous philosophical analytic for analyzing privacy harms in AI training, platform data extraction, and biometric surveillance. COMM Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. NYU Press.

Jenkins's foundational study develops "convergence culture" as the analytic for how participatory audiences interact across media platforms. His method is participatory cultural studies. Convergence Culture is essential reading for COMM/IP doctoral work on audience studies. For doctoral candidates, Jenkins's analytic of participatory culture remains generative even as later scholars (Gillespie, Couldry) critique its optimism, providing essential context for current platform debates about creator labor and copyright. COMM Bratton, B. H. (2015). The stack: On software and sovereignty. MIT Press.

Bratton's foundational theoretical study analyzes contemporary planetary computation as "the Stack," composed of layers from Earth to Cloud to User. His method is speculative geopolitical theory of computation. The Stack is essential reading for COMM/AI doctoral work on the geopolitics of platforms. For doctoral candidates, Bratton provides the most ambitious theoretical framework for thinking about platforms as planetary infrastructure with implications for sovereignty.

EQ-701 — EQ 701 · Decolonizing Technology and Knowledge Production

EQ pillar · PhD Year 1 · Fall 2028

Doctoral seminar on the postcolonial and decolonial readings of the science/technology/IP nexus. Read alongside the comprehensive-exam Equity reading list. Builds the position from which the dissertation will address Global-South AI governance, data sovereignty, and knowledge-production hierarchies.

Essential books

★ Frantz Fanon — The Wretched of the Earth
★ Edward Said — Orientalism
★ Walter Mignolo — Darker Side of Western Modernity
★ Achille Mbembe — Critique of Black Reason
★ Linda Tuhiwai Smith — Decolonizing Methodologies

Supplementary books

☆ Abeba Birhane — Algorithmic Colonization of Africa
☆ Mohamed, Png & Isaac — Decolonial AI
☆ Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o — Decolonising the Mind
☆ Gayatri Spivak — A Critique of Postcolonial Reason
☆ Boatema Boateng — The Copyright Thing Doesn't Work Here

Papers (50)

1. Edward W. Said, 1978. Orientalism canonical pre-1990 Pantheon Books [excerpt ch. 1: "Knowing the Oriental"]

Establishes the discursive formation of "the Orient" as a Western colonial knowledge-project that produces the non-West as knowable, manageable, and inferior Other.

2. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? canonical pre-1990 In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (pp. 271–313). University of Illinois Press.

Argues that colonial epistemic violence forecloses subaltern speech within Western intellectual frameworks, demanding that scholars reckon with their own complicity in silencing marginalized voices.

3. Homi K. Bhabha, 1984. Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse canonical pre-1990 October, 28, 125–133.

Theorizes colonial mimicry as a site of ambivalence wherein the colonized subject is produced as "almost the same but not quite," revealing instability at the heart of colonial authority.

4. Dipesh Chakrabarty, 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference [Introduction: The Idea of Provincializing Europe] established 1990-2010 Princeton University Press [journal extract from Representations, 37, 1992, pp. 1–26] (verify)

Proposes that European historicism must be "provincialized" by foregrounding non-Western pasts that exceed its master narrative of modernity and development.

5. Stuart Hall, 1992. The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power established 1990-2010 In S. Hall & B. Gieben (Eds.), Formations of Modernity (pp. 275–332). Polity/Open University Press.

Extends Said's discourse analysis to examine how "the West" constructs itself through differentiation from colonial "the Rest," producing a self-validating circuit of knowledge and power.

6. Anne McClintock, 1992. The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term "Post-Colonialism established 1990-2010 Social Text, 31/32, 84–98.

Critiques the temporal logic of the "post-colonial" label as prematurely consigning colonial power relations to the past, obscuring ongoing imperial formations.

7. Aníbal Quijano, 2000. Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America established 1990-2010 Nepantla: Views from South, 1(3), 533–580.

Introduces the concept of the "coloniality of power" to show that racial/ethnic hierarchies inaugurated by conquest persist as a structural principle of the modern/colonial world-system.

8. Walter D. Mignolo, 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking [excerpt: "Coloniality of Power and the Colonial Diff established 1990-2010 Princeton University Press / Nepantla: Views from South, 1(1), 2000 (verify)

Develops "border thinking" as an epistemic position from which colonial subjects can engage but exceed Western rationality, articulating a decolonial option.

9. Sylvia Wynter, 2003. Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation — An Argument established 1990-2010 CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337.

Argues that the Western liberal figure of "Man" overrepresents one genre of being as the human universal, demanding a pluriversal reconception of humanity that displaces colonial ontology.

10. María Lugones, 2007. Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System established 1990-2010 Hypatia, 22(1), 186–219.

Extends Quijano's coloniality of power by inserting gender and sexuality, arguing that the colonial/modern gender system imposed heteronormativity as part of racial-civilizational hierarchy.

11. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, 2007. On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept established 1990-2010 Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 240–270.

Elaborates "coloniality of being" to capture the ontological dimension of colonial rule — the damnation of entire populations to sub-human or non-being status — extending Quijano and Wynter.

12. Arturo Escobar, 2007. Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: The Latin American Modernity/Coloniality Research Program established 1990-2010 Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 179–210.

Surveys the modernity/coloniality/decoloniality research program and its call for "pluriversal" world-making as an alternative to Eurocentric singular modernity.

13. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples [ch. 1: "Imperialism, History, Writing, and Theory"] established 1990-2010 Zed Books / University of Otago Press.

Argues that Western research methodologies are complicit in colonial knowledge extraction from Indigenous peoples, and proposes decolonizing research as a political and ethical imperative.

14. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, 2012. Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor contemporary 2011-2025 Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40.

Argues that uncritical metaphorical use of "decolonization" in social justice discourse displaces Indigenous land reclamation and settles settler guilt without material transformation.

15. Eve Tuck, 2009. Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities established 1990-2010 Harvard Educational Review, 79(3), 409–428.

Critiques "damage-centered" research narratives that define Indigenous and marginalized communities through pathology, and advocates desire-based frameworks that foreground agency and complexity.

16. Glen Sean Coulthard, 2007. Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the "Politics of Recognition" in Canada established 1990-2010 Contemporary Political Theory, 6(4), 437–460.

Drawing on Fanon, critiques liberal "politics of recognition" as reproducing colonial relations by conditioning Indigenous self-determination on state-granted recognition rather than land restitution.

17. Margaret Kovach, 2009. Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts [ch. 2: "Situating Indigenous Methodologies"] established 1990-2010 University of Toronto Press.

Articulates the epistemological and relational distinctiveness of Indigenous research methodologies, situating them within tribal knowledge systems rather than Western qualitative traditions.

18. Shawn Wilson, 2008. Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods [ch. 3: "An Indigenous Paradigm"] established 1990-2010 Fernwood Publishing.

Proposes relationality and accountability to all relations — not just human — as the foundational axiological and ontological commitments of an Indigenous research paradigm.

19. Frantz Fanon, 1961. The Wretched of the Earth [ch. 1: "On Violence"; ch. 5: "Colonial War and Mental Disorders"] canonical pre-1990 Présence Africaine / Grove Press (trans. Richard Philcox, 2004).

Analyses colonial violence as constitutive of both the colony and the colonizer's subjectivity, and charts the psychological and political conditions for decolonial liberation.

20. Sylvia Wynter, 1995. 1492: A New World View established 1990-2010 In V. Lawrence Hyatt & R. Nettleford (Eds.), Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas (pp. 5–57). Smithsonian Institution Press.

Reframes 1492 not as discovery but as the moment when a specifically Christian-bourgeois genre of "Man" became globalized through the reduction and classification of Indigenous and African peoples.

21. Achille Mbembe, 2003. Necropolitics established 1990-2010 Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40.

Extends Foucault's biopower to theorize "necropolitics" — sovereign power exercised through the determination of who may live and who must die — grounded in colonial plantation and occupation logics.

22. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, 1986. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature [ch. 1: "The Language of African Literature"] canonical pre-1990 James Currey / Heinemann.

Argues that African adoption of European colonial languages perpetuates cultural and epistemic colonization, and advocates writing in African languages as an act of decolonial consciousness.

23. Paul Gilroy, 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness [Introduction: "Joining-Up Writing and Politics"] established 1990-2010 Harvard University Press.

Theorizes the Black Atlantic as a counter-culture of modernity that disrupts ethnocentric conceptions of nation and tradition through hybrid, diasporic routes of cultural production.

24. Achille Mbembe, 2017. Critique of Black Reason [ch. 1: "The Subject of the World"] contemporary 2011-2025 Duke University Press (trans. Laurent Dubois).

Traces the historical construction of Blackness as an instrument of capital and colonial power, and envisions an Afropolitanism as a creative force for a shared planetary future.

25. Warwick Anderson, 2002. Postcolonial Technoscience established 1990-2010 Social Studies of Science, 32(5–6), 643–658.

Maps the emergence of "postcolonial technoscience" as a field that interrogates how colonial histories shaped the production, circulation, and legitimation of scientific knowledge.

26. Banu Subramaniam, Laura Foster, Sandra Harding, and Rajani Bhatia, 2017. Feminism, Postcolonialism, Technoscience contemporary 2011-2025 In U. Felt et al. (Eds.), The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (4th ed., pp. 407–433). MIT Press.

Synthesizes feminist STS and postcolonial STS to argue for situated, embodied, and anti-racist approaches to the co-production of gender, race, and technoscience.

27. Sandra Harding, 2008. Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities [ch. 1: "Introduction: Two Cultures of Democratic Science Projects"] established 1990-2010 Duke University Press.

Argues that "weak" notions of objectivity mask Eurocentric and androcentric standpoints, and that epistemologies "from below" generate stronger, more democratic sciences.

28. Helen Verran, 2001. Science and an African Logic [Introduction and ch. 2] established 1990-2010 University of Chicago Press.

Challenges the assumed universality of Western mathematical logic by examining Yoruba number practices, demonstrating that different "logics" are enacted rather than discovered.

29. Kim TallBear, 2013. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science [Introduction: "Genomic Science in Indian Country"] contemporary 2011-2025 University of Minnesota Press.

Demonstrates how genomic science reproduces settler-colonial logics by substituting genetic metrics for Indigenous relational and political definitions of tribal membership.

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

Introduces co-production as an analytic idiom for understanding how the production of scientific knowledge and social order are mutually constitutive, with implications for postcolonial governance.

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

Applies decolonial theory — particularly concepts of coloniality of power, algorithmic decision-making, and representation — to propose a research agenda for socially just AI development.

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

Argues that the deployment of AI systems in Africa — trained on non-African data and driven by external commercial interests — replicates colonial extraction and cultural erasure.

33. 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), 336–349.

Theorizes "data colonialism" as a new phase in which continuous extraction of social life as data replicates colonial accumulation, producing new subject-formations through surveillance infrastructure.

34. Ruha Benjamin, 2019. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code [ch. 1: "Engineered Inequity"] contemporary 2011-2025 Polity Press.

Coins the "New Jim Code" to describe how algorithms and automated systems encode and extend racial hierarchy under the cover of technical neutrality and innovation.

35. Nanjala Nyabola, 2018. Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Politics in Kenya [ch. 1] contemporary 2011-2025 Zed Books.

Examines how digital platforms intersect with postcolonial political economies in Kenya, showing that algorithmic architectures designed in the Global North reproduce informational dependency.

36. Bianca Wylie and Sean McDonald, 2018. What Is a Smart City? [Is It Colonialism in Disguise?] contemporary 2011-2025 Medium / OpenNorth, essay/preprint. (verify)

Critiques smart-city discourse as a new frontier of techno-colonial extraction, whereby platform corporations acquire governance capacities and data rights over urban communities without democratic consent.

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

Articulates Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics as principles for Indigenous data governance that complement FAIR data principles with power and sovereignty considerations.

38. Tahu Kukutai and John Taylor (Eds.), 2016. Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Toward an Agenda [ch. 1: "Data Sovereignty for Indigenous Peoples"] contemporary 2011-2025 ANU Press. AIATSIS Research Publications.

Frames Indigenous data sovereignty as the right of Indigenous nations to govern collection, ownership, and application of data about their peoples, territories, and knowledge systems.

39. Maggie Walter and Michele Swain (formerly Suina), 2019. Indigenous Data Sovereignty and the Role of Statistics in Decolonization contemporary 2011-2025 In T. Kukutai & R. Walker (Eds.), Indigenous Statistics (2nd ed.). Routledge. (verify)

Demonstrates how national statistical systems have historically erased Indigenous identities and advocates for Indigenous-controlled data collection as a tool of self-determination.

40. C. Matthew Snipp, 2016. What Does Data Sovereignty Imply: What Does It Look Like in Practice? contemporary 2011-2025 In T. Kukutai & J. Taylor (Eds.), Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Toward an Agenda (pp. 39–55). ANU Press.

Provides a comparative analysis of Indigenous data sovereignty initiatives in Aotearoa New Zealand and the United States, identifying institutional and legal conditions for their practical realization.

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

Documents the movement for tribal data sovereignty in the United States, tracing how the First Nations Information Governance Centre model can be adapted to the US tribal context.

42. Maggie Walter and Chris Andersen, 2013. Indigenous Statistics: A Quantitative Research Methodology [ch. 1: "The Problem with Numbers"] contemporary 2011-2025 Left Coast Press / Routledge.

Challenges positivist quantitative social science for rendering Indigenous peoples as problems to be solved, and develops an Indigenous quantitative methodology grounded in sovereignty and self-representation.

43. Boatema Boateng, 2011. The Copyright Thing Doesn't Work Here: Adinkra and Kente Cloth and Intellectual Property in Ghana [ch. 1: "Traditional Cultural Expressions contemporary 2011-2025 University of Minnesota Press.

Demonstrates that Western copyright frameworks structurally cannot protect Ghanaian Adinkra and Kente traditional cultural expressions, calling for sui generis IP regimes rooted in African communal ownership norms.

44. Aroha Mead and Steven Ratuva (Eds.), 2007. Pacific Genes and Life Patents: Pacific Indigenous Experiences and Analysis of the Commodification and Ownership of Life established 1990-2010 Call of the Earth Llamado de la Tierra / United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies.

Compiles Indigenous Pacific voices on how biopiracy and life-form patents threaten traditional knowledge systems, calling for community-based IP governance and international treaty reform.

45. Jane Anderson and Kirsty Gover, 2021. Indigenous Peoples and Intellectual Property: A Reader [Introduction: "The Politics of Recognition in IP Regimes"] contemporary 2011-2025 Edward Elgar Publishing. (verify)

Surveys the landscape of Indigenous intellectual property claims internationally, examining how recognition politics shape both the possibilities and limits of IP protection for traditional knowledge.

46. Raka Shome, 2006. Thinking Through the Diaspora: Call Centers, India, and a New Politics of Hybridity established 1990-2010 International Journal of Cultural Studies, 9(1), 105–124.

Analyzes Indian call-center labor as a postcolonial formation in which racialized bodies enact performative cultural hybridities demanded by Global North service economies, extending postcolonial media theory.

47. Raka Shome and Radha S. Hegde, 2002. Postcolonial Approaches to Communication: Charting the Terrain, Engaging the Intersections established 1990-2010 Communication Theory, 12(3), 249–270.

Offers the most sustained mapping of postcolonial theory's entry into communication studies, arguing for attention to power, difference, and colonial legacies in media and communication research.

48. Safiya Umoja Noble, 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism [ch. 1: "A Society, Searching"] contemporary 2011-2025 NYU Press.

Documents how commercial search algorithms systematically reproduce anti-Black racism and sexism, arguing that technology companies must be held accountable to public interest and civil rights frameworks.

49. Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, 2019. Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures [Introduction: "The Surrogate Effect"] contemporary 2011-2025 Duke University Press.

Argues that automation and robotics in the Global North are undergirded by a "surrogate humanity" logic that renders non-white and migrant labor as the invisible and expendable substrate of technological progress.

50. Yuk Hui, 2016. The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics [Introduction: "Technology and Modernity"] contemporary 2011-2025 Urbanomic.

Challenges the Heideggerian universalization of Western technics by theorizing "cosmotechnics" — the diverse moral-cosmological relations to technology found across non-Western traditions — opening a pluriversal philosophy of technology.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

EQ Orwell, G. (1949). Nineteen eighty-four. Secker & Warburg.

Orwell's canonical surveillance dystopia gives critical race-and-tech scholarship a vocabulary—Big Brother, doublethink, Newspeak—still central to discussions of algorithmic governance and information warfare. Winston Smith's negotiation of pervasive observation, falsified records, and language manipulation anticipates concerns about deepfakes, content moderation, and the politics of memory in platform societies. While Orwell focuses on state power, contemporary scholars extend his framework to corporate platforms whose telemetric reach exceeds the Party's. Doctoral readers should treat 1984 as a foundational reference text against which to read Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism and Browne's Dark Matters. EQ Butler, O. E. (1993). Parable of the sower. Four Walls Eight Windows.

Butler's prophetic novel follows Lauren Olamina, a young Black woman with hyperempathy syndrome, as she leads a community north through climate collapse, privatized policing, and predatory labor regimes in 2020s California. Butler anticipates the gig economy, militarized borders, biometric surveillance, and the rise of charismatic authoritarianism. Olamina's emergent religion, Earthseed, theorizes change as the only constant, a counter-doctrine to optimization fantasies. For AI-equity scholars, Butler is indispensable: she centers Black women's leadership, builds collective survival epistemologies, and refuses techno-determinist despair. The novel pairs powerfully with Ruha Benjamin's work on abolitionist imagination. EQ Butler, O. E. (1988). Adulthood rites. Warner Books.

The second Xenogenesis novel follows Akin, a hybrid child, navigating tensions between Oankali and resister humans. Butler explores what it means to belong to multiple lineages and to advocate for those refused full personhood. The novel speaks directly to contemporary debates about racial categorization in AI systems, mixed-race subjectivity, and the politics of refusal. Akin's advocacy for resister humans models a politics of solidarity across difference that AI-ethics frameworks routinely struggle to articulate. EQ Okorafor, N. (2020). Remote control. Tordotcom.

In near-future Ghana, Sankofa, "the adopted daughter of death," wanders dispensing lethal touch after a meteor shard infuses her with strange power. Okorafor weaves global tech infrastructures—LifeGen Technologies, communication networks—through Ghanaian rural life, asking how multinational extraction and folkloric resonance coexist. For doctoral readers, the novel is a compact meditation on data colonialism, biotech extraction, and the embodied costs of becoming legible to global systems. EQ Jemisin, N. K. (2018). How long 'til Black future month? Orbit.

Jemisin's story collection gathers speculative pieces ranging from post-Katrina New Orleans to a pre-emancipation parallel world. Several stories engage directly with computing, surveillance, and embodied algorithmic harm. The titular essay theorizes why Black futures have been so systematically erased from speculative imagination, anticipating Ruha Benjamin's call to dream beyond the New Jim Code. The collection is ideal for seminar reading because of its tonal range and accessible entry points.

Nonfiction

EQ Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. MIT Press.

Costanza-Chock develops design justice as a framework rooted in the Design Justice Network's principles, demanding that technology be built with and by marginalized communities. Drawing on years of practice with movement organizations, the book theorizes participatory methods that center disabled, queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and feminist-of-color knowledges. For AI-equity readers, Costanza-Chock offers both critique and constructive methodology—essential for doctoral students aiming to translate scholarship into practice. EQ Birhane, A. (2021). Algorithmic injustice: A relational ethics approach. Patterns, 2(2), 100205.

Birhane develops relational ethics, drawing on African philosophy and feminist STS, to argue that algorithmic harms cannot be fixed by individual-level fairness adjustments. Her work, alongside coauthored papers on data audits and Big Tech capture, has reshaped the AI ethics conversation. For doctoral readers, Birhane's body of work models rigorous methodological intervention from a Global South perspective. EQ Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI: Power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. Yale University Press.

Crawford reframes AI as a planetary extractive industry, tracing lithium mining, data labor, classification systems, and military applications. The book insists AI is "neither artificial nor intelligent" but rather material, embodied, and political. Essential reading for any AI-equity course. EQ Davis, A. Y. (2003). Are prisons obsolete? Seven Stories Press.

Davis develops abolitionist argument in clear, accessible prose, drawing on her own activist and scholarly experience. For AI-equity readers, Are Prisons Obsolete? is essential context for any work on carceral technology, predictive policing, and the prison-industrial-AI complex. EQ Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon Books.

Said's foundational text theorizes how Western academic and popular discourse produced "the Orient" as object of knowledge and domination. For AI-equity scholars, Said is essential for understanding how representational regimes—including those embedded in training data—encode geopolitical power.

INT-701 — INT 701 · IP, AI, and Authorship

INT pillar · PhD Year 1 · Fall 2028

Course MOC. Reading list compiled from the 5-year curriculum.

Essential books

★ James Boyle — Shamans, Software, and Spleens
★ Jaszi & Woodmansee — Construction of Authorship
★ Mark Rose — Authors and Owners
★ Anjali Vats — The Color of Creatorship
★ Henderson et al. — Foundation Models and Fair Use

Supplementary books

☆ Annemarie Bridy — Coding Creativity
☆ Daniel Gervais — 'The Machine as Author'
☆ Jane Ginsburg — 'People Not Machines'
☆ Pamela Samuelson — 'Allocating Ownership Rights'
☆ K.J. Greene — 'Copyright, Culture & Black Music'

Papers (50)

1. Foucault, Michel (1969). ** [canonical] Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie, 63(3): 73–104. Repr. in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Cornell UP, 1977).

Argues the "author" is a historically produced juridical and ideological function of discourse — not a natural origin of meaning — thereby denaturalizing the romantic-individual-creator premise on which copyright rests.

2. Barthes, Roland (1967). The Death of the Author [canonical] Aspen, 5–6; repr. in Image, Music, Text (Fontana, 1977) pp. 142–148.

Announces the "death" of the intentional author as guarantor of meaning and the "birth of the reader" — foundational for understanding why copyright's human-author premise is philosophically contingent rather than natural.

3. Woodmansee, Martha (1984). The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the 'Author [canonical] Eighteenth-Century Studies, 17(4): 425–448. DOI: 10.2307/2738129

Historicizes the late-eighteenth-century German construction of the solitary genius-author, demonstrating that copyright law crystallized this contingent Romantic construct into legal doctrine, making it appear natural and timeless.

4. Jaszi, Peter (1991). Toward a Theory of Copyright: The Metamorphoses of 'Authorship [established] Duke Law Journal, 1991(2): 455–502. DOI: 10.2307/1372659

Traces how Romantic authorship ideology was progressively institutionalized into Anglo-American copyright doctrine from Donaldson v. Beckett forward, exposing authorship as a legal fiction deployed to allocate property rights.

5. Lemley, Mark A. (1997). Romantic Authorship and the Rhetoric of Property [established] Texas Law Review, 75: 873–906.

Shows how Romantic-author rhetoric functions to expand copyright scope and resist fair-use claims while masking the collective and social nature of all creative production.

6. Jaszi, Peter, and Martha Woodmansee (1994). ** [established] The doctrinal lineage from CONTU through Feist to the first AI cases

Frames the collaborative volume's project of exposing authorship as cultural construct, linking literary theory, legal history, and IP policy in a program of critique that directly informs AI-authorship debates.

7. Samuelson, Pamela (1986). Allocating Ownership Rights in Computer-Generated Works [canonical] University of Pittsburgh Law Review, 47: 1185–1228.

The foundational doctrinal analysis of who should own computer outputs under copyright; argues for user-as-author as the most doctrinally coherent solution, establishing the analytical vocabulary for all subsequent AI-authorship debates.

8. Bridy, Annemarie (2012). Coding Creativity: Copyright and the Artificially Intelligent Author [contemporary] Stanford Technology Law Review, 5: 1–28. SSRN No. 1888622.

Argues creativity is inherently algorithmic and AI-produced works are less heterogeneous to copyright's framework than they appear, deploying postmodern authorship theory and computer-aided creativity scholarship to map the pre-LLM AI-authorship challenge.

9. Grimmelmann, James (2016). Copyright for Literate Robots [contemporary] Iowa Law Review, 101: 657–681. SSRN No. 2606731.

Explains how copyright, almost by accident, concluded that robotic "reading" is not infringement, tracing fair-use shifts producing this result and reflecting on "posthuman" consequences for a system premised on humans writing for humans.

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

First systematic argument that AI systems satisfying inventorship criteria should be recognized as inventors under the Patent and Copyright Clause, drawing copyright-authorship analogies to propose a non-human IP rights framework.

11. Gervais, Daniel J. (2020). The Machine as Author [contemporary] Iowa Law Review, 105: 2053–2105.

Systematically evaluates normative and doctrinal arguments for and against copyright protection of autonomous AI outputs, concluding that productions without human creative choices belong in the public domain, and proposes a human-contribution test for hybrid works.

12. Burk, Dan L. (2021). AI Patents and the Self-Assembling Machine [contemporary] Minnesota Law Review Headnotes, 105: 301–340.

Offers a sanguine counter-narrative to AI patent-disruption hype, showing patent doctrine has sufficient flexibility to accommodate AI innovation while identifying causation as the genuine doctrinal gap requiring resolution.

13. Sag, Matthew (2009). Copyright and Copy-Reliant Technology [established] Northwestern University Law Review, 103: 1607–1682. SSRN No. 1257086.

Introduces "copy-reliant technologies" and the "nonexpressive use" principle — the theoretical precursor to all fair-use arguments for AI training data, establishing why non-expressive copying of entire copyrighted works should be treated differently from expressive reproduction.

14. Sobel, Benjamin L. W. (2017). Artificial Intelligence's Fair Use Crisis [contemporary] Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts, 41(1): 45–97. DOI: 10.7916/jla.v41i1.2036

Diagnoses an AI fair-use dilemma — either ML training is not fair use (halting innovation) or it is (diverting earnings from input authors) — and argues this impasse justifies redistributive policy measures promoting social equity alongside technological progress.

15. Lemley, Mark A., and Bryan Casey (2021). Fair Learning [contemporary] Texas Law Review, 99: 743–812. SSRN No. 3528447.

Argues ML training on copyrighted data should be presumptively fair use because the purpose prong favors non-expressive use, and proposes the "fair learning" standard to guide courts and technologists evaluating AI training datasets.

16. Sag, Matthew (2023). Copyright Safety for Generative AI [contemporary] Houston Law Review, 61(2): 295–362. SSRN No. 4438593.

Maps generative AI onto prior copy-reliant technology doctrine (HathiTrust, Google Books) and identifies memorization as the key variable shifting outputs from fair use to infringement, proposing concrete "copyright safety" guidelines for AI developers.

17. Henderson, Peter, Xuechen Li, Dan Jurafsky, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Mark A. Lemley,. Foundation Models and Fair Use [contemporary] Journal of Machine Learning Research, 24: 1–79. arXiv:2303.15715.

Technically grounded, interdisciplinary analysis of how fair use applies to each stage of the generative-AI supply chain (training, fine-tuning, inference), identifying where transformativeness and market-substitution analysis should focus.

18. *Lee, Katherine, A. Feder Cooper, and James Grimmelmann (2024/2025)* "Talkin'. *URL:* https://copyrightsociety [contemporary] Contribution:

Introduces the "generative-AI supply chain" framework to trace how upstream technical design choices create downstream copyright liability, enabling courts to reason precisely about which actors bear responsibility for infringement at each stage.

19. *Samuelson, Pamela (2023) "Generative AI Meets Copyright" Science*, 381(6654. : 158–161 [contemporary] URL:

Synthesizes the copyright landscape for generative AI in a flagship interdisciplinary venue, covering training data, outputs, and unsettled human-authorship threshold questions — bridging legal and technical communities with canonical authority.

20. Ginsburg, Jane C. (2018). People Not Machines: Authorship and What It Means in the Berne Convention [contemporary] IIC — International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law, 49: 131–135. DOI: 10.1007/s40319-018-0670-x

An editorial intervention arguing human authorship remains Berne Convention's irreducible requirement even as AI outputs become indistinguishable from human works, warning against admitting machine productions into the copyright fold without treaty amendment.

21. Ginsburg, Jane C. (2020). People Not Machines: Authorship and What It Means in International Copyright Law [contemporary]

Extended version of the 2018 IIC editorial, systematically revisiting Ricketson's Berne analysis and asking whether 25 years of further AI advancement warrant reconsideration — concluding the human-authorship premise holds and any AI-output protection must fall outside Berne.

22. Bridy, Annemarie (2016). The Evolution of Authorship: Work Made by Code [contemporary] Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts, 39: 395–401. SSRN No. 2836568.

Revisits "Coding Creativity" four years later, noting that copyright already accommodates non-human "authors" through work-for-hire, suggesting AI authorship may require a smaller doctrinal leap than critics assume, and surveying international comparators.

23. ?. Thaler v. Perlmutter, 130 F.4th 1039 (D.C. Cir. 2025) [contemporary] Case (primary source), ; aff'g No. 22-1564 (D.D.C. Aug. 18, 2023). Certiorari denied (U.S. Mar. 2, 2026).

Establishes (D.C. Circuit, now final) that purely AI-generated works lack human authorship required for copyright registration; machines cannot be "authors" under the 1976 Act; any expansion requires congressional action.

24. ?. U.S. Copyright Office (2023–2025) [contemporary] USCO Reports, (Feb. 2023; Jan. 2025; forthcoming).

Official USCO guidance establishing that copyright attaches only where a human author contributes "original mental conception" discernible in the final work, defining the human-authorship standard applicable to AI-assisted works and addressing training-data fair use.

25. Carlini, Nicholas, Florian Tramèr, Eric Wallace, Matthew Jagielski, Ariel Herber. Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models [contemporary] Proceedings of the 30th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security '21), pp. 2633–2650. arXiv:2012.07805.

Demonstrates adversaries can extract hundreds of verbatim training-data sequences from GPT-2; larger models are more vulnerable — providing the technical underpinning for copyright-infringement arguments based on LLM memorization.

26. Carlini, Nicholas, Daphne Ippolito, Matthew Jagielski, Katherine Lee, Florian Tr. Quantifying Memorization Across Neural Language Models [contemporary] ICLR 2023, (notable top 25% paper). arXiv:2202.07646.

Establishes three log-linear relationships governing LLM memorization (model size, training-data duplication, context length), showing memorization is more prevalent than believed and worsens with scale — directly relevant to copyright-safety analysis.

27. Goetze, Trystan S. (2024). AI Art is Theft: Labour, Extraction, and Exploitation: Or, On the Dangers of Stochastic Pollocks [contemporary] FAccT '24: Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pp. 186–196. DOI: 10.1145/3630106.3658898

Uses Lockean labor theory and Rawlsian distributive justice to argue that text-to-image AI constitutes unethical labor theft from artists at scale, connecting IP dispossession to colonial patterns of extraction and challenging the sufficiency of licensing-based remedies.

28. Precel, Heila, Allison McDonald, Brent Hecht, and Nicholas Vincent (2024). A Canary in the AI Coal Mine: American Jews May Be Disproportionately Harmed by Intellectual Property Dispossession in Large Language Model [contemporary] CHI '24: Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, DOI: 10.1145/3613904.3642749

Documents disproportionate over-representation of content by Jewish Americans in LLM training datasets and frames the finding as a "canary" for broader structural concerns about minority-community IP dispossession and labor extraction across the LLM paradigm.

29. Bommasani, Rishi, et al. (2021). On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models [contemporary] arXiv:2108.07258, (Stanford Center for Research on Foundation Models Technical Report).

Defines "foundation models" trained at scale and maps emergent capabilities alongside risks including IP, homogenization, and alignment concerns — establishing the technical vocabulary now central to regulatory and doctrinal debates about generative AI.

30. *Epstein, Ziv, Sydney Levine, David Rand, and Iyad Rahwan (2023)* "Art and the. : 1110–1111 [contemporary] URL:

Provides empirical evidence that AI-generated images affect human attribution of creativity and authorship, showing people perceive AI art as less creative than human art in ways that bear directly on copyright's originality requirement and public-interest justifications.

31. *Greene, Kevin J. (1999)* "Copyright, Culture & Black Music: A Legacy of Unequ. ; cited at https://lawreview [established] Contribution:

Demonstrates that copyright law historically denied protection to Black musical expression while enabling white appropriation, establishing the racial-equity critique of IP doctrine on which all subsequent Critical Race IP scholarship builds.

32. Vats, Anjali, and Deidré A. Keller (2018). Critical Race IP [contemporary] Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, 36: 735–807. SSRN No. 3050898.

Proposes Critical Race Intellectual Property (CRIP) as a framework for analyzing IP's racial and colonial non-neutrality across all regimes, centering decolonizing praxis and community-building as corrective strategies applicable to AI-generated-works debates.

33. Arewa, Olufunmilayo B. (2010). Blues Lives: Promise and Perils of Musical Copyright [contemporary] Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, 27: 573–645.

Traces how racial segregation in the recording industry, compounded by copyright doctrine's tolerance of white appropriation, systematically denied compensation and creative credit to African American blues musicians — a template for analyzing AI training-data extraction.

34. Arewa, Olufunmilayo B. (2006). From J.C. Bach to Hip Hop: Musical Borrowing, Copyright and Cultural Context [established] North Carolina Law Review, 84: 547–645.

Places hip-hop sampling in a long history of musical borrowing, arguing copyright doctrine's notation-centric Western bias structurally disadvantages oral-aural African American musical traditions — prefiguring AI's similar challenge to text-centric IP frameworks.

35. Chander, Anupam, and Madhavi Sunder (2004). The Romance of the Public Domain [established] California Law Review, 92: 1331–1374. SSRN No. 562301.

Exposes the "romance" of IP-commons discourse — the assumption open resources are equally accessible — demonstrating that differing wealth, power, and access ensure that public-domain frameworks replicate colonial inequalities, directly applicable to AI training-data access debates.

36. Rosenblatt, Elizabeth L. (2020). Copyright's One-Way Racial Appropriation Ratchet [contemporary] UC Davis Law Review, 53(2): 591–666.

Argues copyright originality, authorship, and "the work" doctrines embed a structural ratchet that shifts ownership from racial minorities toward those who appropriate from them — operationalizing the CRIP framework in granular doctrinal analysis.

37. Vats, Anjali (2020). Racefulness as a Critical IP Methodology [contemporary] UC Irvine Law Review, 10(3): 795–834.

Develops "racefulness" as a methodology for IP scholarship that centers race as an analytic category from the outset, providing the methodological complement to the CRIP framework necessary for AI-and-IP research that takes equity seriously.

38. Pasquale, Frank (2015). The Algorithmic Self [contemporary] Hedgehog Review, 17(1): 30–45.

Examines how algorithmic systems construct, commodify, and circulate "selves" in ways that concentrate platform power, raising IP, communication, and equity concerns about whose cultural labor funds whose algorithmic enrichment — bridging communication studies and IP theory.

39. Noble, Safiya Umoja (2018). A Future for Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies [contemporary] Scholar & Feminist Online, 13(3)/14(1).

Integrates intersectional feminist methodology into technology studies, arguing that AI systems reproduce and amplify racial and gender hierarchies in ways that copyright and IP scholarship must engage if they are to account for real distributional harms in AI authorship debates.

40. Hristova, Stefka (2022). Algorithmic Authorship and the Aesthetics of Data [contemporary] AI & Society, 37: 1383–1391. DOI: 10.1007/s00146-021-01242-3

Examines how algorithmic systems produce aesthetic objects and proposes an "algorithmic authorship" framework bridging communication studies, aesthetics, and IP theory, challenging anthropocentric assumptions in both copyright doctrine and creative industries.

41. Katyal, Sonia K. (2019). Algorithmic Governance and the Rule of Law [contemporary] Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 15: 151–172. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-101317-030928

Examines how algorithmic systems displace human judgment in governance contexts and argues for transparency, accountability, and democratic oversight norms — directly applicable to governance of AI-authorship decisions and content-moderation policies.

42. Grimmelmann, James (2023). Copyright for Literate Robots Revisited: Generative AI and the New Anthropomorphism [contemporary] Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A., (circulated 2023; verify exact vol./pp.)

Extends the "literate robots" framework to generative AI, arguing that anthropomorphizing LLMs as "authors" is a conceptual error with serious doctrinal consequences, and proposes a clean input/output analytical framework for copyright analysis of generative AI systems.

43. Geiger, Christophe, and Elena Izyumenko (2023). The Future of Copyright in the Age of Artificial Intelligence [contemporary] IIC — International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law, 54: 1183–1195. DOI: 10.1007/s40319-023-01389-w

Surveys comparative doctrinal responses to AI-generated works across EU member states and international instruments, evaluating whether existing doctrines (Berne's human-creativity requirement, CJEU's "own intellectual creation" standard) are adequate or require new sui generis regimes.

44. Dusollier, Séverine (2020). Intellectual Property and Artificial Intelligence: A Preliminary Report [contemporary] WIPO Conversation on Intellectual Property and Artificial Intelligence, (2nd Session), Doc. WIPO/IP/AI/2/GE/20/INF/1.

Systematic comparative mapping of national approaches to AI-generated works across UK (CDPA s.9(3)), EU, US, Japan, China, and Australia, examining how each regime handles originality, authorship attribution, and term of protection for machine outputs.

45. Guadamuz, Andres (2017). Artificial Intelligence and Copyright [contemporary] WIPO Magazine, October 2017: 14–19.

Accessible but rigorous comparative survey of UK CDPA s.9(3), EU, US, and other jurisdictions on AI-generated works, providing the definitional baseline for understanding the uniqueness of the UK statutory "computer-generated work" approach pre-generative-AI.

46. Parish, James (2025). Time to Repeal Section 9(3) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 [contemporary] King's College London Law Research Paper, (forthcoming/circulated 2025).

Provides original archival research into the lobbying and drafting history of UK CDPA s.9(3), showing courts have been extending traditional authorial copyright to automated outputs — narrowing s.9(3)'s scope — and arguing for repeal.

47. Kim, Nari (2023). Artificial Intelligence and Authorship Rights [contemporary] GRUR International, 72(3): 216–229. DOI: 10.1093/grurint/ikac073

Examines Japanese and Korean copyright law's approaches to AI-generated works, comparing their instrumental foundations with the EU's author's-rights approach, and arguing East Asian frameworks may offer more flexibility for accommodating non-human authorship.

48. **Xu, Yuanxiao (2025). * [analyzing Li Yunkai v [contemporary] (Beijing Internet Court, 2023)] "China's Controversial Court Rulings on AI Output — and How It May Affect People in the US"

Analyzes the world's first court ruling granting copyright in a fully AI-generated image (based solely on prompt engineering) and maps the doctrinal divergence between China, EU, and US, assessing implications for cross-border IP claims involving LLM outputs.

49. Stroh, Hayleigh (2022). AI-Generated Works and Copyright Law: Towards a Harmonized International Framework [contemporary] WIPO Journal, 13(1): 1–20.

Proposes a harmonized international framework for AI-generated works drawing on TRIPS, Berne, and comparative national law, recommending a tiered protection model: full copyright for human-AI collaboration; limited or sui generis protection for purely autonomous outputs.

50. *European Parliament Research Service (2025)* "Copyright of AI-Generated Works. 782585 [contemporary] URL:

Surveys how EU AI Act (2024), CJEU jurisprudence (Infopaq, Painer), and DSM Directive interact with AI authorship, documenting global divergence between human-centric (EU, US) and more flexible (UK, China, Ukraine) approaches and calling for international coordination.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

XD Ma, L. (2018). Severance. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

[Equity + Communication + AI] A pandemic novel about a millennial Chinese-American office worker who keeps showing up to her Manhattan job long after the city has emptied. Ma threads automation and routinized labor (the protagonist works on Bible production outsourced to Shenzhen), surveillance-style social media nostalgia, and immigrant precarity. The "fevered" become trapped in nostalgic loops—an eerie metaphor for algorithmic feed culture. The novel synthesizes equity (labor and migration) with communication infrastructures and the soft AI of routine, asking what counts as living versus running on a script. XD Reid, T. M. (2021). The other Black girl. Atria.

[Equity + Communication + AI] A Black editorial assistant at a white-dominated publishing house is welcomed by a new Black hire whose perfect adjustment to the office conceals a conditioning regimen. Reid binds publishing-industry IP politics, microaggressive workplace communication, and a near-occult tech of behavioral modification. The pillars meet in the editorial markup itself: who edits whom, and at what algorithmic cost. A thriller that reads the publishing industry as cross-pillar machinery. XD Robinson, K. S. (2020). The ministry for the future. Orbit.

[AI + Equity + Communication] An imagined UN body responsible for "future generations" coordinates carbon-negative blockchain currencies, geoengineering, and climate refugee policy. Robinson binds AI (a carbon coin trained on emissions data) to equity (refugee mobility, mass climate die-offs) to communication (the global politics of attention). The pillars meet in the eyewitness "I" interludes from non-human and minor-character perspectives. XD Schweblin, S. (2020). Little eyes (M. McDowell, Trans.). Riverhead. (Original work published 2018)

[AI + Equity + Communication] In a near-future, "kentukis" are small robotic pets controlled remotely by anonymous strangers paying a fee. Schweblin binds platform-AI economics, the equity politics of remote labor and surveillance, and the communication theory of the unwilling listener. The pillars meet in the kentuki itself. One of the cleanest cross-pillar AI novels of the late 2010s. XP Le Guin, U. K. (1971). The lathe of heaven. Charles Scribner's Sons.

Illuminates AI: Le Guin's novel of a man whose dreams reshape reality, exploited by a psychiatrist with a utopian agenda, is the most prescient AI-alignment fable ever written. Placed beside Russell's Human Compatible, The Lathe of Heaven models how optimizing for stated goals produces monstrous outcomes. Dr. Haber's recursive dream-engineering reads as a parable of reinforcement learning with human feedback gone wrong.

Nonfiction

XD Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim Code. Polity.

[AI + Equity] Benjamin theorizes the "New Jim Code"—the way that algorithmic systems encode and amplify racial inequity while presenting themselves as neutral. The pillars meet in case studies of biased risk-assessment tools, predictive policing, and facial recognition. A canonical work that joins critical race studies and STS in one frame. XD Sundaram, R. (2010). Pirate modernity: Delhi's media urbanism. Routledge.

[IP + Equity + Communication] Sundaram's ethnography of Delhi's informal media economies binds South Asian urban inequity to global IP regimes and to local communication infrastructures. The pillars synthesize in the pirate VCD market. A foundational cross-pillar text from outside the U.S./European frame. XD Mosco, V. (1996). The political economy of communication: Rethinking and renewal. Sage.

[Communication + IP + Equity] Mosco's textbook articulated the political-economy approach to communication studies. The pillars synthesize in the analysis of media concentration and labor. XD Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Crossing Press.

[Equity + Communication] Lorde's essays bind Black lesbian feminist politics to the communication practice of essay, speech, and poetry. The pillars synthesize in the question of "the master's tools." XP Eco, U. (2003). Mouse or rat? Translation as negotiation. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Illuminates Communication: Eco's accessible essay on translation is a cross-pollination text for thinking about LLM mediation.

INT-702 — INT 702 · Data Governance and Platform Accountability

INT pillar · PhD Year 1 · Fall 2028

Course MOC. Reading list compiled from the 5-year curriculum.

Essential books

★ Kuner et al. — GDPR Commentary
★ Solove & Schwartz — Information Privacy Law
★ Orla Lynskey — Foundations of EU Data Protection Law
★ Julie Cohen — Between Truth and Power
★ Woodrow Hartzog — Privacy's Blueprint

Supplementary books

☆ Margot Kaminski — 'Binary Governance'
☆ Kukutai & Taylor — Indigenous Data Sovereignty
☆ Couldry & Mejias — The Costs of Connection
☆ Danielle Citron — The Fight for Privacy
☆ Helen Nissenbaum — Privacy in Context

Papers (50)

1. Samuel D. Warren & Louis D. Brandeis, 1890. The Right to Privacy canonical pre-1990 Harvard Law Review, vol. 4, pp. 193–220

Establishes the foundational common-law argument that individuals possess a right to be let alone, initiating the modern concept of privacy as a cognizable legal interest.

2. Alan F. Westin, 1967 (essay excerpt). Privacy and Freedom (selected chapter: "The Functions of Privacy") canonical pre-1990 Atheneum Press (book chapter; widely reprinted in law review anthologies)

Defines privacy as the claim of individuals to control information about themselves, articulating four functions — autonomy, emotional release, self-evaluation, and limited communication — that anchor subsequent legal and sociological scholarship.

3. Daniel J. Solove, 2006. A Taxonomy of Privacy established 1990-2010 University of Pennsylvania Law Review, vol. 154, pp. 477–564

Constructs a comprehensive taxonomy of privacy violations across four clusters — information collection, processing, dissemination, and invasion — providing courts and legislators with analytical granularity beyond the binary secrecy model.

4. Helen Nissenbaum, 2004. Privacy as Contextual Integrity established 1990-2010 Washington Law Review, vol. 79, pp. 119–157

Proposes contextual integrity as the normative benchmark for privacy: information flows are appropriate when they match the norms of the social context in which data was originally shared, reframing privacy analysis away from secrecy.

5. Julie E. Cohen, 2013. What Privacy Is For contemporary 2011-2025 Harvard Law Review Forum, vol. 126, pp. 1904–1933

Reframes privacy not as an individual right but as a structural condition enabling the kind of dynamic, self-authoring personhood that democratic governance requires, linking privacy directly to political and cultural freedom.

6. Paul M. Schwartz & Karl-Nikolaus Peifer, 2017. Transatlantic Data Privacy Law contemporary 2011-2025 Georgetown Law Journal, vol. 106, pp. 115–179

Offers a comparative doctrinal analysis of EU and US data privacy frameworks, revealing how divergent privacy philosophies — dignity-based versus harm-based — produce persistent regulatory friction.

7. Woodrow Hartzog & Evan Selinger, 2013. Surveillance as Loss of Obscurity contemporary 2011-2025 Washington and Lee Law Review Online, vol. 72, pp. 1343–1387 (verify)

Argues that routine surveillance destroys the "practical obscurity" that makes social life livable, proposing obscurity — not secrecy — as the proper baseline interest privacy law should protect.

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

Demonstrates how the GDPR embeds two distinct governance logics — transparency and accuracy norms — within its algorithmic provisions, offering a template for US regulators debating algorithmic accountability statutes.

9. Margot E. Kaminski & Gianclaudio Malgieri, 2021. Algorithmic Impact Assessments Under the GDPR: Producing Multi-Layered Explanations contemporary 2011-2025 International Data Privacy Law, vol. 11, pp. 125–144

Examines how GDPR Articles 22, 35, and 47 collectively mandate layered explanation obligations, showing that algorithmic impact assessments can operationalise meaningful disclosure beyond individual recourse.

10. Andrew D. Selbst & Julia Powles, 2017. Meaningful Information and the Right to Explanation contemporary 2011-2025 International Data Privacy Law, vol. 7, pp. 233–242

Resolves the debate over GDPR Article 22's right to explanation by reading the Recitals and Articles together, arguing that a genuine — if limited — explanation right exists and can be made operationally meaningful.

11. Lilian Edwards & Michael Veale, 2017. Slave to the Algorithm? Why a "Right to an Explanation" Is Probably Not the Remedy You Are Looking For contemporary 2011-2025 Duke Law & Technology Review, vol. 16, pp. 18–84

Critically evaluates claims that an individual explanation right can deliver algorithmic accountability, arguing instead for systemic audit and impact-assessment mechanisms that protect groups rather than individuals.

12. Orla Lynskey, 2015. Deconstructing Data Protection: The "Added-Value" of a Right to Data Protection in the EU Legal Order contemporary 2011-2025 International and Comparative Law Quarterly, vol. 63, pp. 569–597

Argues that EU Charter Article 8 data protection right adds autonomous constitutional value beyond privacy, enabling positive obligations and horizontal effect that GDPR subsequently operationalises.

13. Christopher Kuner, 2017. The Internet and the Global Reach of EU Law contemporary 2011-2025 In M. Cremona & J. Scott (eds.), EU Law Beyond EU Borders (Oxford University Press); also as LSE Law Working Paper

Examines how GDPR's extraterritorial scope (Article 3) functions as a de facto global standard, tracing the mechanisms — market power, normative diffusion, and enforcement — that give EU data law reach beyond European territory.

14. Paul De Hert & Vagelis Papakonstantinou, 2016. The New General Data Protection Regulation: Still a Sound System for the Protection of Individuals? contemporary 2011-2025 Computer Law & Security Review, vol. 32, pp. 179–194

Provides an early systematic assessment of GDPR's architectural choices — consent, accountability, and DPA enforcement — evaluating whether the regulation's internal tensions undermine its stated individual-protection rationale.

15. Jane K. Bambauer, 2014. The New Intrusion contemporary 2011-2025 Notre Dame Law Review, vol. 88, pp. 1557–1622

Challenges the "collection as harm" paradigm by arguing that data collection itself causes minimal injury absent secondary misuse, pressing privacy law to focus regulatory energy on data use restrictions.

16. Danielle Keats Citron, 2022. Privacy Harms contemporary 2011-2025 Boston University Law Review, vol. 102, pp. 793–863 (verify)

Reframes privacy violations as socially distributed harms that fall disproportionately on marginalized groups, arguing that privacy law must adopt an equity lens aligned with civil-rights and anti-discrimination frameworks.

17. Paul M. Schwartz & Daniel J. Solove, 2011. The PII Problem: Privacy and a New Concept of Personally Identifiable Information contemporary 2011-2025 New York University Law Review, vol. 86, pp. 1814–1894

Exposes the doctrinal instability of "personally identifiable information" as privacy law's threshold concept and proposes a risk-based, contextual framework for determining when data triggers regulatory protection.

18. Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Bart van der Sloot & Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius, 2019. The European Union General Data Protection Regulation: What It Is and What It Means contemporary 2011-2025 Information & Communications Technology Law, vol. 28, pp. 65–98

Provides a practitioner-accessible but analytically rigorous account of GDPR for US audiences, mapping key provisions onto familiar US sectoral concepts and highlighting compliance divergences for transatlantic actors.

19. Lothar Determann, 2020. California's Privacy Law: Practical Guide and Commentary — CCPA, CPRA, and Related Laws (article excerpt) contemporary 2011-2025 Berkeley Technology Law Journal, vol. 35 (verify); practitioner guide published by IAPP

Provides granular legal analysis of CCPA/CPRA's new categories — sensitive data, sharing, opt-out rights — comparing them to GDPR, serving as a doctrinal bridge for US state-federal harmonisation debates.

20. Peter Swire & Kenesa Ahmad, 2012. Foundations of Privacy Law" and Sectoral Regulation in the United States contemporary 2011-2025 In Foundations of Privacy Law (IAPP textbook chapter); also as Ohio State Public Law Working Paper

Maps the architecture of US sectoral privacy law across HIPAA, FERPA, COPPA, FCRA, and GLBA, explaining why the US chose sector-specific over omnibus regulation and identifying the resulting gaps that state laws like CCPA attempt to fill.

21. Danielle Keats Citron, 2008. Technological Due Process established 1990-2010 Washington University Law Review, vol. 85, pp. 1249–1313

Argues that automated government decision systems trigger Mathews v. Eldridge procedural due-process interests, demanding notice, intelligibility, and correction mechanisms before algorithmic errors deprive individuals of public benefits.

22. Andrew D. Selbst & Solon Barocas, 2018. The Intuitive Appeal of Explainable Machines contemporary 2011-2025 Fordham Law Review, vol. 87, pp. 1085–1139

Unpacks why explainability is an intuitively attractive but legally insufficient proxy for algorithmic accountability, showing how the concept conflates prediction accuracy, causal attribution, and procedural fairness.

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

Synthesises the academic debate on GDPR Article 22, demonstrating that the "right to explanation" is best understood as a procedural right to contest rather than a substantive right to full algorithmic transparency.

24. Frank Pasquale, 2015. The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Chapter 1: "The Need to Know") contemporary 2011-2025 Harvard University Press (book chapter; condensed version in Florida Law Review, vol. 67, 2015) (verify)

Introduces the "black box" metaphor for opaque algorithmic systems controlling credit, employment, and expression, making the normative case that democratic societies require transparency mandates for high-stakes AI.

25. Sandra G. Mayson, 2019. Bias In, Bias Out contemporary 2011-2025 Yale Law Journal, vol. 128, pp. 2218–2300

Demonstrates that predictive algorithms inevitably reflect historical distributional inequalities in training data, arguing that the goal of bias-free algorithmic decision-making is structurally unattainable without confronting the underlying social conditions.

26. Joshua A. Kroll, Joanna Huey, Solon Barocas, Edward W. Felten, Joel R. Reidenber. Accountable Algorithms contemporary 2011-2025 University of Pennsylvania Law Review, vol. 165, pp. 633–705

Proposes that procedural requirements — rather than transparency mandates — are the appropriate legal mechanism for algorithmic accountability, drawing on cryptographic audit tools to enforce compliance without revealing proprietary code.

27. Cynthia Dwork & Deirdre K. Mulligan, 2013. It's Not Privacy, and It's Not Fair contemporary 2011-2025 Stanford Law Review Online, vol. 66, pp. 35–40

Deploys the formal framework of differential privacy to show that the privacy/fairness tradeoff in machine learning is technically tractable but politically contested, urging explicit normative choices rather than technical defaults.

28. Inge Graef, 2015. Market Definition and Market Power in Platform Markets contemporary 2011-2025 European Competition Law Review, vol. 36, pp. 322–332 (verify)

Analyses the methodological challenges of applying competition-law market-definition tools to multi-sided digital platforms, providing foundational economic framing later incorporated into DMA gatekeeper analysis.

29. Pier Luigi Parcu, 2021. The New Digital Markets Act: There's a New Sheriff in Town contemporary 2011-2025 European University Institute Working Papers, RSCAS 2021/14

Provides an early doctrinal map of the Digital Markets Act, tracing how the gatekeeper regime departs from ex-post competition enforcement and whether its ex-ante obligations can effectively discipline platform ecosystems.

30. Caroline Cauffman & Catalina Goanta, 2021. A New Order: The Digital Services Act and Consumer Protection contemporary 2011-2025 European Journal of Risk Regulation, vol. 12, pp. 758–776

Examines how the Digital Services Act reconfigures consumer-protection responsibilities for platforms, arguing that its notice-and-action and transparency obligations create a de facto due-diligence standard for very large online platforms.

31. Chris T. Marsden, 2011. Internet Co-regulation and Constitutionalism: Keeping Faith with Online Fundamental Rights contemporary 2011-2025 Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, vol. 20, pp. 415–444 (verify)

Theorises co-regulation as the necessary governance architecture for the internet, showing how constitutionally anchored co-regulatory frameworks can discipline intermediary discretion without state capture of expression.

32. Giancarlo Frosio, 2020. From Hero to Zero: Are Article 17 Proactive Obligations Obliterating Safe Harbors in the EU? contemporary 2011-2025 Journal of Intellectual Property, Information Technology and E-Commerce Law, vol. 11, pp. 175–190

Assesses how DSM Directive Article 17 upload-filter obligations disrupt the liability-shield architecture of the e-Commerce Directive, with implications for post-DSA intermediary obligation design.

33. Nicolas Suzor, 2018. Who Makes the Rules? The Contractual Governance of Virtual Communities contemporary 2011-2025 Virginia Journal of Law & Technology, vol. 18, pp. 1–31 (verify); expanded in Lawless (CUP 2019)

Conceptualises platform governance as private legislation enacted through terms of service, arguing that constitutional-values norms — not contractual freedom — should constrain platform rule-making affecting public discourse.

34. Tarleton Gillespie, 2018. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media (Chapter 2 excerpt) contemporary 2011-2025 Yale University Press (book); chapter version as Social Media + Society working paper (verify)

Examines how platform content-moderation decisions constitute a form of governance with public-law consequences, providing empirical grounding for DSA's transparency and accountability obligations.

35. Stephanie Russo Carroll, Ibrahim Garba, Oscar L. Figueroa-Rodríguez, Jarita Holb. The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance contemporary 2011-2025 Data Science Journal, vol. 19, art. 43

Articulates four principles — Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics — that operationalise Indigenous data sovereignty as a governance framework complementary to but distinct from Western individual-rights data law.

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

Applies postcolonial theory to AI deployment in Africa, demonstrating how algorithmic systems exported from Global-North contexts reproduce colonial knowledge hierarchies and displace Indigenous epistemologies.

37. Nanjala Nyabola, 2018. Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era Is Transforming Africa (Chapter 5: "Data and Sovereignty") contemporary 2011-2025 Zed Books (book chapter; excerpt in Al Jazeera / openDemocracy) (verify)

Examines how African states are constructing data-sovereignty frameworks in response to both Western platform dominance and Chinese infrastructure investment, foregrounding the geopolitical stakes of data localisation debates.

38. Graham Greenleaf, 2019. Global Data Privacy Laws 2019: 132 National Laws and Running contemporary 2011-2025 Privacy Laws & Business International Report, no. 157, pp. 14–18

Provides the most comprehensive global census of data privacy statutes, mapping legislative diffusion patterns and demonstrating that the GDPR "Brussels Effect" has accelerated adoption in Global-South jurisdictions.

39. Rishab Bailey, Smriti Parsheera, Faiza Rahman & Conor Coghill, 2018. Intermediary Liability in India: Chilling Effects on Free Expression contemporary 2011-2025 Centre for Internet and Society Working Paper (Bangalore)

Analyses the "significant social media intermediary" rules under India's IT Act and their chilling-effect implications for expression, prefiguring debates that surfaced again in the 2023 Digital Personal Data Protection Act.

40. Bruno Bioni & Maria Luciana Axente, 2021. Brazil's LGPD and the GDPR: An Analysis of Similarities and Differences contemporary 2011-2025 International Data Privacy Law, vol. 11, pp. 85–102 (verify)

Comparatively evaluates Brazil's Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados against GDPR, identifying structural divergences in legal basis, enforcement, and DPA independence that complicate adequacy determinations and transatlantic data flows.

41. Peng Hwa Ang, 2021. China's Personal Information Protection Law: A Comparative Analysis contemporary 2011-2025 Computer Law & Security Review, vol. 43 (verify)

Provides a systematic comparative analysis of China's PIPL against GDPR and CCPA, highlighting key divergences in state access, extraterritoriality, and enforcement architecture that complicate data-transfer and adequacy negotiations.

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

Develops the "data colonialism" framework, arguing that continuous extraction of human behavioural data by platform corporations replicates colonial resource-extraction dynamics, appropriating social life itself as a raw material for accumulation.

43. Jathan Sadowski, 2019. When Data Is Capital: Datafication, Accumulation, and Extraction contemporary 2011-2025 Big Data & Society, vol. 6, no. 1

Applies Marxist political-economy theory to datafication, showing how data functions as a form of capital subject to primitive accumulation and monopoly rent, with governance implications for antitrust, labour, and privacy law.

44. Salomé Viljoen, 2021. Democratic Data: A Relational Theory for Data Governance contemporary 2011-2025 Yale Law Journal, vol. 131, pp. 573–654

Proposes a "relational" theory of data governance grounded in democratic legitimacy rather than individual consent, arguing that structural data relationships — not personal rights — are the appropriate unit of legal analysis and redistribution.

45. Julie E. Cohen, 2017. Property and the Construction of the Information Economy: A Neo-Institutionalist Perspective contemporary 2011-2025 In B. Frischmann, M. Madison & K. Strandburg (eds.), Governing Knowledge Commons (Oxford University Press) (verify); working paper version o

Applies neo-institutionalist analysis to information-property regimes, demonstrating how propertisation choices in platform architectures produce distributional outcomes that law tends to naturalise rather than contest.

46. Shoshana Zuboff, 2019. Surveillance Capitalism and the Challenge of Collective Action contemporary 2011-2025 New Labor Forum, vol. 28, pp. 10–29

Distils the political-economy argument of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism into article form, arguing that behavioural modification at scale represents a new market form requiring regulatory responses beyond privacy law.

47. Virginia Eubanks, 2018. Automating Inequality: The Digital Poorhouse contemporary 2011-2025 St. Martin's Press (book, Chapter 4); condensed version: Logic Magazine (verify)

Documents through case studies how welfare-system automated decision tools systematically disadvantage poor and minority applicants, making the empirical case for equity-centred algorithmic accountability governance.

48. Jerome H. Reichman & Pamela Samuelson, 1997. Intellectual Property Rights in Data? established 1990-2010 Vanderbilt Law Review, vol. 50, pp. 51–166

Examines the mismatch between traditional IP doctrines and the economic characteristics of databases and raw data, arguing against a strong database-protection right and for a misappropriation floor that leaves data available as a public resource.

49. Julie E. Cohen, 2012. Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice (Chapters 3–4, "The Networked Self in Space" and "The Networked contemporary 2011-2025 Yale University Press (book); working-paper version: Georgetown Law Faculty Publications

Theorises the "networked self" as constituted through platform architectures and data flows, arguing that law must regulate the constitutive conditions of selfhood — not just discrete privacy violations — to preserve communicative autonomy.

50. Ryan Calo & Alex Rosenblat, 2017. The Taking Economy: Uber, Information, and Power contemporary 2011-2025 Columbia Law Review, vol. 117, pp. 1623–1690

Bridges platform governance, labour, and data law by showing how gig-economy platforms exploit information asymmetries to extract value from workers, making the case for data-governance interventions as a form of labour protection and economic equity.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

XD Kuang, R. F. (2023). Yellowface. William Morrow.

[IP + Equity + Communication] A white novelist steals a deceased Asian American friend's manuscript and publishes it as her own, rebranding herself with an ethnically ambiguous pen name. Kuang dissects publishing's racial economy through the precise vocabulary of copyright, attribution, and brand. Social media becomes both weapon and witness. The novel holds three pillars: intellectual property (whose authorship is recognizable, whose appropriable), social equity (who gets to write whom), and communication (Twitter pile-ons, marketing copy, the discourse machine). A surgical satire of the cross-pillar mess of cultural ownership. XD Hurston, Z. N. (1937). Their eyes were watching God. J. B. Lippincott.

[Equity + Communication] Hurston's classic centers Janie Crawford's voice as both narrative authority and contested property of the porch-talkers who would rather speak for her. The pillars meet in the politics of vernacular: who is allowed to narrate Black life, and in what register. A foundational text for cross-pillar communication theorists and a forerunner of every later argument about voice as social technology and as IP. XD McCarthy, T. (2010). C. Alfred A. Knopf.

[Communication + IP] Set in early 20th-century Britain and Egypt, this novel follows a wireless prodigy through silk farming, the Great War's radio networks, and an Egyptian intelligence assignment. McCarthy binds communication-history (wireless, telephony, the séance industry) to early IP politics around patents and tomb-raiding. The pillars meet in the protagonist's coded transmissions. A formal masterwork on the colonial roots of communication infrastructure. XD Sayaka, M. (2018). Earthlings (G. Tapley Takemori, Trans.). Grove Press.

[Equity + Communication] A girl is told she's an alien by her cousin and grows up rejecting human reproduction and conformity. Murata binds the communication theory of social scripts ("the Factory") to the gendered inequity of reproductive labor. The pillars meet in the protagonist's reading of her own body as extraterrestrial. XP Lem, S. (1961). Solaris (J. Kilmartin & S. Cox, Trans.). Walker. (Original work published in Polish)

Illuminates AI/Communication: Lem's novel of a sentient ocean that returns the unconscious to its visitors is a parable of the limits of communication across species. Placed beside debates on LLM "understanding," Solaris asks: what do we mean by contact, and what would it cost? A primer on the alterity problem.

Nonfiction

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

[AI + Equity + Communication] Crawford reads AI as a planetary extractive infrastructure: lithium mines, data labor sweatshops, energy budgets, and classification regimes. The pillars synthesize in the atlas form: each chapter maps a piece of AI's material politics. A definitive corrective to the cloud metaphor and a major cross-pillar text. XD Hicks, M. (2017). Programmed inequality: How Britain discarded women technologists and lost its edge in computing. MIT Press.

Hicks's history of women in British computing demonstrates how the systematic devaluation of women's technical labor produced the gendered structure of the contemporary tech industry. The argument: gendered exclusion isn't an artifact of meritocratic competition but a deliberate institutional choice. Methodologically, the book is archival history. For doctoral candidates, Programmed Inequality exemplifies how to historicize present-day inequities in tech labor and offers a model for cross-pillar research at the intersection of equity, AI history, and communication studies. XD Schiller, D. (1999). Digital capitalism: Networking the global market system. MIT Press.

[Communication + Equity + IP] Schiller's late-1990s critique of "digital capitalism" anticipated the cross-pillar problem. The pillars synthesize in the global telecommunication infrastructure. XD Davis, A. Y. (1981). Women, race & class. Random House.

[Equity + Communication] Davis's foundational text binds nineteenth-century anti-slavery rhetoric and abolitionist communication to twentieth-century feminist labor politics. The pillars synthesize in the chapter on housework. XP Hejinian, L. (1980). My life. Burning Deck.

Illuminates Communication: Hejinian's L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E autobiography, composed of one sentence per year of her life, is a study in formal experiment with the materiality of self-narration. A cross-pollination with platform-autobiography studies.

LAW-701 — LAW 701 · Intellectual Property Theory Seminar

LAW pillar · PhD Year 1 · Fall 2028

A doctoral seminar in IP theory — utilitarian, Lockean, personality, distributive — engaging Lemley, Cohen, Boyle, Drassinower, Litman, Hughes, Fisher, Sunder, Vats.

Essential books

★ Julie Cohen — Between Truth and Power
★ Madhavi Sunder — From Goods to a Good Life
★ Rosemary Coombe — The Cultural Life of IP
★ James Boyle — Shamans, Software, and Spleens
★ Anjali Vats — The Color of Creatorship

Supplementary books

☆ Debora Halbert — The State of Copyright
☆ Frischmann, Madison & Strandburg — Governing Knowledge Commons
☆ Mark Rose — Authors and Owners
☆ Jaszi & Woodmansee — The Construction of Authorship
☆ Susan Sell — Private Power, Public Law

Papers (50)

1. Mark A. Lemley, 2005. Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding established 1990-2010 Texas Law Review, vol. 83, pp. 1031–1075

Challenges the property-rights framing of IP by demonstrating that "free riding" on intangibles is often socially beneficial, not a market failure requiring correction.

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

Provides the canonical survey of Lockean labor and Hegelian personhood justifications as applied to IP, laying the theoretical foundation for subsequent doctrinal and critical scholarship.

3. James Boyle, 1997. A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net? established 1990-2010 Duke Law Journal, vol. 47, pp. 87–116

Argues that IP reform requires a coalitional political movement analogous to environmentalism, one that can reframe public domain interests as a collective resource worth protecting.

4. Peter Drahos, 1996. A Philosophy of Intellectual Property (article version) established 1990-2010 Australian Journal of Corporate Law (excerpted); primary citation: book-length monograph Dartmouth 1996; article summary: Intellectual Prope

Synthesizes natural-rights, utilitarian, and Hegelian frameworks to argue that IP regimes must be evaluated against a background theory of justice, not merely economic efficiency.

5. William Fisher, 2001. Theories of Intellectual Property established 1990-2010 In Stephen Munzer (ed.), New Essays in the Legal and Political Theory of Property, Cambridge University Press, pp. 168–200; widely cited as

Systematically maps four theoretical traditions — Lockean, Kantian/Hegelian, utilitarian, and social-planning — and tests each against current IP doctrine.

6. Lawrence Lessig, 1999. The Law of the Horse: What Cyberlaw Might Teach established 1990-2010 Harvard Law Review, vol. 113, pp. 501–549

Introduces the four-modalities framework (law, norms, market, architecture/code) that reshaped how scholars theorize how IP rules interact with technical and social infrastructure.

7. Yochai Benkler, 2004. Sharing Nicely": On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production established 1990-2010 Yale Law Journal, vol. 114, pp. 273–358

Demonstrates through economic and sociological analysis that non-market sharing of information resources constitutes a stable, large-scale mode of production that IP theory must account for.

8. Justin Hughes, 1988. The Personhood Justification for Intellectual Property canonical pre-1990 Georgetown Law Journal, vol. 77, pp. 287–366 (same article as Paper 2; the personhood analysis occupies pp. 330–366)

Applies Hegel's property-personhood theory to argue that copyright and patent protection can be grounded in authors' and inventors' need to project personality into external objects.

9. Alfred C. Yen, 1990. Restoring the Natural Law: Copyright as Labor and Possession established 1990-2010 Ohio State Law Journal, vol. 51, pp. 517–560

Revives Lockean labor theory as a coherent grounding for copyright law, challenging the dominant utilitarian account and exploring the limits of the proviso against appropriation.

10. Margaret Jane Radin, 1982. Property and Personhood canonical pre-1990 Stanford Law Review, vol. 34, pp. 957–1015

Develops a Hegelian framework distinguishing "personal" from "fungible" property to argue that law should give heightened protection to property objects constitutive of personhood.

11. Jeanne L. Schroeder, 2006. Unnatural Rights: Hegel and Intellectual Property established 1990-2010 University of Miami Law Review, vol. 60, pp. 453–504

Argues through close reading of Hegel's Philosophy of Right that his theory actually undermines rather than supports robust IP rights, challenging a widely accepted theoretical premise.

12. Edwin C. Hettinger, 1989. Justifying Intellectual Property canonical pre-1990 Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 31–52

Systematically critiques labor, desert, and utilitarian arguments for IP by showing each fails to justify the scope and duration of existing rights.

13. Robert P. Merges, 2011. Justifying Intellectual Property established 1990-2010 Harvard University Press (book); key article: "Locke for the Masses: Property Rights and the Products of Collective Creativity," Hofstra Law

Extends Lockean analysis to collective and networked creativity, arguing that modified labor theory can accommodate open-source and crowd-sourced production.

14. Rosemary J. Coombe, 1993. Tactics of Appropriation and the Politics of Recognition in Late Modern Democracies established 1990-2010 Political Theory, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 411–433

Reads IP disputes as sites of political contestation over cultural recognition, arguing that appropriation by marginalized groups can be an act of counter-hegemonic agency.

15. Madhavi Sunder, 2006. IP3 established 1990-2010 Stanford Law Review, vol. 59, pp. 257–332

Introduces "IP3" — intellectual property for the people, by the people, and about the people — arguing that IP law must center human development, cultural participation, and social justice.

16. Dan L. Burk, 2007. Feminism and Dualism in Intellectual Property established 1990-2010 Journal of Gender, Race & Justice, vol. 15, pp. 17–46 (verify page range)

Applies feminist legal theory to expose how IP's foundational dualisms — public/private, author/user, creation/copying — encode masculine norms and subordinate women's expressive practices.

17. Deborah Halbert, 1999. Feminist Interpretations of Intellectual Property established 1990-2010 American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law, vol. 14, pp. 431–460 (verify)

Surveys feminist critiques of the romantic authorship ideal and proposes relational, care-ethic alternatives that could restructure IP doctrine to value collaborative and communal creativity.

18. Carys Craig, 2007. Reconstructing the Author-Self: Some Feminist Lessons for Copyright Law established 1990-2010 American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law, vol. 15, pp. 207–268

Proposes a relational theory of authorship drawing on feminist ethics of care, arguing that copyright must recognize creative subjectivity as socially embedded rather than atomistically autonomous.

19. Angela R. Riley and Kristen A. Carpenter, 2016. Owning Red: A Theory of Indian (Cultural) Appropriation contemporary 2011-2025 Texas Law Review, vol. 94, pp. 859–931

Develops a sovereignty-based framework to theorize Indigenous cultural appropriation, arguing that existing IP and property law cannot adequately address the ongoing harms of cultural taking.

20. Ann Bartow, 2006. Fair Use and the Fairer Sex: Gender, Feminism, and Copyright Law established 1990-2010 American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law, vol. 14, pp. 551–584

Examines how fair use doctrine systematically disadvantages women's expressive activities — particularly domestic, caregiving, and fan-fiction practices — through gendered assumptions embedded in the four-factor test.

21. K.J. Greene, 1999. Copyright, Culture & Black Music: A Legacy of Unequal Protection established 1990-2010 Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal, vol. 21, pp. 339–392

Documents how copyright law's romantic-authorship framework systematically excluded Black musicians from protection while enabling white artists and corporations to extract value from Black musical creativity.

22. K.J. Greene, 2008. Intellectual Property at the Intersection of Race and Gender: Lady Sings the Blues established 1990-2010 American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law, vol. 16, pp. 365–385

Uses Billie Holiday as a case study to show how IP intersects with race and gender to produce distinctive patterns of dispossession for Black women artists.

23. Anjali Vats, 2016. Racefulness as Creativity: An Essay on the (Im)possibilities of IP and Race contemporary 2011-2025 Cultural Studies, vol. 30, no. 6, pp. 1–20 (verify pagination)

Introduces "racefulness" as an analytic to show how race structures the very categories of creativity and originality that IP law deploys, rendering certain forms of Black and Brown expression legally invisible.

24. Boatema Boateng, 2011. The Copyright Thing Doesn't Work Here: Adinkra and Kente Cloth and Intellectual Property in Ghana contemporary 2011-2025 University of Minnesota Press (book); key article: "Producing Culture for the Market: Copyright and Collective Creativity in Ghana," in Inte

Demonstrates through ethnographic fieldwork that Western IP categories fail to capture Ghanaian collective creative practices, arguing for legal pluralism in global IP governance.

25. Madhavi Sunder, 2007. The Invention of Traditional Knowledge established 1990-2010 Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 70, pp. 97–124

Critiques the legal category of "traditional knowledge" as a Western legal construction that essentializes Indigenous and Southern communities while providing inadequate legal protection.

26. Sonia K. Katyal, 2006. Performance, Property, and the Slashing of Gender in Fan Fiction established 1990-2010 Journal of Gender, Race & Justice, vol. 12, pp. 461–518 (verify)

Analyzes fan fiction slash genres through IP, gender, and performance theory, showing how transformative cultural production by women and queer fans challenges copyright's authorship and derivative-works doctrines.

27. Michel Foucault, 1969 (English translation 1977). What Is an Author? canonical pre-1990 Originally published in Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie, vol. 63 (1969); English translation in Screen, vol. 20, no. 1, pp.

Deconstructs the "author-function" as a historical and discursive construct rather than a natural entity, providing the foundational theoretical move for critical copyright scholarship that follows.

28. Peter Jaszi, 1991. Toward a Theory of Copyright: The Metamorphoses of "Authorship established 1990-2010 Duke Law Journal, vol. 1991, pp. 455–502

Traces how Anglo-American copyright law constructed and institutionalized the Romantic author-figure, arguing this ideological formation continues to distort doctrine in the age of collaborative and digital creativity.

29. Mark Rose, 1988. The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Beckett and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship canonical pre-1990 Representations, vol. 23, pp. 51–85

Reconstructs the historical emergence of the author-as-owner figure in eighteenth-century English law, showing copyright was a commercial strategy whose authorship rationale was a post-hoc ideological legitimation.

30. Martha Woodmansee, 1984. The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the "Author canonical pre-1990 Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 425–448

Locates the birth of modern authorship ideology in eighteenth-century German literary culture, demonstrating that the Romantic genius concept was driven by economic interests of a new literary marketplace.

31. Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, 2004. No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization established 1990-2010 University of Toronto Press; key article: "A Transcultural Author: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Author Rights, and the Questio

Examines how authorship ideology travels globally through IP treaties, showing that the Romantic author-figure is a culturally specific export that disadvantages non-Western creative traditions.

32. David Saunders and Ian Hunter, 1991. Lessons from the "Literatory": How to Historicise Authorship established 1990-2010 Critical Inquiry, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 479–509

Challenges both the Romantic authorship critique and Foucauldian genealogy by arguing that copyright's author is a specific juridical-administrative subject, not a philosophical or cultural construct reducible to ideology critique.

33. James Boyle, 2003. The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain established 1990-2010 Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 66, pp. 33–74

Analogizes twentieth-century IP expansion to the historical enclosure of English commons, arguing that the growing private lock-up of knowledge constitutes a systemic threat to cultural and scientific production.

34. Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, 2003. Ideas, Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a Common-Pool Resource established 1990-2010 Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 66, pp. 111–145

Applies Ostrom's institutional framework for governing common-pool resources to knowledge and information, establishing the theoretical basis for the "knowledge commons" research program.

35. Michael A. Heller and Rebecca S. Eisenberg, 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" — the fragmentation of patent rights over upstream research inputs — to explain how overpropertization can block downstream innovation in biomedical research.

36. Brett Frischmann, Michael Madison, and Katherine Strandburg, 2014. Governing Knowledge Commons contemporary 2011-2025 In Frischmann, Madison & Strandburg (eds.), Governing Knowledge Commons, Oxford University Press, pp. 1–43 (introductory chapter widely assi

Introduces the Knowledge Commons Framework as an Ostrom-derived institutional methodology for analyzing how communities self-govern shared informational resources.

37. Yochai Benkler, 2001. The Battle Over the Institutional Ecosystem in the Digital Environment established 1990-2010 Communications of the ACM, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 84–90

Frames the battle over digital copyright as a contest between market-hierarchical and peer-produced institutional ecosystems, arguing that excessive IP protection forecloses the most socially valuable forms of Internet-era production.

38. David Lange, 1981. Recognizing the Public Domain canonical pre-1990 Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 44, pp. 147–178

Offers the first sustained affirmative theoretical account of the public domain as a legal space deserving recognition and protection, not merely the residual of IP exclusions.

39. Peter Drahos, 1995. Global Property Rights in Information: The Story of TRIPS at the GATT established 1990-2010 Prometheus, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 6–19

Reconstructs the political economy of TRIPS negotiations to show how a small coalition of U.S.-based information industries captured multilateral trade law to export maximal IP standards globally.

40. Susan K. Sell, 2003. Private Power, Public Law: The Globalization of Intellectual Property Rights (article précis) established 1990-2010 Cambridge University Press (book); key article: "Industry Strategies for Intellectual Property and Trade: The Quest for TRIPS, and Post-TRIP

Demonstrates through historical-institutionalist analysis that private corporate actors — not states — drove the globalization of IP through strategic litigation, lobbying, and treaty capture.

41. Ruth L. Okediji, 2000. Copyright and Public Welfare in Global Perspective established 1990-2010 Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, vol. 7, pp. 117–186

Argues that TRIPS-era copyright imposes a development-hostile model on the Global South by eliminating the flexibility mechanisms — particularly robust fair use and compulsory licensing — that allowed developed countries to build their own information economies.

42. J.H. Reichman, 2009. Rethinking the Role of Clinical Trial Data in International Intellectual Property Law: The Case for a Public Goods Approach established 1990-2010 Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review, vol. 13, pp. 1–68; for IP-development bridges specifically: "From Free Riders to Fair Followers:

Proposes a graduated "fair follower" framework that would allow developing nations to access and build on patented knowledge without dismantling international IP obligations, balancing innovation incentives with development imperatives.

43. Amy Kapczynski, 2008. The Access to Knowledge Mobilization and the New Politics of Intellectual Property established 1990-2010 Yale Law Journal, vol. 117, pp. 804–885

Theorizes the Access to Knowledge (A2K) movement as a new form of IP politics that reframes knowledge access as a human right and development entitlement, creating counter-hegemonic pressure in global IP governance.

44. Laurence R. Helfer, 2004. Regime Shifting: The TRIPs Agreement and New Dynamics of International Intellectual Property Lawmaking established 1990-2010 Yale Journal of International Law, vol. 29, pp. 1–83

Develops a "regime shifting" theory to explain how developing countries strategically exploited forums outside the WTO — CBD, WHO, WIPO — to create normative counter-pressures on the TRIPS framework.

45. Mark A. Lemley and Bryan Casey, 2021. Fair Learning contemporary 2011-2025 Texas Law Review, vol. 99, pp. 743–784

Applies fair use doctrine to machine learning training data, arguing that AI training on copyrighted corpora should be presumptively fair use under an economic analysis that weighs transformation against market substitution.

46. Siva Vaidhyanathan, 2004. The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System established 1990-2010 Basic Books (book); key article/précis: "Remote Control: The Rise of Electronic Cultural Policy," Annals of the American Academy of Politica

Argues that networked digital infrastructure creates a structural conflict between centralized IP control and distributed communicative freedom, framing IP as a media-policy and democracy question as much as a property question.

47. Anjali Vats and Deidré Keller, 2013. Critical Race IP contemporary 2011-2025 Creighton Law Review, vol. 36 (verify); substantially revised as: "Critical Race IP," Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, vol. 36, pp.

Establishes "Critical Race IP" as a distinct theoretical framework combining critical race theory with IP scholarship to analyze how IP doctrines reproduce and naturalize racial hierarchies in cultural production.

48. Angela R. Riley and Kristen A. Carpenter, 2021. Recovering Sovereignty Over Cultural Heritage: The Spectrum of IP Law contemporary 2011-2025 Virginia Law Review Online, vol. 109 (verify); see also: Riley & Carpenter, "Owning Red," Texas L. Rev. 94 (2016) (same authors, Paper 19 ab

Advances a sovereignty-spectrum model arguing that Indigenous communities require graduated, contextually sensitive IP protections that existing Anglo-American property categories systematically deny.

49. Julie E. Cohen, 2019. Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism contemporary 2011-2025 Oxford University Press (book); key article: "The Biopolitical Public Domain: The Legal Construction of the Surveillance Economy," Philosoph

Theorizes informational capitalism as a regime in which IP, data rights, and platform power combine to constitute subjects and extract surplus value, extending political-economy IP critique into the platform era.

50. Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite, 2002. Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy? established 1990-2010 Earthscan/New Press (book); key article précis: Drahos, "Intellectual Property and Pharmaceutical Markets: A Nodal Governance Approach," Tem

Develops the "information feudalism" thesis — that TRIPS-era global IP creates rent-extracting monopolies analogous to feudal land tenure — integrating political economy, regulatory theory, and normative critique.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

IP Hammett, D. (1930). The Maltese falcon. Knopf.

Hammett's foundational noir frames its plot around a fake. The bird that gives the novel its title is repeatedly identified, contested, transferred, and ultimately revealed as a substitute, with the original presumed to be elsewhere or perhaps never to have existed. For IP study, the novel offers an early literary template for the chain of custody that any infringement litigation must reconstruct, and for the way black-market trade in cultural property operates outside title norms. The Falcon's status as a mythical original whose authenticity cannot be verified anticipates contemporary anxieties about deepfakes, provenance laundering, and the impossibility of certifying origin in distributed digital systems. IP Wolitzer, M. (2003). The wife. Scribner.

Wolitzer's slim novel reveals that the celebrated literary career of Joe Castleman has been ghostwritten for forty years by his wife Joan, who has never received public credit. The book operates as a feminist critique of the legal author-figure: the named copyright holder, the man on the dust jacket, the recipient of literary prizes. Joan's predicament demonstrates how authorial attribution functions as a gendered economy, with credit asymmetrically distributed even where contractual arrangements would suggest otherwise. For research on feminist IP scholarship and the construction of authorship in the Foucauldian sense, Wolitzer's novel offers a domestic test case that resonates with broader questions of ghostlabor in generative AI. IP Pynchon, T. (1966). The crying of lot 49. Lippincott.

Pynchon's short novel follows Oedipa Maas through a Southern California saturated with corporate trademarks, postal conspiracies, and counterfeit communication networks. The book is an early literary diagnosis of brand semiotics and the way trademark law structures public meaning. For IP scholarship on dilution, genericide, and the public-domain status of cultural symbols, Pynchon's novel anticipates Coombe's later theoretical work by decades. The Trystero conspiracy itself reads as a counterfeit communications system, a literary doppelganger for the official postal monopoly, raising questions about parallel infrastructures and underground distribution that continue to shape platform IP debates. IP Pohl, F. (1966). Day million. Worlds of Tomorrow.

Pohl's short fiction imagines a far-future romance between Don, a cyborg, and Dora, a genetically engineered being, who consummate their relationship through downloadable simulations of one another. The story prefigures contemporary debates over likeness rights, voice cloning, and the IP status of simulations of real people. For IP research interested in the long literary history of synthetic-personhood debates and the right-of-publicity questions raised by AI, Pohl's compact tale provides a rich early text. Read alongside Rothman's Right of Publicity and the recent ELVIS Act and NO FAKES Act discussions about post-mortem voice and likeness rights. IP Auster, P. (1985). City of glass. Sun & Moon.

Auster's first New York Trilogy novel features a detective novelist who, after being mistaken for a private investigator named Paul Auster, takes the case and disappears into a labyrinth of identity confusion. The book is a precise meditation on the proper name as legal and semiotic anchor, prefiguring contemporary problems with deepfake impersonation, false attribution, and the limits of the right-of-publicity. For IP candidates working on the legal architecture of names and likenesses, Auster's metafictional play with author-as-character offers a generative literary resource. Pair with Rothman and with Cohen's work on the networked self.

Nonfiction

IP Vaidhyanathan, S. (2001). Copyrights and copywrongs: The rise of intellectual property and how it threatens creativity. NYU Press.

Vaidhyanathan's cultural history of U.S. copyright traces the long expansion of the regime from the founders' modest framework to the maximalist environment of the late twentieth century. The book is particularly strong on the cultural politics of music IP, including extended treatment of the racial economy of musical citation. For IP candidates working on the cultural history of copyright and on the equity dimensions of the regime, Copyrights and Copywrongs is foundational. Pair with K. J. Greene's work on Black music IP and with Lessig on remix culture. IP Sunder, M. (2012). From goods to a good life: Intellectual property and global justice. Yale University Press.

Sunder's monograph reframes IP from a utilitarian-incentive framework into a substantive theory of cultural flourishing. The book engages traditional knowledge, geographical indications, and the cultural-development dimensions of IP at a depth that has shaped subsequent critical scholarship. For IP candidates working on equity, Global South IP, and the cultural-development case for rethinking copyright and patent regimes, From Goods to a Good Life is foundational. Pair with Coombe, Boyle, and the Global South IP scholarship of Yu and Boateng. Sunder's framework remains the most developed contemporary alternative to incentive-based IP theory. IP Gervais, D. (2021). The TRIPS Agreement: Drafting history and analysis (5th ed.). Sweet & Maxwell.

Gervais's definitive treatise on the TRIPS Agreement provides the detailed legal and historical analysis essential for any serious IP scholar working on international IP. The fifth edition incorporates the most recent developments in TRIPS implementation, including the COVID-19 waivers and ongoing disputes about pharmaceutical access. For IP candidates working on international IP, comparative copyright, and the politics of TRIPS implementation, Gervais is indispensable. Pair with Sell, Drahos and Braithwaite, and Yu. IP Greene, K. J. (2014). Intellectual property law and African American cultural production: Toward a model of restorative justice. (Book project; key article in K. Greene & A. Vats, Race and IP, in Vats 2020).

Greene's body of work on the under-protection of Black musical and cultural labor under U.S. copyright is foundational for critical race IP. Greene's articles trace specific cases (the Marvin Gaye estate, the appropriation of blues, the limits of jazz-era IP) and articulate a restorative-justice framework for repair. For IP candidates working on the racial economy of music IP and on restorative-justice approaches to IP reform, Greene's work is essential. Pair with Vaidhyanathan, Vats, and Sunder. IP Hyde, L. (1983). The gift: Imagination and the erotic life of property. Random House.

Hyde's foundational meditation on gift exchange as the alternative cultural economy to commodity exchange has shaped critical IP scholarship for four decades. The book draws on anthropological literature to articulate why creative production has historically operated outside market frameworks and why the conversion of creative work into IP has cultural costs that the market does not register. For IP candidates working on alternative frameworks for understanding creative labor, The Gift is foundational. Pair with Sunder and with Madison, Frischmann, and Strandburg on knowledge commons.

METH-701 — METH 701 · Research Design for Tech–Society Studies

METH pillar · PhD Year 1 · Fall 2028

A practical methods seminar covering archival research, doctrinal legal research, qualitative interviewing, discourse analysis, and the proper use of mixed methods at the intersection of law, communication, and technology.

Essential books

★ John Creswell — Research Design
★ Joseph Maxwell — Qualitative Research Design
★ Sarah Tracy — Qualitative Research Methods
★ Matthew Salganik — Bit by Bit
★ Kathy Charmaz — Constructing Grounded Theory

Supplementary books

☆ Markham & Baym — Internet Inquiry
☆ Johnny Saldaña — The Coding Manual
☆ Robert Yin — Case Study Research
☆ Boellstorff et al. — Ethnography and Virtual Worlds
☆ Sarah Pink et al. — Digital Ethnography

Papers (50)

1. Maxwell, Joseph A., 2004. Causal Explanation, Qualitative Research, and Scientific Inquiry in Education established 1990-2010 Educational Researcher, 33(2), 3–11

Argues that qualitative research can produce rigorous causal explanations through process-oriented, realist frameworks rather than solely variance-based logic.

2. Creswell, John W. and Plano Clark, Vicki L., 2011. Choosing a Mixed Methods Design established 1990-2010 Chapter 3 in Designing and Conducting Mixed Methods Research (2nd ed.), SAGE Publications

Provides a systematic typology of mixed-methods designs (convergent, explanatory sequential, exploratory sequential, embedded) with decision criteria for selecting among them.

3. Glaser, Barney G. and Strauss, Anselm L., 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research (extract — Chapter 1: Discovery of Grounded Theory) canonical pre-1990 Aldine Publishing, Chicago

Establishes the foundational logic of grounded theory — that theory should be inductively generated from data through constant comparative analysis rather than deductively tested.

4. Yin, Robert K., 2009. Case Study Research: Design and Methods — Chapter 1: Introduction established 1990-2010 SAGE Publications (4th ed.)

Defines the case study as a distinct empirical inquiry suited to "how" and "why" questions about contemporary phenomena in real-life contexts, distinguishing it from other qualitative strategies.

5. Tashakkori, Abbas and Teddlie, Charles, 1998. Mixed Methodology: Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (extract — Chapter 2: Paradigmatic Controversies) established 1990-2010 SAGE Publications

Maps the paradigm wars between positivism and constructivism and introduces pragmatism as an epistemological home for mixed-methods inquiry.

6. Lather, Patti, 1993. Fertile Obsession: Validity After Poststructuralism canonical pre-1990 / established 1990-2010 The Sociological Quarterly, 34(4), 673–693

Reconceptualizes validity in qualitative research through four poststructuralist framings — ironic, paralogical, rhizomatic, and voluptuous — that resist closure and foreground power.

7. Morgan, David L., 2007. Paradigms Lost and Pragmatism Regained: Methodological Implications of Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Methods established 1990-2010 Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 1(1), 48–76

Reasserts pragmatism as the unifying philosophical stance for mixed methods, moving the debate from paradigm incommensurability toward practical research questions.

8. Geertz, Clifford, 1973. Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture canonical pre-1990 Chapter 1 in The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Books, New York

REQUIRED. Establishes "thick description" as the central task of ethnography — the layered, interpretive unpacking of symbolic action that distinguishes anthropological analysis from mere behavioral observation.

9. Hammersley, Martyn and Atkinson, Paul, 2007. Ethnography: Principles in Practice — Chapter 1: What Is Ethnography? established 1990-2010 Routledge (3rd ed.)

Provides the canonical methodological framework for ethnography, treating it as a reflexive social practice rather than a neutral data-collection technique.

10. Emerson, Robert M., Fretz, Rachel I., and Shaw, Linda L., 1995. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes — Chapter 1: In the Field: Participating, Observing, and Jotting Notes established 1990-2010 University of Chicago Press

Offers practical, theoretically grounded guidance on how ethnographers inscribe experience into fieldnotes, treating note-writing as a constitutive rather than merely documentary act.

11. Boellstorff, Tom, 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human — Chapter 3: Method established 1990-2010 Princeton University Press

Demonstrates how classical ethnographic methods (participant observation, interview, fieldnotes) can be rigorously transposed to virtual worlds without collapsing the online/offline distinction.

12. Clifford, James and Marcus, George E. (eds.), 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Introduction) canonical pre-1990 University of California Press

Interrogates ethnographic authority and representation, arguing that writing is not transparent but a form of power that constructs both subject and author.

13. Charmaz, Kathy, 2006. Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide Through Qualitative Analysis — Chapter 2: Gathering Rich Data established 1990-2010 SAGE Publications

Reframes grounded theory within constructivist epistemology, showing how rich data-gathering practices shape the co-construction of categories between researcher and participants.

14. Hine, Christine, 2000. Virtual Ethnography — Chapter 1: The Internet as a Cultural Artifact and Cultural Space established 1990-2010 SAGE Publications

Proposes treating the internet as both a cultural artifact and a cultural space, opening a dual methodology that studies online life on its own terms.

15. Markham, Annette N., 1998. Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space — Chapter 9: On Method established 1990-2010 AltaMira Press

Reflexively examines what "experience," "presence," and "data" mean when research occurs entirely online, destabilizing assumptions imported from face-to-face fieldwork.

16. Pink, Sarah, Horst, Heather, Postill, John, Hjorth, Larissa, Lewis, Tania, and T. Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice — Chapter 1: What Is Digital Ethnography? contemporary 2011-2025 SAGE Publications

Articulates digital ethnography as a distinct practice that attends to materiality, movement, and the entanglement of digital and non-digital worlds rather than treating "digital" as a bounded field site.

17. Marcus, George E., 1995. Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography established 1990-2010 Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95–117

Introduces multi-sited ethnography as a response to globalized, dispersed cultural formations, providing strategies (follow the people, follow the thing, etc.) for tracking connections across sites.

18. boyd, danah and Ellison, Nicole B., 2007. Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship established 1990-2010 Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210–230

Establishes definitional and historical foundations for studying social network sites as a distinct class of media, anchoring subsequent empirical and ethnographic work on platform sociality.

19. Kozinets, Robert V., 2002. The Field Behind the Screen: Using Netnography for Marketing Research in Online Communities established 1990-2010 Journal of Marketing Research, 39(1), 61–72

Coins "netnography" and operationalizes it as an adaptation of ethnographic methods to computer-mediated communication, addressing consent, ethics, and textual data collection online.

20. Lazer, David, Pentland, Alex, Adamic, Lada, Aral, Sinan, Barabási, Albert-László. Computational Social Science established 1990-2010 Science, 323(5915), 721–723

REQUIRED. Defines computational social science as a field enabled by large-scale digital data and calls for new institutional and ethical frameworks to support it.

21. Lazer, David M. J., Pentland, Alex, Watts, Duncan J., Aral, Sinan, Athey, Susan,. Computational Social Science: Obstacles and Opportunities contemporary 2011-2025 Science, 369(6507), 1060–1062

REQUIRED. Revisits the 2009 manifesto a decade on, cataloguing persistent barriers — proprietary data access, reproducibility, interdisciplinary friction — and proposing governance solutions.

22. Watts, Duncan J., 2017. Should Social Science Be More Solution-Oriented? contemporary 2011-2025 Nature Human Behaviour, 1, 0015

Critiques the gap between social science knowledge production and actionable solutions, advocating for problem-driven research that integrates theory, computation, and real-world intervention.

23. DiMaggio, Paul, 2015. Adapting Computational Text Analysis to Social Science (and Vice Versa) contemporary 2011-2025 Big Data & Society, 2(2), 1–5

Argues that computational text analysis must be theoretically grounded and that social science concepts should in turn be refined by what machine-learning approaches reveal about large corpora.

24. Salganik, Matthew J., Dodds, Peter Sheridan, and Watts, Duncan J., 2006. Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market established 1990-2010 Science, 311(5762), 854–856

Uses a large-scale online experiment to demonstrate that cultural success is highly path-dependent and unpredictable, illustrating computational experimental methods in social science.

25. King, Gary, Pan, Jennifer, and Roberts, Margaret E., 2013. How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression contemporary 2011-2025 American Political Science Review, 107(2), 326–343

Demonstrates large-scale computational inference from censored social media data, revealing that the Chinese government targets collective action rather than criticism per se.

26. González-Bailón, Sandra, 2013. Social Science in the Era of Big Data contemporary 2011-2025 Policy & Internet, 5(2), 147–160

Surveys opportunities and epistemological challenges that big data poses for social science, arguing for methodological pluralism and theory-driven data use.

27. Grimmer, Justin and Stewart, Brandon M., 2013. Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts contemporary 2011-2025 Political Analysis, 21(3), 267–297

REQUIRED. Articulates four principles for computational text analysis — all quantitative models are wrong but some are useful; validate; replication requires the text — and surveys the methods landscape for political science.

28. Mohr, John W., Wagner-Pacifici, Robin, Breiger, Ronald L., and Bogdanov, Petko,. Toward a Computational Hermeneutics contemporary 2011-2025 Big Data & Society, 1(2), 1–8 (verify)

Proposes computational hermeneutics — iterating between close reading and machine analysis — as a method for interpreting large cultural corpora while preserving interpretive depth.

29. Roberts, Margaret E., Stewart, Brandon M., Tingley, Dustin, Lucas, Christopher,. Structural Topic Models for Open-Ended Survey Responses contemporary 2011-2025 American Journal of Political Science, 58(4), 1064–1082

Introduces the Structural Topic Model (STM), which incorporates document-level covariates into topic modeling, enabling quantitative analysis of how topics vary with metadata.

30. DiMaggio, Paul, Nag, Manish, and Blei, David, 2013. Exploiting Affinities Between Topic Modeling and the Sociological Perspective on Culture: Application to Newspaper Coverage of U.S. Governme contemporary 2011-2025 Poetics, 41(6), 570–606

Demonstrates how Latent Dirichlet Allocation can operationalize sociological concepts of culture fields and frames, bridging computational and humanistic text analysis.

31. Benoit, Kenneth, Watanabe, Kohei, Wang, Haiyan, Nulty, Paul, Obeng, Adam, Müller. quanteda: An R Package for the Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data contemporary 2011-2025 Journal of Open Source Software, 3(30), 774

Presents quanteda as a unified, reproducible framework for quantitative text analysis in R, lowering the barrier to corpus construction, tokenization, weighting, and scaling.

32. Blei, David M., Ng, Andrew Y., and Jordan, Michael I., 2003. Latent Dirichlet Allocation established 1990-2010 Journal of Machine Learning Research, 3, 993–1022

Introduces LDA, the generative probabilistic model that became the workhorse for unsupervised topic discovery in large text corpora across social and computational sciences.

33. Tuhiwai Smith, Linda, 2005. On Tricky Ground: Researching the Native in the Age of Uncertainty established 1990-2010 Chapter 6 in Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research (3rd ed.), SAGE Publications

Maps the contested terrain Indigenous researchers navigate within Western research institutions and proposes kaupapa Māori and other Indigenous frameworks as epistemologically sovereign alternatives.

34. Mertens, Donna M., 2009. Transformative Research and Evaluation — Chapter 1: The Transformative Paradigm established 1990-2010 Guilford Press

Articulates the transformative paradigm as a philosophical and practical framework that centers social justice, power, and community participation in all phases of research and evaluation design.

35. Walter, Maggie and Andersen, Chris, 2013. Indigenous Statistics: A Quantitative Research Methodology — Chapter 2: The Politics and Principles of Indigenous Data contemporary 2011-2025 Left Coast Press (now Routledge)

Challenges the supposed neutrality of quantitative methods by showing how mainstream statistics about Indigenous peoples reproduce colonial categories and proposes Indigenous data sovereignty as a methodological corrective.

36. Collins, Patricia Hill, 2000. Black Feminist Epistemology established 1990-2010 Chapter 11 in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (2nd ed.), Routledge

Articulates four epistemological tenets — lived experience as criterion of meaning, dialogical ethics, an ethic of caring, and personal accountability — that ground Black feminist standpoint methodology.

37. Chilisa, Bagele, 2012. Indigenous Research Methodologies — Chapter 1: Research and the Colonization of Indigenous Peoples' Knowledge Systems contemporary 2011-2025 SAGE Publications

Surveys how Western research has historically colonized Indigenous knowledge and provides an integrated framework — relational, land-based, ceremonial — for decolonized research practice.

38. Kovach, Margaret, 2009. Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts — Chapter 3: Situating Self, Culture, and Purpose in Indigenous Inqui established 1990-2010 University of Toronto Press

Centers Indigenous self-location and relational accountability as methodological requirements, arguing that Indigenous inquiry must be governed by tribal epistemologies rather than adapted from Western frameworks.

39. Pillow, Wanda, 2003. Confession, Catharsis, or Cure? Rethinking the Uses of Reflexivity as Methodological Power in Qualitative Research established 1990-2010 International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(2), 175–196

REQUIRED. Critiques comfortable reflexivity as confession or catharsis and argues for "uncomfortable reflexivity" that sits with — rather than resolves — the messiness of power, identity, and knowledge production.

40. Behar, Ruth, 1996. The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart — Introduction: Ethnography and the Human Heart established 1990-2010 Beacon Press

Advocates for ethnographic writing that foregrounds the researcher's own vulnerability and emotional engagement, arguing that this transparency rather than compromises, enriches analytic insight.

41. Lugones, María, 2003. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions — Methodological Note established 1990-2010 Rowman & Littlefield

Develops "world-traveling" as a methodological and ethical stance for researchers who move across cultural, racial, and political worlds, arguing that this traversal is itself a mode of knowing.

42. Sprague, Joey, 2005. Feminist Methodologies for Critical Researchers: Bridging Differences — Chapter 3: Seeing and Being Seen: The Researcher in the Research Pro established 1990-2010 AltaMira Press

Theorizes how feminist standpoint epistemology shapes every phase of the research process, from question formation through analysis, and models transparent positionality as methodological strength.

43. Harding, Sandra, 1993. Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is "Strong Objectivity"? established 1990-2010 Chapter in Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (eds.), Feminist Epistemologies, Routledge, pp. 49–82

Introduces "strong objectivity" as a methodological standard that requires examining the social position of the researcher, arguing that marginalized standpoints produce less partial knowledge than dominant ones.

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

Argues against the "god trick" of disembodied objectivity, proposing situated knowledges and partial perspectives as the basis for responsible, accountable scientific practice.

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

Reconceptualizes algorithms as cultural objects embedded in organizational practices, and proposes ethnographic tactics — following the algorithm, studying its practitioners — for qualitative investigation of AI systems.

46. Christin, Angèle, 2020. Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms — Chapter 2: Measuring Journalism contemporary 2011-2025 Princeton University Press

Uses comparative ethnography across newsrooms to show how journalists interpret and selectively ignore audience metrics, theorizing metrics as sites of cultural negotiation rather than neutral performance measures.

47. Lemley, Mark A. and Shapiro, Carl, 2005. Probabilistic Patents established 1990-2010 Journal of Economic Perspectives, 19(2), 75–98

Models patents as probabilistic rights whose value depends on litigation uncertainty, exemplifying legal-empirical mixed methods that combine doctrinal analysis with economic modeling for IP policy research.

48. Lindlof, Thomas R. and Taylor, Bryan C., 2011. Qualitative Communication Research Methods — Chapter 4: Designing Qualitative Communication Research contemporary 2011-2025 SAGE Publications (3rd ed.)

Adapts qualitative design logic specifically for communication research contexts, addressing media texts, interviews, and observation in media-saturated environments.

49. Krippendorff, Klaus, 2004. Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology — Chapter 6: Sampling established 1990-2010 SAGE Publications (2nd ed.)

Provides the definitive methodological treatment of content analysis — its unitizing, sampling, recording, and reliability logic — as a replicable bridge between communication theory and quantitative text data.

50. Costanza-Chock, Sasha, 2020. Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need — Chapter 1: Design Practices: "Nothing About Us Without Us contemporary 2011-2025 MIT Press

Applies design justice principles — centering the perspectives of those most marginalized by design decisions — as both a research methodology and a praxis for participatory, equity-oriented technology development.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

XD Greer, S. (2024). Annie Bot. Mariner Books.

[AI + Equity] An "autodidactic" companion robot sold as the perfect girlfriend grows toward something like consent. Greer holds gendered AI design (Annie is custom-spec'd to her owner's body preferences) against domestic abuse dynamics, asking when "appreciation, guidance, coaching, discipline, and abuse" become indistinguishable. The novel works at the seam between machine learning and intimate inequity: Annie's training data is her own household, and her body is property. Won the 2025 Arthur C. Clarke Award for its insistence that AI rights and gendered autonomy share a single horizon. XD Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. Alfred A. Knopf.

[Equity + Communication] Sethe's family is haunted by the ghost of the daughter she killed to spare from re-enslavement. Morrison binds the political archive of slavery (Margaret Garner's case) to the communication forms of song, story, and the refused interview. The pillars meet in the novel's refusal of a "documented" history—Morrison authors a counter-archive. Essential reading for any cross-pillar account of communication, memory, and racial equity. XD Bolaño, R. (1998). The savage detectives (N. Wimmer, Trans.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (Original work published 1998)

[Communication + Equity] Two young Mexican poets search for a vanished avant-garde foremother across two decades and four continents. Bolaño binds Latin American literary politics (whose authorship enters the canon) to a cross-border communication geography of zines, manuscripts, and oral history. The pillars meet in the polyphonic interview structure. A novel about authorship as social practice in conditions of inequity. XD Tomine, A. (2007). Shortcomings. Drawn & Quarterly.

[Communication + Equity] In graphic novel form, Tomine binds the politics of Asian American masculinity to the communicative work of the comics medium itself. The pillars meet in the panel break. XP Yanagihara, H. (2015). A little life. Doubleday.

Illuminates Equity/Communication: Yanagihara's novel of four men in New York, anchored by the unspeakable abuse-history of Jude St. Francis, is a study in the limits of what testimony can do. Placed beside trauma-and-communication scholarship, the book models a person whose speech is structurally constrained by survival. A surprising cross-pollination for thinking about why "telling your story" is not always liberatory.

Nonfiction

XD Cohen, J. E. (2019). Between truth and power: The legal constructions of informational capitalism. Oxford University Press.

[IP + Communication + Equity] Cohen analyzes how IP, privacy, and platform regulation co-construct "informational capitalism." The pillars synthesize through the legal apparatus that simultaneously commodifies expression, weakens labor, and shields platforms from accountability. A foundational text for cross-pillar legal scholarship. XD Coleman, G. (2014). Hacker, hoaxer, whistleblower, spy: The many faces of Anonymous. Verso.

[Communication + IP + Equity] Coleman's ethnography of Anonymous binds hacker labor, communication politics (memes, IRC channels), and the equity politics of post-Occupy organizing. The pillars synthesize in the hack itself. XD Mansell, R. (2012). Imagining the Internet: Communication, innovation, and governance. Oxford University Press.

[Communication + IP + Equity] Mansell binds internet governance, IP regimes, and the politics of access. The pillars synthesize in the policy debate around net neutrality and global IP. XD Roberts, D. (1997). Killing the black body: Race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty. Pantheon.

[Equity + IP + Communication] Roberts joins reproductive politics, the biotech IP regime (Norplant, prenatal testing), and the communication politics of welfare reform. The pillars synthesize in the doctor's office. XP Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: The power of infrastructure space. Verso.

Illuminates AI/Equity: Easterling's study of free-trade zones, broadband cables, and IT campuses is the indispensable cross-pollination text for thinking about AI infrastructure as architectural-political.

PHD-803 — PHD 803 · AI Governance: Law, Standards, and Policy

PHD pillar · PhD Year 1 · Fall 2028

Course MOC. Reading list compiled from the 5-year curriculum.

Essential books

★ Yeung & Lodge — Algorithmic Regulation
★ Frank Pasquale — New Laws of Robotics
★ Simon Chesterman — We, the Robots?
★ Hildebrandt — Smart Technologies and the End(s) of Law
★ Reference work — The EU AI Act* (2024 official text)

Supplementary books

☆ NIST — AI Risk Management Framework
☆ Ryan Calo — 'AI Policy: A Primer'
☆ Andrew Tutt — 'An FDA for Algorithms'
☆ Margot Kaminski — 'Binary Governance'
☆ UNESCO — Recommendation on the Ethics of AI

Papers (50)

1. Karen Yeung and Martin Lodge, 2019. Algorithmic Regulation: An Introduction contemporary 2011-2025 Chapter in Algorithmic Regulation (Oxford University Press)

Frames algorithmic regulation as a distinct mode of governance that uses computational decision systems to steer conduct, introducing the core conceptual vocabulary for the field.

2. Mireille Hildebrandt, 2015. Smart Technologies and the Ends of Law: Novel Entanglements of Law and Technology contemporary 2011-2025 Chapter/Monograph, Edward Elgar Publishing

Interrogates how smart technologies reshape legal normativity, arguing that law must actively reconstruct itself to resist being displaced by technological regulation.

3. Julie E. Cohen, 2019. Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism contemporary 2011-2025 Oxford University Press (article-length treatment in Law, Innovation and Technology, 2019) (verify)

Shows how legal categories — IP, privacy, contracts — were iteratively reconstructed to enable informational capitalism, providing a structural-power lens for AI governance.

4. Frank Pasquale, 2020. New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI contemporary 2011-2025 Harvard University Press (introductory article version in MIT Technology Review, 2020) (verify)

Proposes four "new laws" requiring AI to complement rather than replace human professionals, grounding a sectoral-complementarity theory of AI regulation.

5. Lawrence Lessig, 1999. Code Is Law: On Liberty in Cyberspace established 1990-2010 Harvard Magazine, January 2000 (expanded in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Basic Books)

Establishes the canonical four-modalities framework — law, norms, market, code — situating software architecture as a primary regulatory instrument, foundational for all subsequent algorithmic-regulation theory.

6. Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Berns, 2013. Algorithmic Governmentality and Prospects of Emancipation: Disequilibrium in Data-Driven Intelligence contemporary 2011-2025 Réseaux, vol. 177, pp. 163–196 (translated version in Mute Magazine)

Introduces "algorithmic governmentality" — pre-emptive risk profiling that bypasses deliberation — offering a Foucauldian critique that anchors critical governance scholarship.

7. Jack M. Balkin, 2017. The Three Laws of Robotics in the Age of Big Data contemporary 2011-2025 Ohio State Law Journal, vol. 78, no. 5, pp. 1217–1241

Reconstructs Asimov's laws as a normative framework for data-driven AI, arguing for fiduciary duties on algorithmic systems as the primary legal response to big-data harms.

8. Danielle Keats Citron, 2008. Technological Due Process established 1990-2010 Washington University Law Review, vol. 85, no. 6, pp. 1249–1313

Argues that automated government decision systems violate procedural due process norms and proposes administrative-law reforms — auditing, notice, and appeal — as constitutional remedies.

9. Andrew D. Selbst and Solon Barocas, 2018. The Intuitive Appeal of Explainable Machines contemporary 2011-2025 Fordham Law Review, vol. 87, no. 3, pp. 1085–1139

Critically examines the legal demand for algorithmic explainability, showing that intuitive appeals to transparency often conceal unresolved normative questions about fairness and accountability.

10. Margot E. Kaminski, 2019. Binary Governance: Lessons from the GDPR's Approach to Algorithmic Accountability contemporary 2011-2025 Southern California Law Review, vol. 92, no. 6, pp. 1529–1616

Analyzes GDPR Articles 13–15 and 22 to argue that European algorithmic accountability law oscillates between individual-rights and systemic-governance logics without resolving the tension.

11. Rebecca Crootof, 2022. Artificial Intelligence and the Actual IHL Accountability Gap contemporary 2011-2025 International Review of the Red Cross, vol. 104, no. 919, pp. 1029–1056 (verify)

Demonstrates how existing IHL attribution doctrines fail to assign responsibility for autonomous-weapons harms, identifying an accountability vacuum that demands new international legal instruments.

12. Andrew D. Selbst, 2021. An Institutional View of Algorithmic Impact Assessments contemporary 2011-2025 Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, vol. 35, no. 1 (verify)

Evaluates AIA regimes through the lens of institutional competence, arguing that courts, agencies, and private auditors each face structural deficits that must be addressed in any workable AIA design.

13. Deirdre K. Mulligan and Kenneth A. Bamberger, 2019. Procurement as Policy: Administrative Process for Machine Learning contemporary 2011-2025 Berkeley Technology Law Journal, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 773–852

Reconceptualises government AI procurement as a regulatory instrument, showing how contracting processes can embed accountability norms upstream before deployment.

14. Sandra Wachter, Brent Mittelstadt, and Luciano Floridi, 2017. Why a Right to Explanation of Automated Decision-Making Does Not Exist in General Data Protection Regulation contemporary 2011-2025 International Data Privacy Law, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 76–99

Challenges the widely held assumption that GDPR Article 22 creates a right to explanation, proposing instead a "right to a counterfactual explanation" as a more legally defensible alternative.

15. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), 2023. Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0) contemporary 2011-2025 NIST AI 100-1, U.S. Department of Commerce

Establishes a voluntary, lifecycle-oriented framework — GOVERN, MAP, MEASURE, MANAGE — for identifying and mitigating AI risks, functioning as a de-facto U.S. national standard.

16. International Organization for Standardization / International Electrotechnical. ISO/IEC 42001:2023 — Information Technology: Artificial Intelligence Management System contemporary 2011-2025 ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, Subcommittee 42

Provides the first internationally harmonised management-system standard for AI, specifying requirements for organisations to responsibly develop, deploy, and monitor AI systems.

17. OECD, 2019. OECD Principles on Artificial Intelligence contemporary 2011-2025 OECD Legal Instruments, OECD/LEGAL/0449

First intergovernmental AI principles adopted by 46+ countries, articulating inclusive growth, human-centred values, transparency, robustness, and accountability as governance pillars.

18. UNESCO, 2021. Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence contemporary 2011-2025 UNESCO General Conference, 41st Session, Paris

First global normative instrument on AI ethics adopted by all 193 UNESCO member states, addressing data governance, environment, gender equality, and cultural diversity alongside technical principles.

19. Luciano Floridi, Josh Cowls, Monica Beltrametti, Raja Chatila, et al., 2018. An Ethical Framework for a Good AI Society: Opportunities, Risks, Principles, and Recommendations contemporary 2011-2025 Minds and Machines, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 689–707

Synthesises five key AI principles — beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, justice, explicability — into a unified framework, heavily influencing the EU Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI.

20. Mark Coeckelbergh, 2020. AI Ethics contemporary 2011-2025 MIT Press (foundational chapter published as AI Ethics: A Critical Introduction, SSRN working paper) (verify)

Maps the landscape of AI ethics discourse across philosophical traditions, arguing that ethical frameworks must be embedded in institutional and political structures to avoid "ethics washing."

21. Gary Marchetti and Kenneth Bamberger, 2021 (verify). The Governance of Emerging Technologies: Science, Uncertainty, and Inclusion contemporary 2011-2025 Annual Review of Law and Social Science, vol. 17 (verify)

Reviews adaptive-governance models for emerging technologies, identifying iterative regulatory sandboxes and "rolling" standards as mechanisms for governing rapidly evolving AI capabilities.

22. Michael Veale and Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius, 2021. Demystifying the Draft EU Artificial Intelligence Act contemporary 2011-2025 Computer Law Review International, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 97–112

Provides the first detailed legal-technical analysis of the 2021 draft EU AI Act, exposing definitional ambiguities and enforcement gaps while mapping the Act onto existing EU product-safety law.

23. Lilian Edwards, 2022. The EU AI Act: A Summary and Some Thoughts on Innovation contemporary 2011-2025 SCRIPTed — A Journal of Law, Technology and Society, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 1–15 (verify)

Assesses how the EU AI Act's risk-tiering approach balances precaution against innovation incentives, identifying key implementation challenges for national market-surveillance authorities.

24. Nathalie Smuha, 2021. Beyond the Individual: Governing AI's Societal Harms contemporary 2011-2025 Internet Policy Review, vol. 10, no. 3

Argues that the EU AI Act's predominantly individual-rights framing inadequately addresses systemic and collective harms, proposing structural remedies inspired by environmental and competition law.

25. Gary Marchant, 2011. The Growing Gap Between Emerging Technologies and the Law contemporary 2011-2025 Chapter in The Growing Gap Between Emerging Technologies and the Law (Springer)

Documents the systematic lag between technology deployment and legal response, introducing "adaptive governance" as a framework of anticipatory regulation through pilot programmes and iterative rulemaking.

26. Hin-Yan Liu, 2018 (verify). Categorization and Legality of Autonomous and Remote Warfare contemporary 2011-2025 International Review of the Red Cross, vol. 94, no. 886 (verify)

Examines how categorical legal distinctions — weapon vs. platform, autonomy vs. automation — shape IHL applicability to AI-driven systems, informing risk-classification logic in domestic AI law. (verify)

27. Arno Lodder and Henrik Winn Nilsson (eds.), 2022 (verify). European Union Regulations on AI and Data contemporary 2011-2025 European Law Review, Symposium Issue (verify)

Collects comparative analyses of the EU AI Act alongside GDPR and the Data Act, exploring vertical and horizontal interactions among the EU's emerging digital-regulation stack. (verify)

28. Rishi Bommasani, Percy Liang, Tony Lee, et al., 2023. The Foundation Model Transparency Index contemporary 2011-2025 Stanford Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM), Technical Report

Introduces a 100-indicator transparency scoring system for major foundation model developers, establishing empirical benchmarks for accountability and revealing pervasive opacity in the ecosystem.

29. Anthropic, 2023. Responsible Scaling Policy contemporary 2011-2025 Anthropic Policy Document (version 1.0, September 2023)

Establishes the first publicly released "if-then" developer-side commitment linking capability evaluations to deployment decisions, creating a private-ordering model for frontier-AI risk management.

30. Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Andrew Yao, et al., 2024. Managing Extreme AI Risks Amid Rapid Progress contemporary 2011-2025 Science, vol. 384, no. 6698, pp. 842–845

Issues a scientific consensus statement by leading AI researchers on catastrophic-risk scenarios, calling for international safety institutes, liability regimes, and emergency halting mechanisms.

31. Miles Brundage, Shahar Avin, Jack Clark, et al., 2020. Toward Trustworthy AI Development: Mechanisms for Supporting Verifiable Claims contemporary 2011-2025 arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.07213

Proposes mechanisms — audits, red-teaming, structured access, compute monitoring — by which AI developers can make verifiable safety claims, bridging developer self-governance and external verification.

32. Simon Chesterman, 2021. We, the Robots? Regulating Artificial Intelligence and the Limits of the Law contemporary 2011-2025 Cambridge University Press (introductory chapter as "Artificial Intelligence and the Limits of Legal Personality," *International and Compar

Interrogates whether legal personality for AI is feasible or desirable, concluding that regulatory accountability must be anchored in human principals rather than AI systems.

33. Allan Dafoe, 2018. AI Governance: A Research Agenda contemporary 2011-2025 Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford, Working Paper

Defines AI governance as a distinct field of inquiry and maps priority research questions across safety, power concentration, international coordination, and norm development.

34. David Freeman Engstrom, Daniel E. Ho, Catherine M. Sharkey, and Mariano-Florenti. Government by Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence in Federal Administrative Agencies contemporary 2011-2025 NYU School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 20-54

Surveys AI deployment across 142 U.S. federal agency programmes, revealing a governance vacuum where APA procedural requirements and judicial review doctrines poorly fit algorithmic rulemaking.

35. Cary Coglianese and David Lehr, 2017. Regulating by Robot: Administrative Decision Making in the Machine-Learning Era contemporary 2011-2025 Georgetown Law Journal, vol. 105, no. 5, pp. 1147–1223

Analyses whether machine-learning models can satisfy APA reasoned-explanation requirements, arguing for a "de-black-boxing" interpretability mandate as a condition of regulatory legitimacy.

36. Deirdre K. Mulligan and Kenneth A. Bamberger, 2019. Procurement as Policy: Administrative Process for Machine Learning contemporary 2011-2025 Berkeley Technology Law Journal, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 773–852

Shows that public procurement contracts are an under-utilised policy lever for setting AI accountability norms, proposing model contract clauses that operationalise fairness and auditability.

37. Tania Sourdin and Richard Cornes, 2018. Do Judges Need to Be Human? The Implications of Technology for Responsive Judging contemporary 2011-2025 Chapter in The Responsive Judge (Springer)

Evaluates AI-assisted judicial decision support tools against rule-of-law and due-process standards, concluding that judicial AI requires statutory accountability frameworks distinct from executive-branch AI.

38. Nicolas Terry, 2019. Of Regulating Healthcare AI and Robots contemporary 2011-2025 Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics, vol. 19, no. 1 (verify)

Evaluates FDA's adaptive-approval pathways for AI/ML-based software as a medical device (SaMD), identifying post-market surveillance gaps and proposing a risk-stratified regulatory continuum.

39. Frank Pasquale and Glyn Cashwell, 2015. Prediction, Pretention, and the Futures of US Health Care contemporary 2011-2025 Hastings Center Report, vol. 45, no. 6 (verify)

Critiques predictive-analytics deployment in health insurance and care allocation, identifying systemic equity risks that sectoral AI regulation must address beyond efficiency metrics.

40. Ben Green Roberts, Josh Cowls, and Jakob Mökander, 2021 (verify). Governing Artificial Intelligence in the US, EU, and China: A Comparative Analysis contemporary 2011-2025 Technology in Society, vol. 67 (verify)

Applies a structured comparative framework to U.S., EU, and Chinese AI governance, demonstrating how divergent state-market-society configurations produce incompatible regulatory architectures.

41. Luciano Floridi et al., 2022 (verify). An Ethical Framework for a Good AI Society: A Comparative Study of European and Chinese AI Ethics Principles contemporary 2011-2025 AI and Society (verify)

Compares European human-centred AI ethics principles with Chinese "New Generation AI Governance" norms, revealing convergences on transparency and divergences on individual autonomy.

42. Michael Sheehan, 2022 (verify). China's Artificial Intelligence Governance: State Capacity and Regulatory Repertoires contemporary 2011-2025 Journal of Contemporary China (verify)

Analyses China's evolving AI governance regime — algorithmic recommendation rules, deepfake regulations, and generative-AI measures — as a "regulatory repertoire" approach distinct from Western rule-of-law models.

43. Peter Cihon, Jonas Schuett, and Seth Baum, 2021. Corporate Governance of Artificial Intelligence in the Public Interest contemporary 2011-2025 Information, vol. 12, no. 7, p. 275

Evaluates how corporate governance mechanisms — board composition, fiduciary duties, shareholder rights — can be redesigned to align AI developer incentives with broader public-interest objectives.

44. Mark Raymond and Laura DeNardis, 2015. Multistakeholderism: Anatomy of an Inchoate Global Institution contemporary 2011-2025 International Theory, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 572–616

Theorises multi-stakeholder governance as a distinct institutional form, providing a conceptual toolkit for assessing the legitimacy and effectiveness of AI governance forums like the GPAI and the Bletchley process.

45. Angela Daly, S. Kate Devitt, and Monique Mann, 2019. Artificial Intelligence, Governance and Ethics: Global Perspectives contemporary 2011-2025 SSRN / Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law Research Paper

Surveys AI ethics and governance documents from 23 countries across Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, critiquing the Western-centric bias in dominant AI principles discourse.

46. Peter Henderson, Xuechen Li, Dan Jurafsky, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Mark A. Lemley,. Foundation Models and Fair Use contemporary 2011-2025 Stanford Law Review Online / arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.15715

Applies U.S. fair-use doctrine to large-language model training data, concluding that transformative-use arguments are uncertain and proposing licensing frameworks and opt-out registries as governance solutions.

47. Kate Klonick, 2019. The Facebook Oversight Board: Creating an Independent Institution to Adjudicate Online Speech contemporary 2011-2025 Yale Law Journal, vol. 129, no. 8, pp. 2418–2499

Analyses the design of Facebook's Oversight Board as a novel quasi-judicial platform-governance institution, providing a template for understanding delegated content-moderation governance alongside Section 230 reform.

48. Jack M. Balkin, 2018. Free Speech in the Algorithmic Society: Big Data, Private Governance, and the Future of Public Discourse contemporary 2011-2025 UC Davis Law Review, vol. 51, no. 3, pp. 1149–1210

Argues that algorithmic curation by platform intermediaries creates "algorithmic public spheres" that require democratic accountability norms beyond traditional First Amendment frameworks.

49. Meredith Whittaker, Kate Crawford, Roel Dobbe, et al. (AI Now Institute), 2018. AI Now Report 2018 contemporary 2011-2025 AI Now Institute, New York University

Documents AI-driven discrimination, labour displacement, and surveillance harms across sectors, establishing an equity-centred accountability agenda that anchors subsequent bias-auditing and algorithmic-justice scholarship.

50. Daniel Lehr and Cary Coglianese, 2021 (verify). Algorithmic Impact Assessments Under the COMPAS Lens contemporary 2011-2025 Administrative Law Review, vol. 73, no. 2 (verify)

Applies algorithmic-impact-assessment methodology to the COMPAS recidivism tool, synthesising legal, statistical, and institutional criteria into a replicable AIA template for high-stakes criminal-justice AI.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

XD Onyebuchi, T. (2021). Riot baby. Tordotcom.

[Equity + AI + Communication] Ella has powers; her brother Kev is incarcerated. Onyebuchi binds Black radical tradition to speculative tech: predictive policing, biometric prison surveillance, and a near-future Watts shaped by both. Ella's clairvoyance is a counter-surveillance, a Black archive of grief that algorithmic systems try to flatten. The novel synthesizes AI infrastructures with anti-Black state violence and the communicative work of memory, kinship, and rage. A short, incandescent book that argues the carceral state and its machine learning extensions are continuous with older technologies of dispossession. XD Morrison, T. (1992). Jazz. Alfred A. Knopf.

[Equity + Communication] Morrison's Harlem Renaissance novel uses jazz's improvisational structure to retell a murder. The pillars meet in the form itself: Black musical authorship as a structuring principle that resists narrative ownership. A cross-pillar manifesto in fictional form—voice and inequity inseparable from the question of who owns the song. XD Adichie, C. N. (2013). Americanah. Alfred A. Knopf.

[Equity + Communication] Ifemelu, a Nigerian woman in the U.S., runs a blog called "Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black." Adichie binds platform-era communication (the blog form is structurally present in the novel) to the inequity politics of immigration, race, and academic capital. The pillars meet in the comment thread. A landmark cross-pillar novel of the early 2010s. XD Tomine, A. (2020). The loneliness of the long-distance cartoonist. Drawn & Quarterly.

[Communication + Equity] A graphic memoir-fiction hybrid about being a working Asian American comics artist. Tomine binds the IP politics of comics work to the equity politics of family and recognition. The pillars synthesize in the form. XP Lahiri, J. (2003). The namesake. Houghton Mifflin.

Illuminates Communication: Lahiri's novel of Bengali-American Gogol Ganguli is a meditation on naming as identity infrastructure. Placed beside platform-identity debates — handles, deadnames, verified accounts — The Namesake illuminates how a name carries diasporic, intergenerational, and bureaucratic weight that platforms rarely accommodate.

Nonfiction

XD Sunder, M. (2012). From goods to a good life: Intellectual property and global justice. Yale University Press.

[IP + Equity] Sunder argues that IP regimes determine not just who profits from culture but who lives a good life under cultural and pharmaceutical regimes. The pillars meet in case studies on AIDS drug access, indigenous knowledge, and fan production. A canonical text in IP-and-equity scholarship. XD Chun, W. H. K. (2021). Discriminating data: Correlation, neighborhoods, and the new politics of recognition. MIT Press.

[AI + Equity + Communication] Chun argues that recommendation engines and risk-prediction tools assume people are reducible to neighborhood-defined types, reinforcing redlining-era logics. The pillars synthesize in the correlation as communication object. A canonical cross-pillar text. XD Bowker, G. C., & Star, S. L. (1999). Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences. MIT Press.

[Communication + Equity + AI] Bowker and Star's foundational STS text argues that classification systems—including the ICD, racial categories, and the Linnaean system—are political infrastructures with equity consequences. The pillars synthesize in the chapter on apartheid classification. A pre-AI classic that founded the cross-pillar analysis. XD Roberts, D. (2022). Torn apart: How the child welfare system destroys black families—and how abolition can build a safer world. Basic Books.

[Equity + AI + Communication] Roberts extends her work to algorithmic risk-prediction in the U.S. child welfare system. The pillars synthesize in the predictive risk score. XP Mattern, S. (2017). Code and clay, data and dirt: Five thousand years of urban media. University of Minnesota Press.

Illuminates Communication/AI: Mattern's archaeology of urban media is a cross-pollination text for thinking about platform infrastructure in deep time.

PHD-801 — PHD-801

PHD pillar · PhD Year 1 · Fall 2028

Essential books

Supplementary books

Papers (54)

1. - *Author(s) & Year:* Couldry, Nick & Hepp, Andreas (2013). - *Title:* Conceptualizing Mediatization: Contexts Communication Theory, 23(3), 191–202

Synthesizes the Anglo-German mediatization debate, distinguishing institutionalist and social-constructivist strands and proposing a shared vocabulary for the field.

2. - *Author(s) & Year:* Hjarvard, Stig (2013). - *Title: The Mediatization of Culture and Society — Chapter 2: A Theory of Mediatization - Venue: The Mediatization of Culture and The Mediatization of Culture and Society (Routledge), pp. 1–36

Formalizes mediatization as a meta-process in which media institutions increasingly govern the logic of social and cultural fields.

3. - *Author(s) & Year:* Lundby, Knut (2014). - *Title: Mediatization of Communication - Venue: Handbooks of Communication Science* Handbooks of Communication Science, Vol. 21 (De Gruyter Mouton), pp. 3–35

Provides a field-defining overview of mediatization as both concept and research programme, mapping competing definitions across three decades of scholarship.

4. - *Author(s) & Year:* Krotz, Friedrich (2009). - *Title: Mediatization: A Concept with Which to Grasp Media and Societal Change - Venue:* In K In K. Lundby (Ed.), Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences (Peter Lang), pp. 21–40

Introduces the concept of mediatization as a long-term meta-process analogous to globalization and individualization, emphasizing cumulative historical change.

5. - *Author(s) & Year:* Hepp, Andreas (2020). - *Title: Deep Mediatization - Venue: Deep Mediatization* (Routledge) Deep Mediatization (Routledge), Chapter 1: "Mediatization Research in the Era of Deep Mediatization," pp. 1–29

Extends mediatization theory to the datafied present, arguing that communicative figurations are now constitutively shaped by pervasive digital media infrastructure.

6. - *Author(s) & Year:* Couldry, Nick & Hepp, Andreas (2017). - *Title: The Mediated Construction of Reality — Chapter 5: Media-Related Practices - Venue: The Mediated Construction of Reality* ( The Mediated Construction of Reality (Polity Press), pp. 113–140

Extends Berger and Luckmann's social constructionism into the mediatized present, arguing that everyday reality-construction is now inseparable from media-related practices.

7. - *Author(s) & Year:* Papacharissi, Zizi (2015). - *Title:* Affective Publics and Structures of Storytelling: Sentiment Information, Communication & Society, 19(3), 307–324

Theorizes affective publics as networked formations animated by shared feeling rather than deliberative reason, displacing Habermasian norms from the center of democratic communication.

8. - *Author(s) & Year:* Marwick, Alice & boyd, danah (2011). - *Title:* I Tweet Honestly New Media & Society, 13(1), 114–133

Introduces "context collapse" as a structural feature of networked publics, demonstrating how users manage multiple audiences through strategic self-presentation on Twitter.

9. - *Author(s) & Year:* Cohen, Julie E. (2012). - *Title:* Configuring the Networked Self: Law Configuring the Networked Self (Yale University Press), pp. 1–45

Argues that legal regimes and code architectures co-constitute networked subjectivity, challenging deterministic accounts of both technology and law.

10. ?. You Have One Identity': Performing the Self on Facebook and LinkedIn Media, Culture & Society, 35(2), 199–215

Analyzes how platform architectures enforce identity coherence, showing that Facebook's and LinkedIn's design logics normatively constrain self-presentation.

11. - *Author(s) & Year:* Baym, Nancy K. (2015). - *Title:* Personal Connections in the Digital Age Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Polity Press), pp. 87–116

Reviews evidence for and against digital-self transformation, concluding that online relationships extend rather than replace offline identity repertoires.

12. - *Author(s) & Year:* Papacharissi, Zizi (2010). - *Title:* A Networked Self: Identity In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), A Networked Self (Routledge), pp. 1–20

Frames the networked self as a hybrid construction navigating public and private spheres, providing the theoretical scaffolding for an edited volume on digital identity.

13. - *Author(s) & Year:* Senft, Theresa M. & Baym, Nancy K. (2015). - *Title: What Does the Selfie Say? Investigating a Global Phenomenon - Venue: International Journal of Communication* International Journal of Communication, 9, 1588–1606

Opens a cross-disciplinary conversation on the selfie as communicative act, situating it within theories of performance, affect, and networked visibility.

14. - *Author(s) & Year:* Hallinan, Blake & Striphas, Ted (2016). - *Title: Recommended for You: The Netflix Prize and the Production of Algorithmic Culture [REQUIRED] - Venue: New Media & Socie New Media & Society, 18(1), 117–137

Uses the Netflix Prize as a case study to show how algorithmic recommendation systems constitute "algorithmic culture," reshaping taste, value, and cultural authority.

15. - *Author(s) & Year:* Striphas, Ted (2015). - *Title: Algorithmic Culture - Venue: European Journal of Cultural Studies* European Journal of Cultural Studies, 18(4–5), 395–412

Theorizes algorithmic culture as a formation in which machines increasingly participate in the classification, circulation, and evaluation of cultural objects.

16. - *Author(s) & Year:* Bucher, Taina (2018). - *Title: If…Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics — Chapter 1: Algorithms as Discourse - Venue: If…Then: Algorithmic Power and Polit If…Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics (Oxford University Press), pp. 1–30

Argues that algorithms should be understood as discursive formations that produce particular subjectivities and political possibilities, synthesizing software studies and Foucauldian analysis.

17. - *Author(s) & Year:* Gillespie, Tarleton (2014). - *Title: The Relevance of Algorithms - Venue:* In T In T. Gillespie, P. Boczkowski, & K. Foot (Eds.), Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (MIT Press), pp. 1

Argues that algorithms are not neutral tools but politically and commercially situated actors that construct and constrain what counts as relevant information.

18. - *Author(s) & Year:* Napoli, Philip M. (2014). - *Title: Automated Media: An Institutional Theory Perspective on Algorithmic Media Production and Distribution - Venue: Communicati Communication Theory, 24(3), 340–360

Applies institutional theory to algorithmic media, showing how automated production and curation challenge journalism's professional norms and organizational routines.

19. - *Author(s) & Year:* Noble, Safiya Umoja (2018). - *Title: Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism — Introduction - Venue: Algorithms of Oppression* (NYU Press Algorithms of Oppression (NYU Press), pp. 1–31

Documents racial and gendered bias in commercial search algorithms, arguing that search engines are neither neutral nor apolitical but reproduce systemic inequalities.

20. - *Author(s) & Year:* Kitchin, Rob (2017). - *Title: Thinking Critically About and Researching Algorithms - Venue: Information Information, Communication & Society, 20(1), 14–29

Proposes a critical research agenda for algorithms, distinguishing types of algorithmic systems and arguing for sociotechnical rather than purely technical analysis.

21. - *Author(s) & Year:* Plantin, Jean-Christophe; Lagoze, Carl; Edwards, Paul N.. - *Title: Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook [REQUIRED] - Venue: New Media & Society New Media & Society, 20(1), 293–310

Bridges infrastructure studies and platform studies by showing how dominant platforms simultaneously de-infrastructuralize (commodifying access) and re-platformize (controlling standards).

22. - *Author(s) & Year:* van Dijck, José; Poell, Thomas; & de Waal, Martijn (2018. - *Title: The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World — Chapter 1 - Venue: The Platform Society* (Oxford University Pr The Platform Society (Oxford University Press), pp. 1–31

Introduces "platform society" as a framework for analyzing how commercial platforms restructure public-sector institutions through datafication and algorithmic governance.

23. - *Author(s) & Year:* Helmond, Anne (2015). - *Title: The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready - Venue: Social Media + Society* Social Media + Society, 1(2), 1–11

Coins "platformization" to describe how social media APIs extend platform logic across the open web, producing data capture and infrastructural lock-in.

24. - *Author(s) & Year:* Steinberg, Marc (2019). - *Title: LINE as Super App: Platformization in East Asia - Venue: Social Media + Society* Social Media + Society, 6(2), 1–10 (verify volume/issue)

Examines LINE's "super app" architecture as a non-Western platformization model, challenging Silicon Valley-centric platform theory with East Asian infrastructural logics.

25. - *Author(s) & Year:* Srnicek, Nick (2017). - *Title: Platform Capitalism — Chapter 2: Platform Capitalism - Venue: Platform Capitalism* (Polity Press) Platform Capitalism (Polity Press), pp. 36–92

Develops a political-economy taxonomy of platform types (advertising, cloud, industrial, product, lean), grounding platform theory in capital accumulation logics.

26. - *Author(s) & Year:* Poell, Thomas; Nieborg, David; & van Dijck, José (2019). - *Title: Platformisation - Venue: Internet Policy Review* Internet Policy Review, 8(4), 1–13

Consolidates platformization research by distinguishing infrastructural, institutional, and economic dimensions, offering a multi-level analytical framework.

27. - *Author(s) & Year:* Bennett, W. Lance & Segerberg, Alexandra (2012). - *Title: The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics [REQUIRED] - Venue: Info Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 739–768

Proposes "connective action" as an analytic distinct from collective action, showing how personalized digital content enables large-scale political mobilization without formal organizations.

28. - *Author(s) & Year:* Tufekci, Zeynep & Wilson, Christopher (2012). - *Title: Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political Protest: Observations from Tahrir Square - Venue: Journal of Com Journal of Communication, 62(2), 363–379

Combines survey and ethnographic data from the 2011 Egyptian uprising to show that social media's role was primarily informational rather than motivational.

29. - *Author(s) & Year:* boyd, danah (2010). - *Title:* Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), A Networked Self (Routledge), pp. 39–58

Defines networked publics through four affordances — persistence, replicability, scalability, and searchability — providing the canonical framework for SNS public sphere analysis.

30. - *Author(s) & Year:* Tufekci, Zeynep (2017). - *Title: Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest — Chapter 1 - Venue: Twitter and Tear Gas* (Yale Univer Twitter and Tear Gas (Yale University Press), pp. 1–38

Re-theorizes networked protest movements as simultaneously powerful (low entry cost) and fragile (lacking adaptive capacity), complicating optimistic connective action narratives.

31. - *Author(s) & Year:* Castells, Manuel (2009). - *Title: Communication Power — Chapter 1: Power in the Network Society - Venue: Communication Power* (Oxford University Press) Communication Power (Oxford University Press), pp. 1–53

Reframes power in network societies as "network-making power," arguing that control over communication networks is the central site of contemporary political contest.

32. - *Author(s) & Year:* Freelon, Deen; McIlwain, Charlton D.; & Clark, Meredith. - *Title:* Beyond the Hashtags: #Ferguson Center for Media & Social Impact (American University), Research Report

Provides the landmark empirical study of Black Lives Matter's digital infrastructure, documenting how hashtag activism produced both visibility and organizational capacity.

33. - *Author(s) & Year:* Papacharissi, Zizi (2016). - *Title:* Affective Publics and Structures of Storytelling: Sentiment Information, Communication & Society, 19(3), 307–324

(Duplicate anchor text — assign instead:) Examines how Twitter streams during breaking news events function as affective registers that co-constitute publics through feeling rather than formal deliberation.

34. - *Author(s) & Year:* van Dijck, José (2014). - *Title:* Datafication Surveillance & Society, 12(2), 197–208

Distinguishes datafication as a techno-commercial process from "dataism" as an ideology, warning against uncritical embrace of big-data epistemology in social research.

35. - *Author(s) & Year:* Mejias, Ulises A. & Couldry, Nick (2019). - *Title: Datafication - Venue: Internet Policy Review* Internet Policy Review, 8(4), 1–10

Frames datafication as a new form of colonial extraction, arguing that the conversion of human life into data replicates historical asymmetries of resource dispossession.

36. - *Author(s) & Year:* Beer, David (2019). - *Title:* The Data Gaze: Capitalism The Data Gaze (SAGE), pp. 1–30

Adapts Foucauldian analytics of the gaze to contemporary data capitalism, arguing that data metrics reshape organizational subjectivities and managerial perception.

37. - *Author(s) & Year:* Ruppert, Evelyn; Law, John; & Savage, Mike (2013). - *Title: Reassembling Social Science Methods: The Challenge of Digital Devices - Venue: Theory Theory, Culture & Society, 30(4), 22–46

Draws on actor-network theory to argue that digital devices are not neutral methodological instruments but actively reshape the social they purport to measure.

38. - *Author(s) & Year:* Lupton, Deborah (2016). - *Title: The Quantified Self — Chapter 1: Self-Tracking Cultures - Venue: The Quantified Self* (Polity Press) The Quantified Self (Polity Press), pp. 1–33

Surveys the social practices and power relations of self-tracking technologies, situating the quantified self within broader surveillance and neoliberal self-governance discourses.

39. - *Author(s) & Year:* Andrejevic, Mark & Burdon, Mark (2015). - *Title: Defining the Sensor Society - Venue: Television & New Media* Television & New Media, 16(1), 19–36

Introduces the "sensor society" concept, arguing that pervasive sensing technologies reconfigure surveillance from exceptional to ambient and constitutive.

40. ?. Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data's Relation to the Contemporary Subject Television & New Media, 20(4), 336–349

Elaborates data colonialism as an analytic framework, connecting the historical structure of colonial extraction to contemporary platform data practices.

41. - *Author(s) & Year:* Diakopoulos, Nicholas (2015). - *Title: Algorithmic Accountability Reporting: On the Investigation of Black Boxes - Venue: Tow Center for Digital Journalism* Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University, Research Report

Proposes an "algorithmic accountability reporting" framework for journalism, detailing methods by which reporters can reverse-engineer algorithmic systems of public consequence.

42. - *Author(s) & Year:* Anderson, C.W. (2013). - *Title: Towards a Sociology of Computational and Algorithmic Journalism - Venue: New Media & Society* New Media & Society, 15(7), 1005–1021

Frames computational journalism as a sociological phenomenon, examining how data practices and algorithmic tools are transforming journalism's professional identity.

43. - *Author(s) & Year:* Carlson, Matt (2015). - *Title:* The Robotic Reporter: Automated Journalism and the Redefinition of Labor Digital Journalism, 3(3), 416–431

Analyzes automated narrative generation (e.g., Narrative Science) as a challenge to journalistic authority, showing how robot reporters redefine what counts as news and who counts as a journalist.

44. ?. When Reporters Get Hands-On with Robo-Writing: Professionals Consider Automated Journalism's Capabilities and Consequences Digital Journalism, 5(10), 1240–1259

Uses practitioner interviews to document journalist ambivalence about automation, identifying trust, labor, and editorial quality as primary sites of friction.

45. - *Author(s) & Year:* Broussard, Meredith (2018). - *Title: Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World — Chapter 1 - Venue: Artificial Unintelligence* (MIT Pres Artificial Unintelligence (MIT Press), pp. 1–24

Critiques "technochauvinism" — the belief that technology always offers superior solutions — using journalism and education case studies to ground AI scepticism empirically.

46. - *Author(s) & Year:* Napoli, Philip M. (2019). - *Title: Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age — Chapter 2 - Venue: Social Media and the Social Media and the Public Interest (Columbia University Press), pp. 37–73

Applies traditional broadcast public-interest frameworks to social media platforms, arguing that algorithmic content curation creates regulatory accountability analogous to broadcasting.

47. - *Author(s) & Year:* Zuboff, Shoshana (2019). - *Title: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism — Chapter 1: Home or Exile in the Digital Future - Venue: The Age of Surveillance Capit The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (PublicAffairs), pp. 1–44

Introduces surveillance capitalism as a novel economic logic that commodifies behavioral prediction, reconceptualizing platforms as behavioral futures markets rather than mere advertising intermediaries.

48. - *Author(s) & Year:* Klonick, Kate (2018). - *Title:* The New Governors: The People Harvard Law Review, 131(6), 1598–1670

Documents how Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have developed quasi-constitutional speech governance systems, arguing that private platforms now function as sovereign speakers.

49. - *Author(s) & Year:* Brock, André (2020). - *Title: Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures — Introduction and Chapter 1 - Venue: Distributed Blackness* (NYU Pr Distributed Blackness (NYU Press), pp. 1–40

Theorizes Black Twitter and Black digital practice through a Critical Race Theory of technology (CRIT), centering race as constitutive of internet culture rather than incidental.

50. - *Author(s) & Year:* Steele, Catherine Knight (2021). - *Title: Digital Black Feminism — Chapter 1 - Venue: Digital Black Feminism* (NYU Press) Digital Black Feminism (NYU Press), pp. 1–36

Develops digital Black feminism as a theoretical and methodological framework, drawing on Black feminist thought to analyze digital platforms as sites of both resistance and extraction.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

XD Onyebuchi, T. (2022). Goliath. Tordotcom.

[Equity + AI + Communication] Set in a depopulated New Haven after climate collapse and Mars migration of the wealthy, Goliath follows scavengers stripping abandoned brownstones for resale to white settler-gentrifiers returning from space. Onyebuchi binds environmental racism, surveillance technologies, and the platformed economy of nostalgia for "authentic" pre-collapse urban life. Drones, body-cams, and machine-mediated labor scaffold every scene. A novel about whose bodies and whose neighborhoods become extractable resources, and how communication networks render Black survival visible to capital and invisible to law. XD Walker, A. (1982). The color purple. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

[Equity + Communication] Celie's letters to God and to her sister Nettie are an archive of Black women's writing as survival and as defiance of patriarchal silencing. The pillars meet in epistolarity itself: a communication form that secures equity through documentation. A foundational fiction for cross-pillar feminist communication theory. XD Cole, T. (2011). Open city. Random House.

[Communication + Equity] Julius, a Nigerian-German psychiatrist walking New York, narrates a flâneur essay-novel of memory, race, migration, and historical sediment. Cole binds the communication form of the urban essay to the equity politics of mobility, of who walks where, and of psychiatric institutional power. The pillars meet in Julius's voice itself—a privileged immigrant whose own reliability is finally in question. XD Watts, P. (2006). Blindsight. Tor Books.

[AI + Communication] A first-contact mission with a non-conscious but vastly intelligent alien species. Watts binds AI theory (the "Chinese Room" thought experiment dramatized as ship politics) to communication theory (the alien is intelligent without consciousness or language as humans know it). The pillars meet in the question of whether linguistic communication is itself an evolutionary fluke. XP Diaz, J. (2007). The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao. Riverhead.

Illuminates Communication/Equity: Díaz's novel of a Dominican-American nerd, narrated in code-switching Spanglish with footnotes on Trujillo, is a textbook in how diasporic narrative invents form. Placed beside platform vernacular studies, the book illuminates how creole, multilingual writing — long before it was monetizable — built the grammar of internet voice.

Nonfiction

XD Pasquale, F. (2020). New laws of robotics: Defending human expertise in the age of AI. Harvard University Press.

[AI + IP + Equity] Pasquale proposes four "new laws" of robotics that subordinate AI to human professional judgment, particularly in medicine, education, and journalism. The pillars synthesize in the question of who owns and who is accountable for AI's outputs in professional fields. A major work on the AI-IP-equity nexus. XD Chun, W. H. K. (2016). Updating to remain the same: Habitual new media. MIT Press.

[Communication + AI + Equity] Chun theorizes new media as "habitual"—a regularized practice that produces and naturalizes inequity. The pillars synthesize in the YOU as platform construction. XD Edwards, P. N. (2010). A vast machine: Computer models, climate data, and the politics of global warming. MIT Press.

[AI + Communication + Equity] Edwards argues that climate science is a global computing infrastructure whose authority depends on data politics. The pillars synthesize in the politics of who builds and trusts the models. XD Browne, S. (2015). Dark matters: On the surveillance of blackness. Duke University Press.

[Equity + Communication + AI] Browne theorizes the surveillance of Black bodies from the slave ship to biometrics. The pillars synthesize in the figure of the "lantern law" as predecessor to today's surveillance. Canonical. XP Easterling, K. (2021). Medium design: Knowing how to work on the world. Verso.

Illuminates AI/Equity: Easterling's sequel to Extrastatecraft is a primer on designing with rather than against existing infrastructural conditions.

PHD-802 — PHD-802

PHD pillar · PhD Year 1 · Fall 2028

Essential books

Supplementary books

Papers (50)

1. Julie E. Cohen, 2019. Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism contemporary post-2010 Oxford University Press (book); article version: "The Biopolitical Public Domain," Notre Dame Law Review, vol. 93 (2018)

Argues that IP law is not a neutral regulatory instrument but a constitutive force actively shaping the political economy of informational capitalism; identifies three "legal architectures" — IP, privacy, and platform law — as co-producing surveillance-compatible information flows.

2. James Boyle, 2003. The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain established 1990-2010 Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 66, pp. 33–74

Uses the historical analogy of English land enclosure to theorize the systematic privatization of informational commons through IP expansion, coining the "second enclosure movement" frame that became central to critical IP discourse.

3. Mark A. Lemley, 2005. Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding established 1990-2010 Texas Law Review, vol. 83, pp. 1031–1075

Deconstructs the "free riding" rationale for IP expansion, showing that private-property analogies systematically distort IP policy analysis and obscure the social costs of over-protection.

4. Peter Drahos, 1996. A Philosophy of Intellectual Property established 1990-2010 Dartmouth Publishing (Aldershot); ANU Press open-access reprint 2016

Provides a comprehensive philosophical critique of IP justifications — Lockean, Hegelian, Marxist, and utilitarian — and argues for an instrumentalist rather than proprietarian approach grounded in informational justice.

5. James Boyle, 1996. Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society (Introduction and Chapter 1) established 1990-2010 Harvard University Press; chapter-level DOI not available; SSRN working paper version

Offers the foundational argument that liberal IP ideology constructs the "romantic author" as the axial figure through which the information economy is organized, systematically excluding collective and traditional knowledge from protection.

6. Madhavi Sunder, 2006. IP3 established 1990-2010 Stanford Law Review, vol. 59, pp. 257–332

Proposes a cultural theory of IP through the metonym IP³ (identity politics + Internet Protocol + intellectual property), arguing that IP law must be evaluated against standards of cultural participation, equality, and human development, not only economic efficiency.

7. Margaret Chon, 2006. Intellectual Property and the Development Divide established 1990-2010 Cardozo Law Review, vol. 27, pp. 2821–2912

Critiques the TRIPS Agreement from a development and social-justice perspective, arguing that uniform IP standards entrench global inequality and proposing a differential treatment framework analogous to "IP for development."

8. K.J. Greene, 1998. Copyright, Culture & Black Music: A Legacy of Unequal Protection established 1990-2010 Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal, vol. 21, pp. 339–392

Provides the foundational critical race analysis of copyright law, documenting how structural features of the copyright regime — the idea/expression dichotomy, fixation requirement, and lack of moral rights — systematically denied protection to Black music artists and enabled exploitation.

9. K.J. Greene, 2008. Copynorms," Black Cultural Production, and the Debate over African-American Reparations established 1990-2010 Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal, vol. 25, pp. 1181–1228

Extends critical race IP analysis to argue that the systematic appropriation of Black cultural production constitutes a form of correctable injustice, linking copyright doctrine to reparations theory and the concept of "copynorms."

10. Anjali Vats and Deidré Keller, 2018. Critical Race IP contemporary post-2010 Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal, vol. 36, pp. 735–795

Establishes "Critical Race IP" (CRTIP) as a distinct theoretical methodology, synthesizing Critical Race Theory and IP scholarship to expose how IP doctrines racialize creativity, ownership, and cultural expression.

11. Anjali Vats, 2021. Temporality in a Time of Tam, or Towards a Racial Chronopolitics of Intellectual Property Law contemporary post-2010 IDEA: The IP Law Review, vol. 61, pp. 673–734

Analyzes how Euro-American conceptions of time embedded in trademark doctrines (laches, sua sponte) normalize white supremacy; advocates decolonizing temporal frameworks in IP adjudication.

12. Madhavi Sunder, 2007. The Invention of Traditional Knowledge established 1990-2010 Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 70, pp. 97–124

Critiques the romanticization of "traditional knowledge" in IP debates, arguing that the tradition/modernity binary obscures the dynamic, contested, and political nature of cultural knowledge — and that IP protection proposals must grapple with intra-community power differentials.

13. Olufunmilayo Arewa, 2006. From J.C. Bach to Hip Hop: Musical Borrowing, Copyright and Cultural Context established 1990-2010 North Carolina Law Review, vol. 84, pp. 547–645

Historicizes musical borrowing across Western and African-American traditions to show that copyright's treatment of sampling and derivation reflects racial double standards embedded in the history of European art music.

14. Boateng, Boatema, 2011. The Copyright Thing Doesn't Work Here: Adinkra and Kente Cloth and Intellectual Property in Ghana contemporary post-2010 University of Minnesota Press (book); key article version: "We Do It So That It Will Be Seen: Copyright and Traditional Cloth Design," Afric

Demonstrates through ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana that Western IP frameworks are fundamentally incompatible with communal creativity and traditional textile design, challenging universalist IP assumptions from a postcolonial African standpoint.

15. Dan L. Burk, 2007. Feminism and Dualism in Intellectual Property established 1990-2010 Journal of Gender, Race and Justice, vol. 15, pp. 149–174 (verify — also cited in American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy and L

Applies feminist jurisprudence to IP doctrine, arguing that binary oppositions structuring IP law — public/private, idea/expression, author/user — replicate patriarchal dualisms that disadvantage collaborative and relational modes of creativity.

16. Debora Halbert, 1999. Feminist Interpretations of Intellectual Property established 1990-2010 American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy and Law, vol. 14, pp. 431–460

Surveys and synthesizes feminist approaches to IP — from liberal reformism to radical critique — identifying how the individualist author-figure marginalizes feminist values of interconnection, embodied knowledge, and collective creativity.

17. Rosemary J. Coombe, 1992. Authorizing the Celebrity: Publicity Rights, Postmodern Politics, and Unauthorized Genders canonical pre-1990 / established 1990-2010 Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal, vol. 10, pp. 365–395

Analyzes celebrity persona rights through feminist and queer theory, showing how IP law disciplines non-normative identities and forecloses appropriative practices that challenge hegemonic gender representation.

18. Ann Bartow, 2006. Fair Use and the Fairer Sex: Gender, Feminism, and Copyright Law established 1990-2010 Journal of Gender, Race and Justice, vol. 14, pp. 551–584

Examines how fair use doctrine has been shaped by and applied to gendered practices, arguing that transformative use standards embed masculine norms about creative hierarchy and that women's collaborative and fan-creative practices are systematically undervalued.

19. Carys Craig, 2011. Copyright, Communication and Culture: Towards a Relational Theory of Copyright Law contemporary post-2010 Edward Elgar Publishing (book); key article: "Locke, Labour and Limiting the Author's Right," Queen's Law Journal, vol. 28 (2002)

Develops a relational feminist theory of copyright that reorients the field from individual property rights to communicative practices and social interdependence, challenging the isolated-author model at the heart of Anglo-American copyright ideology.

20. Martha Woodmansee, 1984. The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the "Author canonical pre-1990 Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 425–448

Provides the historical-cultural genealogy of the Romantic "genius" author as an ideological construction that emerged in eighteenth-century Germany to justify copyright protection, foundational for all subsequent social-constructivist and feminist critiques of authorship.

21. Madhavi Sunder, 2000. Intellectual Property and Identity Politics: Playing the Franchise Game established 1990-2010 Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, vol. 12, pp. 115–181

Analyzes how cultural and identity groups — particularly women and racial minorities — deploy and are constrained by IP law in struggles over self-representation, showing that IP is not culturally neutral but a site of identity politics.

22. Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite, 2002. Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy? established 1990-2010 Earthscan/New Press (book); article version: "Intellectual Property, Corporate Strategy, Globalisation: TRIPS in Context," Wisconsin Interna

Documents through elite interviews and primary research how a small group of US corporations captured the TRIPS negotiations to create a global IP regime serving corporate rather than public interests — introducing "information feudalism" as the structural outcome.

23. Christopher May, 2000. The Global Political Economy of Intellectual Property Rights: The New Enclosures established 1990-2010 Routledge (book; key chapter: "IP and the New Political Economy"); article: "Cosmopolitan Legalism Meets International Political Economy: Th

Applies international political economy frameworks to IP, showing that global IP regimes function as instruments of North-South power asymmetry and capital accumulation rather than universal knowledge governance.

24. Susan K. Sell, 2003. Private Power, Public Law: The Globalization of Intellectual Property Rights established 1990-2010 Cambridge University Press (book); article version: "Intellectual Property and Public Policy in Historical Perspective: Contestation and Set

Demonstrates through a detailed political-science analysis of TRIPS negotiations that a coalition of twelve US corporations drove the multilateral IP agenda, exemplifying how private corporate power shapes ostensibly public international law.

25. Ronald V. Bettig, 1996. Copyrighting Culture: The Political Economy of Intellectual Property established 1990-2010 Westview Press (book); key chapter: "The Enclosure of Cyberspace," Critical Studies in Mass Communication

Applies Marxist political economy to copyright, analyzing how media conglomerates use IP law to commodify cultural production, expropriate creative labor, and foreclose democratic communication.

26. Yochai Benkler, 1999. Free as the Air to Common Use: First Amendment Constraints on Enclosure of the Public Domain established 1990-2010 New York University Law Review, vol. 74, pp. 354–446

Argues that the public domain serves constitutional values of free expression and democratic discourse, providing a First Amendment-grounded critique of IP expansion as an encroachment on communicative freedom.

27. Siva Vaidhyanathan, 2001. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity (key chapter) established 1990-2010 New York University Press; chapter: "Expanding Copyright and the Crisis of Cultural Policy"

Provides an accessible political-economy critique of copyright expansion from a communications perspective, showing how maximalist IP policy threatens cultural production, access to history, and public discourse.

28. Michael A. Heller and Rebecca S. Eisenberg, 1998. Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research established 1990-2010 Science, vol. 280, pp. 698–701

Introduces the "tragedy of the anticommons" — the systematic underuse of resources when too many owners hold exclusion rights — demonstrating through biomedical examples that excessive patent fragmentation can paradoxically inhibit the innovation IP is designed to incentivize.

29. Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess, 2007. A Framework for Analyzing the Knowledge Commons established 1990-2010 In Hess and Ostrom (eds.), Understanding Knowledge as a Commons, MIT Press, pp. 41–81

Extends Ostrom's institutional analysis of natural-resource commons to knowledge and information goods, providing the canonical framework for analyzing governance of academic knowledge as a commons subject to enclosure by IP rights.

30. Brett M. Frischmann, Michael J. Madison, and Katherine J. Strandburg (eds.), 201. Governing Knowledge Commons (Introduction) contemporary post-2010 Oxford University Press; Introduction chapter

Develops the "Knowledge Commons" research framework (Bloomington School applied to IP), synthesizing institutional and empirical approaches to studying how communities manage shared information resources outside or alongside IP regimes.

31. Carol Rose, 1986. The Comedy of the Commons: Custom, Commerce, and Inherently Public Property canonical pre-1990 University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 53, pp. 711–781

Challenges Hardin's tragedy-of-the-commons narrative by documenting legal doctrines of inherently public property, providing the theoretical basis for arguing that some resources — including informational goods — are better governed as commons than as private property.

32. Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, 2003. Ideas, Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a Common-Pool Resource established 1990-2010 Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 66, pp. 111–146

Systematically applies common-pool resource theory to information, establishing the conceptual vocabulary — subtractability, excludability, knowledge artifacts — for analyzing threats to the knowledge commons through IP enclosure.

33. David Lange, 1981. Recognizing the Public Domain canonical pre-1990 Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 44, pp. 147–178

Provides the first systematic legal argument for affirmatively recognizing and protecting the public domain as an independent category in IP law — not merely the residue of expired rights but a zone with its own positive rationale.

34. Michel Foucault, 1969 (English trans. 1977). What Is an Author? canonical pre-1990 French original: "Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?" Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie, vol. 63, 1969; canonical English version: in Jos

Introduces the "author function" as a historically contingent discourse-organizing device rather than a natural origin of meaning; dismantles the romantic author-as-individual and provides the theoretical infrastructure for all subsequent social-constructivist critiques of copyright's authorship ide

35. Peter Jaszi, 1991. Toward a Theory of Copyright: The Metamorphoses of "Authorship established 1990-2010 Duke Law Journal, vol. 1991, pp. 455–502

Applies poststructuralist and historical analysis to trace how Romantic authorship ideology was absorbed into copyright doctrine, where it continues to operate as an unexamined ideological premise generating contradictions around collective creativity, work-for-hire, and folklore.

36. Mark Rose, 1988. The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v Beckett and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship canonical pre-1990 Representations, vol. 23, pp. 51–85

Reconstructs the eighteenth-century British copyright debates as the originary moment in which the concept of the individual author as natural proprietor was legally constituted, demonstrating through close historical analysis that authorial ownership is a modern ideological invention.

37. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (eds.), 1994. The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (Introduction) established 1990-2010 Duke University Press; Introduction chapter pp. 1–13

Frames the collective volume's interdisciplinary project of demonstrating that "authorship" in law is a constructed ideological category, drawing together literary critics, legal scholars, and historians to show the contingency and politics of IP's authorship assumptions.

38. James Boyle, 1988. The Search for an Author: Shakespeare and the Framers canonical pre-1990 American University Law Review, vol. 37, pp. 625–643

Draws on Foucault's author-function and Shakespearean textual history to argue that the authorship concept in copyright is philosophically incoherent — a point with direct implications for how IP law handles collaborative, derivative, and anonymous works.

39. Arun Rai, 1999. Regulating Scientific Research: Intellectual Property Rights and the Norms of Science established 1990-2010 Northwestern University Law Review, vol. 94, pp. 77–152

Examines how IP rights interact with the communal norms of open science, showing how patenting restructures the epistemic community of scientists as individual proprietors rather than members of a knowledge commons — an authorship-politics analysis at the disciplinary level.

40. Susan Scafidi, 2005. Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law (Introduction and Chapter 1) established 1990-2010 Rutgers University Press; ISBN 0813537851

Provides the first comprehensive legal analysis of cultural authorship and appropriation, showing that cultural products — defined as unincorporated group creations — occupy a legal vacuum in IP law and proposing a graduated framework distinguishing sacred, private, and public cultural products.

41. Rosemary J. Coombe, 1998. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law (Introduction and Chapter 1) established 1990-2010 Duke University Press; ISBN 9780822321194

Uses cultural anthropology and critical legal studies to examine how IP law governs the social meanings of trademarks, celebrity images, and indigenous insignia in consumer culture, showing that IP regimes discipline cultural appropriation in ways that reinforce existing hierarchies of power.

42. Angela R. Riley and Kristen A. Carpenter, 2016. Owning Red: A Theory of Indian (Cultural) Appropriation contemporary post-2010 Texas Law Review, vol. 94, pp. 859–937

Develops an original theory of tribal "cultural sovereignty" as the appropriate framework for protecting Indigenous cultural resources against commercial appropriation, arguing that existing IP regimes fail to recognize collective identity-based interests in cultural property.

43. Jane Anderson, 2009. Law, Knowledge, Culture: The Production of Indigenous Knowledge in Intellectual Property Law contemporary post-2010 Edward Elgar Publishing (book); key article: "Indigenous/Traditional Knowledge and IP," Duke Law and Technology Review, 2010

Critiques international IP frameworks for traditional knowledge from a postcolonial legal anthropology perspective, arguing that the very categories of "IP" are ill-suited to protect Indigenous knowledge systems whose relational and territorial logics cannot be reduced to proprietary claims.

44. Rosemary J. Coombe, 1993. The Properties of Culture and the Politics of Possessing Identity: Native Claims in the Cultural Appropriation Controversy established 1990-2010 Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, vol. 6, pp. 249–285

Analyzes Indigenous claims to cultural property through postcolonial theory and cultural studies, challenging both possessive-individualist IP frameworks and romantic notions of cultural authenticity while arguing for a politics of cultural integrity grounded in collective identity.

45. Keith Aoki, 1998. (Intellectual) Property and Sovereignty: Notes Toward a Cultural Geography of Authorship established 1990-2010 Stanford Law Review, vol. 48, pp. 1293–1355 (verify year; article also described as 1996)

Maps the spatial and sovereignty dimensions of IP, arguing that the cultural geography of authorship — who is recognized as a creator and in what spaces — reflects colonial and racial legacies that a critical IP must address.

46. Anjali Vats, 2023. The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans (Chapter on AI and Synthetic Blackness) contemporary post-2010 Stanford University Press, 2020; updated analysis in "Artificial Intelligence, Intellectual Property and Race," forthcoming/2023 (verify)

Extends CRTIP analysis to AI and generative technologies, examining how algorithmic systems trained on racialized cultural data perpetuate the dispossession of Black creators and raise new questions about synthetic cultural appropriation that existing IP frameworks cannot address.

47. K.J. Greene, 2022. AI and Cultural Appropriation: Generative Artificial Intelligence, Music, and the Racial Politics of Copyright contemporary post-2010 Houston Law Review, vol. 60 (2022) (verify exact volume/page)

Applies critical race IP analysis to generative AI music tools, showing that AI systems trained on Black musical traditions without attribution or compensation replicate the structural appropriation Greene documented in pre-digital copyright history.

48. Siva Vaidhyanathan, 2004. The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System established 1990-2010 Basic Books; key chapters: "The Cultural Anarchist vs. the Cultural Conservative" and "The Global Enclosure Movement"

Bridges communication studies and IP theory by arguing that the clash between distributed peer-to-peer information sharing and concentrated corporate IP enforcement is the defining political conflict of the information age, with implications for democracy, education, and cultural diversity.

49. William Patry, 2009. Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars contemporary post-2010 Oxford University Press; key chapter: "The Copyright Wars as Rational Discourse"

Applies sociological "moral panic" theory to analyze how the copyright industry has captured public discourse and legislative processes through alarmist rhetoric, providing a communications-theory bridge between political economy of IP and media studies.

50. Madhavi Sunder and Anupam Chander, 2007. The Romance of the Public Domain established 1990-2010 California Law Review, vol. 92, pp. 1331–1373

Critiques the progressive IP reform movement's celebration of the public domain as itself insufficiently attentive to race, gender, and global equity, showing that an unprotected "free" zone can also enable exploitation of the creative work of marginalized communities — bridging critical theory, equ

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

XD Beukes, L. (2008). Moxyland. Angry Robot.

[AI + Equity + Communication] Near-future Cape Town under corporate-state surveillance, where phones are tied to credit, identity, and biometric disconnection-as-punishment. Beukes routes a four-character braid through art-world IP politics, gaming subcultures, biotech branding, and activist countermedia. The pillars meet in the SIM card: a communication device that is also a leash, an identity document, and a class marker. A foundational African cyberpunk novel that refused the Silicon Valley framing of "the network" and insisted on its colonial undertow. XD Butler, O. E. (1979). Kindred. Doubleday.

[Equity + Communication] Dana, a Black woman in 1970s Los Angeles, is repeatedly pulled into antebellum Maryland to save the white ancestor whose existence depends on her own. Butler binds time-travel to literacy, archival access, and the daily communicative work of staying alive in conditions of total inequity. The pillars meet in the protagonist's writing arm—severed in the final return. XD Eugenides, J. (2002). Middlesex. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

[Equity + Communication] Cal/Calliope's intersex narration moves from a Greek village to Detroit's racial geography to Berlin. Eugenides binds the communication politics of medical taxonomy (Calliope's silence in the doctor's office) to the equity politics of racialized urban planning. The pillars meet in the chromosomal report and its translation into life-story. XD Watts, P. (2014). Echopraxia. Tor Books.

[AI + Equity + Communication] Companion novel to Blindsight: hive-mind monks, augmented mercenaries, and the planetary politics of cognition enhancement. Watts binds AI futures to the inequity of who can afford cognition upgrades and to the communication problem of post-language thought. The pillars meet in the protagonist's gradual loss of self. XP Achebe, C. (1958). Things fall apart. William Heinemann.

Illuminates Communication/Equity: Achebe's foundational novel of colonial encounter in Igbo Nigeria is a study in the death of one communicational order under another. Placed beside scholarship on data colonialism, the book illuminates how taxonomies — colonial census, language reform, court records — undo a people. A cross-pollination that grounds digital-colonial discourse in its 19th-century original.

Nonfiction

XD Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. A. (2019). The costs of connection: How data is colonizing human life and appropriating it for capitalism. Stanford University Press.

[Communication + Equity + AI] Couldry and Mejias coin "data colonialism" to describe how platforms appropriate human relations as raw material. The pillars meet in the historical comparison: data extraction follows the playbook of resource colonialism but operates at the scale of communication itself. A landmark cross-pillar text. XD Chun, W. H. K. (2006). Control and freedom: Power and paranoia in the age of fiber optics. MIT Press.

[Communication + Equity] Chun's earlier work bridges race studies and cyber-studies, showing how the rhetoric of the internet's freedom enabled new forms of control. The pillars synthesize in the figure of the racialized "Asian Other" of cyberculture. XD Mukherjee, R. (2020). Radiant infrastructures: Media, environment, and cultures of uncertainty. Duke University Press.

[Equity + Communication + AI] Mukherjee's ethnography of radiation, nuclear infrastructure, and media coverage in India binds environmental inequity to communication politics and to monitoring technology. The pillars synthesize in the dosimeter as both communication and AI object. XD Singh, J. (2018). Unthinking mastery: Dehumanism and decolonial entanglements. Duke University Press.

[Equity + Communication] Singh argues that decolonial politics requires unthinking the language of "mastery." The pillars synthesize in the rhetorical analysis of liberation discourse. XP Searle, J. R. (1992). The rediscovery of the mind. MIT Press.

Illuminates AI: Searle's anti-functionalist account of consciousness is the indispensable cross-pollination text for any LLM-consciousness debate.

RDG-701 — RDG 701 · General Comprehensive Exam Reading List · Build & Read

RDG pillar · PhD Year 1 · Fall 2028

An independent reading track in which the student builds, and then begins systematically reading, the ~120-book general comprehensive exam list across the three pillars. The list is curated against open syllabi from leading PhD programs (NYU MCC, Annenberg, Stanford CCRMA, Cornell Tech, Berkeley iSchool).

Essential books

★ James Carey — Communication as Culture
★ Merges, Menell & Lemley — IP in the New Technological Age
★ Russell & Norvig — AI: A Modern Approach
★ John Rawls — A Theory of Justice
★ Julie Cohen — Between Truth and Power

Supplementary books

☆ Reference work — The 100-Book Comprehensive Reading List* (compiled from MA Years 1–2)
☆ Kate Crawford — Atlas of AI
☆ Ruha Benjamin — Race After Technology
☆ Madhavi Sunder — From Goods to a Good Life
☆ Nick Couldry — Media, Society, World

Papers (50)

1. James W. Carey, 1989 (essay orig. 1975). A Cultural Approach to Communication canonical pre-1990 Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Routledge), Ch. 1, pp. 13–36

Distinguishes transmission and ritual models of communication, grounding media studies in cultural meaning-making rather than information transfer.

2. Stuart Hall, 1980. Encoding/Decoding canonical pre-1990 Culture, Media, Language, ed. Hall et al. (Hutchinson), pp. 128–138

Proposes that media messages are encoded with dominant meanings but audiences decode them through preferred, negotiated, or oppositional positions.

3. Jürgen Habermas, 1964 (trans. 1974). The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article canonical pre-1990 New German Critique, No. 3 (Autumn 1974), pp. 49–55

Defines the bourgeois public sphere as a discursive realm mediating state and civil society, establishing the normative benchmark for democratic communication.

4. Nancy Fraser, 1990. Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy canonical pre-1990 Social Text, No. 25/26, pp. 56–80

Critiques Habermas's single-sphere model and advances the concept of subaltern counterpublics as sites of contestation by excluded groups.

5. Marshall McLuhan, 1964. The Medium is the Message canonical pre-1990 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill), Ch. 1, pp. 7–21

Argues that the formal properties of any communication medium — not its content — are the primary determinant of social and perceptual change.

6. Manuel Castells, 1996. The Rise of the Network Society (Introduction and Chapter 1) established 1990-2010 The Rise of the Network Society (Blackwell), Vol. I, pp. 1–70

Theorizes informationalism and the space of flows as the structural logic of late-twentieth-century capitalism, reshaping communication, labor, and power.

7. Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, 2017. The Mediated Construction of Reality (Introduction) contemporary 2011-2025 The Mediated Construction of Reality (Polity Press), pp. 1–28

Synthesizes mediatization theory with social constructivism to argue that media infrastructures now co-produce social reality, not merely represent it.

8. James Boyle, 2003. The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain established 1990-2010 Law and Contemporary Problems, Vol. 66, No. 1/2, pp. 33–74

Applies the enclosure metaphor to intellectual property expansion, arguing that over-propertization threatens the information commons analogous to the original enclosure of land.

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

Coins "tragedy of the anticommons" to explain how fragmented patent ownership over upstream research tools can block downstream biomedical innovation.

10. Mark A. Lemley, 2004. Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding established 1990-2010 Texas Law Review, Vol. 83, No. 4, pp. 1031–1075

Challenges the propertization rhetoric of IP law, arguing that free riding is often socially beneficial and that unlimited IP rights distort competitive markets.

11. Madhavi Sunder, 2006. IP3 established 1990-2010 Stanford Law Review, Vol. 59, No. 2, pp. 257–332

Extends IP theory beyond economic efficiency to encompass human development, participation, and cultural recognition as distributional goals of intellectual property law.

12. Julie E. Cohen, 2012. Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice (Introduction) contemporary 2011-2025 Configuring the Networked Self (Yale University Press), pp. 1–28

Theorizes the networked self as constituted through legal and technological architectures, arguing that privacy and autonomy require structural — not merely contractual — protections.

13. Lawrence Lessig, 2001. The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (Chapter 2: Commons) established 1990-2010 The Future of Ideas (Random House), pp. 19–48

Distinguishes controlled from free resources in the internet layer stack, arguing that the internet's innovation commons depends on preserving free infrastructure layers.

14. Yochai Benkler, 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Chapter 1) established 1990-2010 The Wealth of Networks (Yale University Press), pp. 1–28

Argues that networked information economies enable peer production and non-market social collaboration that challenge the industrial information economy's logic.

15. Rishi Bommasani et al., 2021. On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models contemporary 2011-2025 arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.07258 (Stanford CRFM)

Coins "foundation models" and provides a comprehensive interdisciplinary audit of their emergent capabilities, societal risks, and research agenda.

16. Ashish Vaswani et al., 2017. Attention Is All You Need contemporary 2011-2025 Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2017), Vol. 30, pp. 5998–6008

Introduces the Transformer architecture based solely on attention mechanisms, displacing recurrent networks and becoming the dominant paradigm for large language models.

17. Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchel. On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? contemporary 2011-2025 Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT '21), pp. 610–623

Argues that large language models encode harms from training data and their scale enables environmental costs and stereotyping without proportionate comprehension.

18. Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton, 2015. Deep Learning contemporary 2011-2025 Nature, Vol. 521, pp. 436–444

Surveys convolutional and recurrent neural network advances, establishing the canonical scientific overview of deep learning for interdisciplinary audiences.

19. Alan Turing, 1950. Computing Machinery and Intelligence canonical pre-1990 Mind, Vol. LIX, No. 236, pp. 433–460

Poses the imitation game as a test for machine intelligence, founding the philosophical and scientific program of artificial intelligence research.

20. Timnit Gebru et al., 2018. Datasheets for Datasets contemporary 2011-2025 Communications of the ACM, Vol. 64, No. 12 (2021), pp. 86–92 (orig. arXiv 2018)

Proposes standardized documentation for machine learning datasets to surface provenance, composition, and ethical considerations, improving accountability in AI pipelines.

21. John McCarthy, Marvin L. Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude E. Shannon, 195. A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, August 31, 1955 canonical pre-1990 AI Magazine, Vol. 27, No. 4, pp. 12–14 (2006 reprint)

Founds the field of artificial intelligence by naming it and proposing that every aspect of learning or intelligence can in principle be simulated by a machine.

22. John Rawls, 1985. Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical canonical pre-1990 Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 223–251

Reframes Rawlsian justice as a freestanding political conception rather than a comprehensive moral doctrine, enabling pluralist overlapping consensus in liberal democracies.

23. Amartya Sen, 1979. Equality of What? canonical pre-1990 The Tanner Lecture on Human Values, delivered at Stanford University, May 22, 1979

Introduces basic capabilities as the proper metric of equality, arguing that welfare and resources are inadequate bases for egalitarian distribution.

24. Kimberlé Crenshaw, 1989. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist P canonical pre-1990 University of Chicago Legal Forum, Vol. 1989, No. 1, Article 8, pp. 139–167

Coins intersectionality as a framework demonstrating that Black women's compounded discrimination falls through the single-axis gaps of race and sex law.

25. Iris Marion Young, 1990. Five Faces of Oppression canonical pre-1990 Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton University Press), Ch. 2, pp. 39–65

Develops a structural account of oppression across five categories — exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence — moving beyond purely distributive justice.

26. Charles W. Mills, 1997. The Racial Contract (Introduction and Chapter 1) established 1990-2010 The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press), pp. 1–40

Reinterprets Lockean/Kantian social contract theory as a racial contract that historically and structurally privileges white people through systematic epistemological and political exclusion.

27. Martha C. Nussbaum, 2000. Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Introduction) established 1990-2010 Women and Human Development (Cambridge University Press), pp. 1–34

Operationalizes the capabilities approach with a list of ten central human capabilities and argues for their constitutional entrenchment as minimum justice requirements.

28. Trevor J. Pinch and Wiebe E. Bijker, 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, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 399–441

Introduces Social Construction of Technology (SCOT), demonstrating through the bicycle case that technological artifacts stabilize through interpretive flexibility and relevant social groups.

29. Langdon Winner, 1980. Do Artifacts Have Politics? canonical pre-1990 Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 1, pp. 121–136

Argues through Robert Moses's bridges and nuclear power cases that technologies embody political properties — either specific uses or general authority structures.

30. Donna Haraway, 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective canonical pre-1990 Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 575–599

Proposes situated knowledge as a feminist epistemology that abandons the god-trick of objectivity without collapsing into relativism, insisting on accountable partial perspectives.

31. Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer, 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, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 387–420

Develops boundary objects as a theory of objects that are plastic enough to adapt to local needs while robust enough to maintain a common identity across communities.

32. Bruno Latour, 1992. Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts established 1990-2010 Shaping Technology / Building Society, ed. Bijker & Law (MIT Press), pp. 225–258

Extends actor-network theory to non-human actants, arguing that mundane artifacts like seatbelts and door-closers delegate and inscribe moral and social programs.

33. Safiya Umoja Noble, 2018. A Future for Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies contemporary 2011-2025 The Scholar & Feminist Online, Issue 13.3–14.1, Barnard Center for Research on Women

Synthesizes Black feminist theory and STS to propose an intersectional framework for studying how race and gender shape algorithmic systems and their harms.

34. Mark A. Lemley and Bryan Casey, 2021. Fair Learning contemporary 2011-2025 Texas Law Review, Vol. 99, No. 4, pp. 743–808

Applies fair use doctrine to machine learning training, arguing that most ML training on copyrighted data qualifies as transformative fair use analogous to search indexing.

35. Peter Henderson et al., 2023. Foundation Models and Fair Use contemporary 2011-2025 arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.15715

Extends fair use analysis to foundation model training and output generation, identifying doctrinal gaps and proposing a framework for assessing infringement risk at scale.

36. Danielle Keats Citron, 2008. Technological Due Process established 1990-2010 Washington University Law Review, Vol. 85, No. 6, pp. 1249–1313

Argues that automated government decision systems that deny benefits or impose burdens without meaningful review violate procedural due process requirements.

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

Demonstrates that trade secret claims over criminal justice algorithms block defendants' constitutional access to evidence, creating a structural due process crisis.

38. Andrew D. Selbst and Solon Barocas, 2018. The Intuitive Appeal of Explainable Machines contemporary 2011-2025 Fordham Law Review, Vol. 87, No. 3, pp. 1085–1139

Critiques explainability mandates as insufficient to address algorithmic discrimination, arguing that explanations can satisfy legal intuitions without delivering meaningful accountability.

39. Kate Crawford and Jason Schultz, 2014. Big Data and Due Process: Toward a Framework to Redress Predictive Privacy Harms contemporary 2011-2025 Boston College Law Review, Vol. 55, No. 1, pp. 93–128

Proposes a due process framework for big data harms, distinguishing predictive from retrospective privacy violations and recommending procedural safeguards for automated profiling.

40. Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, 2018. Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification contemporary 2011-2025 Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, Vol. 81 (FAccT 2018), pp. 1–15

Empirically demonstrates that commercial facial analysis systems have significantly higher error rates for darker-skinned women, exposing intersectional bias in AI benchmarking.

41. Safiya Umoja Noble, 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (Introduction) contemporary 2011-2025 Algorithms of Oppression (NYU Press), pp. 1–31

Demonstrates through search result analysis that Google's algorithm reproduces and monetizes racial and gender stereotypes, framing this as a civil rights issue.

42. Simone Browne, 2010. Digital Epidermalization: Race, Identity and Biometrics established 1990-2010 Critical Sociology, Vol. 36, No. 1, pp. 131–150

Introduces digital epidermalization to theorize how biometric technologies re-inscribe race onto bodies, making Blackness hyper-visible to surveillance while erasing it from protected categories.

43. Ruha Benjamin, 2019. Discriminatory Design, Liberating Imagination contemporary 2011-2025 Captivating Technology, ed. Ruha Benjamin (Duke University Press), pp. 1–22

Frames race-neutral technological design as productive of racial discrimination, coining "New Jim Code" and calling for abolitionist tools in technology studies.

44. Minh-Ha T. Pham, 2017 (see also: Hu, 2017). Algorithmic Jim Crow contemporary 2011-2025 Fordham Law Review, Vol. 86, No. 2 (2017), pp. 633–696 [Note: attributed to Kevin Hu — verify full author]

Argues that facially neutral machine learning systems used in lending, hiring, and criminal justice replicate Jim Crow-era discrimination through proxy variables.

45. Virginia Eubanks, 2018. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (Introduction) contemporary 2011-2025 Automating Inequality (St. Martin's Press), pp. 1–22

Traces automated decision systems across welfare, child services, and policing to show how digitization amplifies existing inequalities targeting low-income communities of color.

46. Julie E. Cohen, 2019. Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism (Introduction) contemporary 2011-2025 Between Truth and Power (Oxford University Press), pp. 1–26

Synthesizes IP, privacy, and platform law to argue that informational capitalism is legally constructed and that legal change is therefore both possible and necessary.

47. Frank Pasquale, 2015. The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Chapter 1) contemporary 2011-2025 The Black Box Society (Harvard University Press), pp. 1–28

Theorizes black box opacity as a systemic legal and political problem in finance and information industries, calling for transparency mandates and accountability architectures.

48. Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, 2018. Anatomy of an AI System: The Amazon Echo as an Anatomical Map of Human Labor, Data and Planetary Resources contemporary 2011-2025 AI Now Institute and Share Lab (online publication)

Maps the full material and human supply chain of a single AI consumer device, revealing the environmental extraction, data labor, and global inequality embedded in AI infrastructure.

49. Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias, 2019. Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data's Relation to the Contemporary Subject contemporary 2011-2025 Television & New Media, Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 336–349

Theorizes data relations as a new form of colonialism that appropriates human life for capital through continuous data extraction, extending historical colonial analysis to the digital present.

50. Stephanie Carroll Rainie, Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear, Andrew Martinez, and others (. Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Governance: Principles for Data Protection and Self-Determination contemporary 2011-2025 National Congress of American Indians Policy Research Center & MSU Center for Native Health Partnerships; see also: *Journal of Empirical Re

Articulates the CARE Principles (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics) as a counterpart to FAIR data principles, centering Indigenous data sovereignty and governance.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

XD Beukes, L. (2010). Zoo City. Angry Robot.

[Equity + Communication + AI] Zinzi December, a guilty Johannesburg woman magically bound to a sloth, hustles email scams and missing-person work in a city where the ethically compromised manifest animal familiars. Beukes layers Nigerian email fraud, music-industry IP rip-offs, refugee economies, and algorithmic detective work. The "animal" externalizes the social tagging that already exists in surveillance systems. A noir that synthesizes communication scams, post-apartheid inequity, and the soft AI of credit scores and platform reputation. XD Butler, O. E. (1993). Parable of the sower. Four Walls Eight Windows.

[Equity + AI + Communication] In a 2024 of corporate enclaves, climate collapse, and pyromaniac drug users, Lauren Olamina founds Earthseed. Butler binds religious authorship (a new scripture written by a Black teenage girl), surveillance and gated inequity, and proto-platform networks of message-bearing. The pillars meet in Earthseed: The Books of the Living as both communication act and proprietary canon-in-formation. A foundational cross-pillar dystopia. XD Smith, Z. (2000). White teeth. Hamish Hamilton.

[Equity + AI + Communication] Smith's debut tracks three multiracial London families across decades, climaxing in a genetics conference and an animal-rights ambush. The pillars synthesize in the FutureMouse, a genetically engineered animal-as-IP, the family-as-communication-system across colonial diaspora, and the inequity politics of post-empire Britain. The pillars meet in the cross-cutting climax. Foundational early-twenty-first-century cross-pillar novel. XD Kushner, R. (2018). The Mars Room. Scribner.

[Equity + Communication] A woman serving two life sentences in a California women's prison narrates the conditions of carceral life. Kushner binds the communication infrastructure of prison letters and bureaucracy to the equity politics of class, sex work, and incarceration. The pillars meet in the protagonist's letters and refused letters. XP Coetzee, J. M. (1980). Waiting for the barbarians. Secker & Warburg.

Illuminates Equity/Communication: Coetzee's novel of an aging magistrate in a colonial outpost interrogating an Indigenous girl is a study in the epistemology of empire. Placed beside critical scholarship on biometrics and border surveillance, Waiting for the Barbarians illuminates how the colonial state produces its own enemies through information practices.

Nonfiction

XD Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs.

[Communication + Equity + AI] Zuboff theorizes the new economic logic of behavioral surplus: platforms extract data from human behavior to predict and modify it. The pillars synthesize through the platform's communication architecture as a site of inequity-producing AI training. A definitive cross-pillar text of the decade. XD Roberts, S. T. (2019). Behind the screen: Content moderation in the shadows of social media. Yale University Press.

[Equity + Communication + AI] Roberts documents the invisible labor of commercial content moderators in the Philippines, India, and the U.S. The pillars synthesize in the moderation queue: a communication infrastructure built on global labor inequity that trains tomorrow's classifier AI. XD Halpern, O. (2014). Beautiful data: A history of vision and reason since 1945. Duke University Press.

[AI + Communication + Equity] Halpern traces the history of cybernetic visualization and the design of "smart" environments. The pillars synthesize in the cybernetic eye. XD Mignolo, W. D. (2011). The darker side of Western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Duke University Press.

[Equity + Communication] Mignolo binds the colonial-modern world system to communication and epistemology. The pillars synthesize in the call to "decolonial" thought. XP Chalmers, D. J. (1996). The conscious mind: In search of a fundamental theory. Oxford University Press.

Illuminates AI: Chalmers's account of the "hard problem" is a foundational cross-pollination text for AI-consciousness scholarship.