Jamal Awil

INT-703 — INT 703 · Trade Secrets, Data, and the New Forms of IP

INT pillar · PhD Year 1 · Spring 2029

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

Essential books

• ★ Sandeen & Rowe — Trade Secret Law
• ★ Rebecca Wexler — 'Life, Liberty, and Trade Secrets'
• ★ Camilla Hrdy — 'Are Trade Secrets Just an Alternative to Patents?'
• ★ James Pooley — Trade Secrets* (treatise)
• ★ Frank Pasquale — The Black Box Society

Supplementary books

• ☆ David Levine — 'Secrecy and Unaccountability'
• ☆ Jenna Burrell — 'How the Machine "Thinks"'
• ☆ Simon Chesterman — We, the Robots?
• ☆ Danielle Citron — 'Technological Due Process'
• ☆ Boyle & Jenkins — IP Law & the Information Society

Papers (50)

1. Mark A. Lemley, 2008. The Surprising Virtues of Treating Trade Secrets as IP Rights established 1990-2010 Stanford Law Review, vol. 61, pp. 311–353

Argues that trade secret law functions as a coherent IP regime—not merely as tort or contract—by providing incentives to invest in secrecy that are distinct from patent incentives.

2. Camilla A. Hrdy & Mark D. Seaman, 2022. Beyond the Trade Secret/Patent Dichotomy (verify) contemporary 2011-2025 William & Mary Law Review, vol. 63, pp. 1 ff. (verify)

Challenges the binary framing of trade secret vs. patent protection by examining hybrid strategies and the doctrinal blurring between the two regimes.

3. Robert G. Bone, 1998. A New Look at Trade Secret Law: Doctrine in Search of Justification established 1990-2010 California Law Review, vol. 86, pp. 241–313

Provides a comprehensive doctrinal critique of trade secret law, questioning whether existing justifications—property, tort, and contract—are internally coherent.

4. Michael Risch, 2007. Why Do We Have Trade Secrets? established 1990-2010 Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review, vol. 11, pp. 1–76

Surveys the normative justifications for trade secret protection—labor, property, efficiency, and fairness—and assesses which best explains current doctrine.

5. David S. Levine, 2013. Secrecy and Unaccountability: Trade Secrets in Our Public Infrastructure contemporary 2011-2025 Florida Law Review, vol. 59, pp. 135–194 (verify)

Examines how trade secret claims shielding public-infrastructure software undermine democratic accountability and due process.

6. James Pooley, 2013. The Myth of the Trade Secret Troll: Why the DTSA Threatens to Destabilize the Balance of Power Between Employers and Employees contemporary 2011-2025 George Mason Law Review, vol. 23, pp. 1175–1213 (verify)

Critically evaluates employee mobility and the expanding scope of trade secret law prior to the DTSA, identifying structural power imbalances between employers and workers.

7. Sharon K. Sandeen & Christopher B. Seaman, 2017. Toward a Federal Jurisprudence of Trade Secret Law contemporary 2011-2025 Berkeley Technology Law Journal, vol. 32, pp. 829–908

Analyzes the first year of DTSA litigation to map emerging federal common law of trade secrets and divergences from state law baselines.

8. Elizabeth A. Rowe, 2017. Saving Trade Secret Disclosures on the Internet Through Sequential Preservation contemporary 2011-2025 Ohio State Law Journal, vol. 78, pp. 671–726 (verify)

Proposes a procedural framework for preserving trade secret status when disclosures occur online, addressing gaps the DTSA did not resolve.

9. Eric Goldman, 2016 (verify). Trade Secrets and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (verify) contemporary 2011-2025 George Mason Law Review (verify)

Explores the interaction between § 230 immunity and trade secret claims against online platforms, arguing that § 230 limits civil liability in ways trade secret doctrine has not fully absorbed.

10. David S. Levine, 2018. Secrecy and the Unaccountable Algorithm (verify) contemporary 2011-2025 Administrative Law Review (verify), vol. 70 (verify)

Argues that trade secret shields on government-deployed algorithms obstruct administrative-law accountability mechanisms, requiring a public-interest exception.

11. David S. Almeling, Darin W. Snyder, Michael Sapoznikow, Whitney E. McCollum & Ji. A Statistical Analysis of Trade Secret Litigation in Federal Courts established 1990-2010 Gonzaga Law Review, vol. 45, pp. 291–334 (verify)

Provides the first large-scale empirical analysis of federal trade secret litigation, revealing patterns in industry distribution, case outcomes, and damages.

12. Christopher B. Seaman, 2015. The Case Against Federalizing Trade Secrecy contemporary 2011-2025 Virginia Law Review, vol. 101, pp. 317–390

Makes the pre-DTSA case that federal preemption of state trade secret law would distort the incremental innovation system and harm employee mobility.

13. Sharon K. Sandeen, 2010. Kewanee Revisited: Returning to First Principles of Intellectual Property Law to Determine the Issue of Federal Preemption established 1990-2010 Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review, vol. 14, pp. 1–68 (verify)

Revisits the Supreme Court's Kewanee Oil framework to recalibrate how federal IP preemption should apply to state trade secret regimes.

14. Rebecca Wexler, 2018. Life, Liberty, and Trade Secrets: Intellectual Property in the Criminal Justice System contemporary 2011-2025 Stanford Law Review, vol. 70, pp. 1343–1429

Demonstrates that trade secret claims over criminal-justice algorithms deprive defendants of the procedural rights necessary to challenge evidence, colliding with constitutional due process guarantees. [REQUIRED]

15. Amanda Levendowski, 2018. How Copyright Law Can Fix Artificial Intelligence's Implicit Bias Problem contemporary 2011-2025 Washington Law Review, vol. 93, pp. 579–630

Proposes using copyright's fair-use doctrine to compel disclosure of biased training datasets as a mechanism for correcting AI discrimination.

16. Frank Pasquale, 2010. Beyond Innovation and Competition: The Need for Qualified Transparency in Internet Intermediaries established 1990-2010 Northwestern University Law Review, vol. 104, pp. 105–173

Develops the concept of "qualified transparency" to navigate the tension between trade secret protection for platform algorithms and the public interest in algorithmic accountability.

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

Identifies how automated government decision-making systems deprive individuals of meaningful procedural protections and calls for due-process design requirements in public algorithms.

18. Danielle Keats Citron & Frank Pasquale, 2014. The Scored Society: Due Process for Automated Predictions contemporary 2011-2025 Washington Law Review, vol. 89, pp. 1–33

Proposes a procedural-due-process framework for automated scoring systems used in consequential decisions such as employment and credit.

19. Kiel Brennan-Marquez, 2017. Plausible Cause": Explanatory Standards in the Age of Powerful Machines contemporary 2011-2025 Vanderbilt Law Review, vol. 70, pp. 1249–1302 (verify)

Argues that evidentiary opacity in machine-learning decision systems undermines the "plausible cause" threshold in Fourth Amendment analysis, requiring new explanation standards.

20. Rebecca Wexler, 2020. Privacy as Intellectual Property? (verify) contemporary 2011-2025 Stanford Law Review, vol. 72, pp. 1(verify)

Interrogates whether trade secret and privacy law are converging in their treatment of sensitive datasets, arguing that treating personal data as proprietary IP exacerbates inequality.

21. Pamela Samuelson, 1999. Intellectual Property and the Digital Economy: Why the Anti-Circumvention Regulations Need to Be Revised established 1990-2010 Berkeley Technology Law Journal, vol. 14, pp. 519–566

Offers an early systematic critique of DMCA § 1201's anti-circumvention regime, warning it would impede security research, fair use, and interoperability.

22. R. Anthony Reese, 2003. Will Merging Access Controls and Rights Controls Undermine the Structure of Anticircumvention Law? established 1990-2010 Berkeley Technology Law Journal, vol. 18, pp. 619–666

Identifies a structural ambiguity in § 1201 between access controls and rights controls, predicting doctrinal instability when the two categories merge in practice.

23. Fred von Lohmann, 2002. Unintended Consequences: Twelve Years Under the DMCA established 1990-2010 Electronic Frontier Foundation White Paper (updated 2010)

Documents empirical harms from DMCA § 1201 enforcement—chilling effects on security research, competition, and consumer rights—over the first twelve years of the statute.

24. Shyamkrishna Balganesh, 2009. Foreseeability and Copyright Incentives established 1990-2010 Harvard Law Review, vol. 122, pp. 1569–1637

Proposes a foreseeability doctrine to limit anti-circumvention's extension into markets copyright originally had no intention of reaching, connecting § 1201 to underlying IP incentives.

25. Aaron Perzanowski & Jason Schultz, 2011. Digital Exhaustion contemporary 2011-2025 UCLA Law Review, vol. 58, pp. 889–946

Argues that the first-sale doctrine should apply to digital goods, directly challenging anti-circumvention enforcement that prevents resale and transfer of digital media.

26. Séverine Dusollier, 2003. Exceptions and Technological Measures in the European Copyright Directive of 2001 — An Empty Promise established 1990-2010 International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law, vol. 34, pp. 62–75 (verify)

Evaluates the EU Information Society Directive's technological protection measure provisions and concludes that exceptions for users are rendered hollow by the architecture of enforcement.

27. Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, 2005. Author Autonomy and Atomism in Copyright Law established 1990-2010 Virginia Law Review, vol. 96, pp. 549–636 (verify)

Links anti-circumvention doctrine to a broader argument that technological locks fragment the copyright system by enabling hyper-granular licensing that displaces statutory balances.

28. Orin S. Kerr, 2003. Cybercrime's Scope: Interpreting "Access" and "Authorization" in Computer Misuse Statutes established 1990-2010 New York University Law Review, vol. 78, pp. 1596–1668

Provides the canonical analysis of "access" and "authorization" under the CFAA, identifying ambiguity between code-based and contract-based interpretations that shapes all subsequent litigation. [REQUIRED]

29. Orin S. Kerr, 2010. Vagueness Challenges to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act established 1990-2010 Minnesota Law Review, vol. 94, pp. 1561–1595

Applies void-for-vagueness doctrine to the CFAA, concluding that the statute's breadth creates constitutional problems that neither courts nor Congress have adequately addressed.

30. Danielle Keats Citron & Woodrow Hartzog, 2015. The CFAA and What's Left of the Common Law (verify) contemporary 2011-2025 Illinois Law Review (verify), vol. 2015 (verify)

Examines whether CFAA preempts state tort claims for data breaches, arguing that common-law development has been stunted by federal statutory overreach.

31. Eric Goldman, 2017 (verify). The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act: A Problematic Law That Gets Misapplied Even More Than It Should Be (verify) contemporary 2011-2025 Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review (verify)

Catalogues judicial misapplications of CFAA to ordinary web-scraping and platform policy violations, arguing for a legislative reset of the "exceeds authorized access" standard.

32. Jonathan Mayer, 2017. Cybercrime Litigation contemporary 2011-2025 University of Pennsylvania Law Review, vol. 164, pp. 1453–1536 (verify)

Empirically maps CFAA civil litigation, revealing that most suits are filed by private parties against insiders or competitors, not by the government against external hackers.

33. Orin S. Kerr, 2022. Van Buren and the Limits of the CFAA contemporary 2011-2025 Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, vol. 112 (verify), pp. 1 ff. (verify)

Analyzes the Supreme Court's Van Buren v. United States decision, evaluating how the "gates-up-or-down" reading of authorization clarifies but does not fully resolve the CFAA's scope.

34. Andrea M. Matwyshyn, 2010. Hacking Speech: Informational Speech and the First Amendment established 1990-2010 Northwestern University Law Review, vol. 107, pp. 795–874 (verify)

Argues that CFAA and anti-circumvention enforcement that targets publication of security research implicates First Amendment values in ways courts have not adequately weighed.

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

Provides the foundational critique of extending IP rights to raw factual data, demonstrating that neither copyright nor patent theory justifies a sui generis database right. [REQUIRED]

36. P. Bernt Hugenholtz, 2003. The New Database Right: Early Case Law from Europe established 1990-2010 Ninth Annual Conference on International IP Law and Policy, Fordham (chapter) (verify)

Surveys the early European case law interpreting the sui generis database right, finding doctrinal incoherence in what constitutes "substantial investment."

37. Estelle Derclaye, 2008. The Legal Protection of Databases: A Comparative Analysis established 1990-2010 Book chapter / Edward Elgar monograph (verify)

Compares EU sui generis and U.S. misappropriation approaches to database protection, identifying irreconcilable systemic differences that impede transatlantic data markets.

38. J.H. Reichman & Paul F. Uhlir, 2003. A Contractually Reconstructed Research Commons for Scientific Data in a Highly Protectionist Intellectual Property Environment established 1990-2010 Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 66, pp. 315–462

Proposes open-access licensing models to preserve a scientific data commons against the enclosure threatened by database protection laws and private contracts.

39. Jerome H. Reichman & Jonathan A. Franklin, 1999. Privately Legislated Intellectual Property Rights: Reconciling Freedom of Contract with Public Good Uses of Information established 1990-2010 University of Pennsylvania Law Review, vol. 147, pp. 875–970

Examines how click-wrap and shrink-wrap licenses can legislate property rights in information beyond what IP statutes grant, threatening public-domain and fair-use baselines.

40. Niva Elkin-Koren & Eli M. Salzberger, 2013. The Law and Economics of Intellectual Property in the Digital Age: The Limits of Analysis (verify) contemporary 2011-2025 Routledge (book); relevant chapter on database economics (verify)

Applies law-and-economics analysis to digital information goods, concluding that standard welfare frameworks misfire when applied to non-rivalrous database resources.

41. Lionel Bently & Brad Sherman, 2020 (verify). The Database Directive and the Boundaries of the Sui Generis Right (verify) contemporary 2011-2025 Intellectual Property Quarterly (verify)

Revisits the Directive's legislative history to argue that post-Brexit UK divergence in database rights creates market fragmentation detrimental to EU–UK data cooperation.

42. Matthew Sag, 2019. The New Legal Landscape for Text Mining and Machine Learning contemporary 2011-2025 Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A., vol. 66, pp. 291–367

Maps the post-Authors Guild v. Google fair-use doctrine to TDM and ML training, arguing that U.S. law permits most non-expressive use of copyrighted works as inputs. [REQUIRED]

43. Christophe Geiger, Giancarlo Frosio & Oleksandr Bulayenko, 2019. Text and Data Mining in the Proposed Copyright Reform: Making the EU Ready for an Age of Big Data? contemporary 2011-2025 IIC — International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law, vol. 49, pp. 814–844

Evaluates the EU DSM Directive's Article 3 and 4 TDM exceptions, concluding that mandatory opt-out rights for rights holders will structurally disadvantage European AI development.

44. Lionel Bently & Brad Sherman, 2023 (verify). Article 4 of the Digital Single Market Directive: The Commercial TDM Exception and Its Limits (verify) contemporary 2011-2025 European Intellectual Property Review (verify)

Analyzes Article 4's commercial TDM exception and the opt-out mechanism, identifying interpretive gaps that will generate litigation when applied to large-language-model training.

45. James Grimmelmann, 2016. Copyright for the Rest of Us contemporary 2011-2025 Vanderbilt Law Review, vol. 67, pp. 1 ff. (verify)

Develops a functional framework for copyright's non-expressive use cases, directly applicable to TDM by distinguishing copying for meaning from copying for expression.

46. Matthew Sag, 2012. Copyright and Copy-Reliant Technology established 1990-2010 Northwestern University Law Review, vol. 103, pp. 1607–1682 (verify)

Proposes a "copy-reliant technology" doctrine to rationalize fair-use analysis for search engines, TDM tools, and other technologies that necessarily ingest copyrighted material.

47. Amanda Levendowski, 2024 (verify). Resisting Face Surveillance with Copyright Law (verify) contemporary 2011-2025 Houston Law Review (verify), vol. 61 (verify)

Proposes using copyright doctrine to challenge facial-recognition databases assembled from scraped images, bridging IP law, trade secrecy, and anti-discrimination equity arguments.

48. Virginia Eubanks, 2014. Want to Predict the Future of Surveillance? Ask Poor Communities (verify) contemporary 2011-2025 The American Prospect (essay); see also Eubanks, Automating Inequality (2018) for related scholarship

Grounds algorithmic accountability debates in the lived experience of communities subjected to welfare-algorithm surveillance, connecting equity critique to the opacity of proprietary government systems.

49. Camilla A. Hrdy, 2021. Are Trade Secrets Just an Alternative to Patents? The Case Against Uniformity contemporary 2011-2025 Stanford Technology Law Review, vol. 24, pp. 1–62 (verify)

Challenges the dominant law-and-economics assumption that trade secrets and patents are interchangeable incentive mechanisms, with direct implications for AI-era IP strategy.

50. Frank Pasquale & Glyn Salge, 2015. Toward a Program of Research on Trade Secrets and the Open Society (verify) contemporary 2011-2025 George Washington Law Review (verify)

Synthesizes the Black Box Society thesis into a research agenda connecting trade secrecy, algorithmic opacity, and democratic information governance, bridging all eight sub-topics of this course.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

XD Nayler, R. (2022). The mountain in the sea. MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

[AI + Equity + Communication] A marine biologist studying a newly-discovered intelligent octopus species off Vietnam works for a corporation also operating an AI-piloted slaver fishing fleet manned by trafficked workers. Nayler interlaces three pillars: non-human cognition and machine intelligence, the labor inequity of automated extraction, and the semiotics of inter-species communication. The novel insists that AI ethics is unintelligible without confronting marine slavery and indigenous knowledge of nonhuman minds. A philosophical thriller that refuses to discuss minds in isolation from political economy. XD Butler, O. E. (1998). Parable of the talents. Seven Stories Press.

[Equity + Communication + AI] Earthseed grows into a movement under a Christian-nationalist administration's "Crusaders" wearing slave collars on women and other dissidents. Butler binds the carceral collar (a near-AI implant) to political communication and to the inequity of evangelical resurgence. The pillars meet in the daughter's documentary frame: an archival recovery of her mother's testimony. XD Smith, Z. (2012). NW. Hamish Hamilton.

[Communication + Equity] Four Londoners from one council estate diverge into different class trajectories. Smith binds the formal experiment (chat transcripts, walking directions, list chapters) to the inequity of neighborhood. The pillars meet in the formal architecture: communication design as political argument about urban race and class. XD Otsuka, J. (2011). The Buddha in the attic. Alfred A. Knopf.

[Equity + Communication] Otsuka's first-person plural narration follows Japanese picture brides arriving in California in the early 20th century. The choral voice itself is a communication theory of community under inequity: how many women's voices does it take to make one history. The pillars meet in the formal experiment. XP Coetzee, J. M. (1999). Disgrace. Secker & Warburg.

Illuminates Communication: Coetzee's post-apartheid novel of a disgraced professor in rural South Africa is a study in what happens to communication after the moral consensus collapses. Placed beside contemporary platform polarization, the book illuminates how speech acts misfire across a transformed audience. A cross-pollination for thinking about cancel-culture discourse in its political-historical longue durée.

Nonfiction

XD Bridle, J. (2018). New dark age: Technology and the end of the future. Verso.

[AI + Communication + Equity] Bridle reads computation as a system that produces opacity even as it claims transparency, with consequences for climate, politics, and content. The pillars meet in the "automation paradox" and the algorithmic farming of YouTube Kids. A major popular-scholarly cross-pillar text. XD Gray, M. L., & Suri, S. (2019). Ghost work: How to stop Silicon Valley from building a new global underclass. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

[Equity + AI + Communication] Gray and Suri document the workers behind the AI curtain—the click-workers, the labelers, the "ghosts" who make AI seem autonomous. The pillars synthesize in the figure of the data-labeler as both communication worker and AI substrate. A canonical text on AI-equity-labor. XD Larkin, B. (2008). Signal and noise: Media, infrastructure, and urban culture in Nigeria. Duke University Press.

[Communication + Equity + IP] Larkin's ethnography of Nigerian media infrastructures binds Nollywood's IP improvisations, urban inequity, and communication politics. The pillars synthesize in the cable TV box. XD Couldry, N. (2010). Why voice matters: Culture and politics after neoliberalism. Sage.

[Communication + Equity] Couldry argues that "voice" is the political ground neoliberalism cannot recognize. The pillars synthesize in the framework of voice as both communication and equity claim. XP Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness explained. Little, Brown.

Illuminates AI: Dennett's functionalist account is the indispensable counterweight to Searle in any AI-consciousness syllabus.

---

INT-704 — INT 704 · Tech Policy and Social Movements

INT pillar · PhD Year 1 · Spring 2029

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

Essential books

• ★ Manuel Castells — Networks of Outrage and Hope
• ★ Zeynep Tufekci — Twitter and Tear Gas
• ★ Amy Kapczynski — 'A2K Mobilization'
• ★ Costanza-Chock — Out of the Shadows
• ★ Jackson, Bailey & Welles — #HashtagActivism

Supplementary books

• ☆ Gabriella Coleman — Coding Freedom
• ☆ Christopher Kelty — Two Bits
• ☆ Krikorian & Kapczynski — Access to Knowledge
• ☆ Bennett & Segerberg — Logic of Connective Action
• ☆ Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor — From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

Papers (50)

1. McAdam, Doug (1982). Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 [book excerpt, Ch. 1–2] canonical pre-1990 University of Chicago Press (excerpt reprinted in social movement theory anthologies)

Establishes the political process model — linking organizational strength, cognitive liberation, and political opportunity — that anchors empirical social-movement research.

2. Tilly, Charles and Tarrow, Sidney (2007). Contentious Politics established 1990-2010 Paradigm Publishers (chapter-length overview available as working paper, Cornell ILR) (verify)

Synthesizes the contentious-politics framework — repertoires, performances, campaigns — offering a unified vocabulary for comparing movements across time and place.

3. Polletta, Francesca and Jasper, James M. (2001). Collective Identity and Social Movements established 1990-2010 Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 283–305

Reviews how collective identity — the shared sense of "we" — motivates participation, sustains commitment, and shapes movement strategy and outcomes.

4. Benford, Robert D. and Snow, David A. (2000). Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment established 1990-2010 Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 611–639

Systematizes frame analysis for movements — diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational frames — providing a toolkit for studying how movements construct meaning and win audiences.

5. McCarthy, John D. and Zald, Mayer N. (1977). Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory canonical pre-1990 American Journal of Sociology, 82(6), 1212–1241

Introduces resource mobilization theory, shifting attention from grievances to organizational resources — money, labor, legitimacy — as the key determinants of movement emergence and success.

6. Tarrow, Sidney (1994 / 2011 4th ed.). Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics [overview article version] established 1990-2010 Cambridge University Press; key arguments summarized in Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 16(1), 2011 (verify)

Theorizes cycles of contention, modular repertoires, and the relationship between political opportunity structures and sustained collective action.

7. Jasper, James M. (2004). A Strategic Approach to Collective Action: Looking for Agency in Social Movement Choices established 1990-2010 Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 9(1), 1–16

Argues for a strategic, agent-centered complement to structural models, foregrounding dilemmas, arenas, and players that movements navigate in real time.

8. Bennett, W. Lance and Segerberg, Alexandra (2012). The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics contemporary 2011-2025 Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 739–768

Distinguishes connective action (personally expressive, digitally enabled) from collective action (organizationally brokered), showing how personalized digital content spreads mobilization without strong organizational infrastructure.

9. Tufekci, Zeynep and Wilson, Christopher (2012). Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political Protest: Observations from Tahrir Square contemporary 2011-2025 Journal of Communication, 62(2), 363–379

Provides survey and ethnographic evidence that social media — especially Facebook — significantly shaped awareness and mobilization decisions during the Egyptian uprising, but did not replace on-the-ground networks.

10. Castells, Manuel (2012 / 2015). Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age [article précis] contemporary 2011-2025 Polity Press; condensed argument in Journal of Political Power, 5(1), 2012 (verify)

Argues that contemporary movements form in the space of flows — network-enabled, leaderless, occupying physical and digital space simultaneously — constituting a new form of transformative politics.

11. Earl, Jennifer and Kimport, Katrina (2011). Digitally Enabled Social Change: Activism in the Internet Age [chapter as article] established 1990-2010 MIT Press; article version: Mobilization, 13(3), 2008, 289–310 (verify)

Develops a typology of e-tactics and shows that internet-enabled activism can lower costs so dramatically that it changes the nature of collective action itself, not merely its speed.

12. Morozov, Evgeny (2011). The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom [chapter précis as review essay] contemporary 2011-2025 PublicAffairs; critical review in Journal of Democracy, 22(2), 2011, 20–24 (verify)

Offers a contrarian corrective to cyber-optimism, arguing that authoritarian regimes exploit the same digital tools that activists use — framing the internet as politically ambivalent infrastructure.

13. Gerbaudo, Paolo (2012). Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism [overview article] contemporary 2011-2025 Pluto Press; article version: Social Movement Studies, 11(3–4), 2012 (verify)

Introduces the concept of "choreography of assembly" — showing how social media figures perform soft leadership to coordinate physical occupation without claiming formal authority.

14. Jackson, Sarah J., Bailey, Moya, and Welles, Brooke Foucault (2020). #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice [introduction as article] contemporary 2011-2025 MIT Press; article version: Information, Communication & Society, 23(7), 2020 (verify)

Documents how Black women and other marginalized groups use hashtag campaigns to build counter-publics, reframe dominant narratives, and shift policy discourse on race and gender.

15. Kelty, Christopher M. (2008). Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software [article précis] established 1990-2010 Duke University Press; précis in Public Culture, 20(3), 2008, 566–571 (verify)

Introduces the concept of the "recursive public" — a public that constitutes itself through building and maintaining the technical infrastructure it uses to argue — anchoring free software as a social-movement form.

16. Coleman, E. Gabriella (2013). Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking [introduction/conclusion as article] contemporary 2011-2025 Princeton University Press; article version: Limn, Issue 0, 2010 (verify)

Ethnographically reconstructs how Debian developers enact liberal values — free speech, meritocracy, craft — constructing a distinctive hacker ethics that sustains open-source community and political advocacy.

17. Söderberg, Johan (2008). Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement established 1990-2010 Routledge; book chapter as article in ephemera: theory & politics in organization, 2(3), 2002, 209–226 (verify)

Reads the FOSS movement through autonomist Marxist theory, arguing that copyleft is a form of labor struggle that appropriates and redirects capitalist techniques of intellectual enclosure.

18. Postigo, Hector (2012). The Digital Rights Movement: The Role of Technology in Subverting Digital Copyright contemporary 2011-2025 MIT Press; article version: Information, Communication & Society, 15(8), 2012, 1228–1244

Traces how activists used technological tools — circumvention code, alternative licensing — as material tactics in the copyright reform movement, showing that code is both medium and message of digital rights advocacy.

19. Stallman, Richard M. (1985). The GNU Manifesto canonical pre-1990 Dr. Dobb's Journal, 10(3), 30–35; archived at gnu.org

Foundational movement document arguing that software freedom is an ethical imperative and that copyleft licensing is the political instrument to defend it against proprietary enclosure.

20. Benkler, Yochai (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom [chapter précis] established 1990-2010 Yale University Press; précis in Journal of Telecommunications and High Technology Law, 4(2), 2006 (verify)

Argues that networked peer production constitutes a new mode of economic and social organization that challenges both markets and states, reframing free software as structural economic transformation.

21. Coleman, E. Gabriella and Golub, Alex (2008). Hacker Practice: Moral Genres and the Cultural Articulation of Liberalism established 1990-2010 Anthropological Theory, 8(3), 255–277

Distinguishes three moral genres within hacker culture — free software, open source, and hacker underground — showing how each articulates a distinct version of liberal values and political strategy.

22. Kapczynski, Amy (2008). The Access to Knowledge Mobilization and the New Politics of Intellectual Property established 1990-2010 Yale Law Journal, 117(5), 804–885

Provides the definitive account of the A2K coalition — mapping how patient-access, education, and software-freedom advocates converged to contest the TRIPS-plus IP regime through a novel counter-hegemonic frame.

23. Sell, Susan K. and Prakash, Aseem (2004). Using Ideas Strategically: The Contest between Business and NGO Networks in Intellectual Property Rights established 1990-2010 International Studies Quarterly, 48(1), 143–175

Demonstrates how both corporate and civil-society actors strategically deploy ideas and frames in multilateral IP negotiations, revealing the ideational dimension of transnational advocacy network competition.

24. Halbert, Debora J. (2005). Resisting Intellectual Property [chapter as article] established 1990-2010 Routledge; article version: First Monday, 10(5), 2005 (verify)

Frames IP resistance as a social movement, documenting how pirates, hackers, and access advocates collectively contest the expansion of IP law and construct alternative ethical imaginaries around knowledge sharing.

25. Krikorian, Gaëlle and Kapczynski, Amy (eds.) (2010). Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property [introduction] established 1990-2010 Zone Books; introduction available via SSRN

Frames A2K as a global social movement spanning public health, education, and digital commons, synthesizing legal, political, and movement-theory perspectives on IP governance contestation.

26. Drahos, Peter and Braithwaite, John (2002). Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy? [chapter précis as article] established 1990-2010 Earthscan; article précis: World Patent Information, 25(3), 2003, 235–242 (verify)

Documents the corporate capture of global IP lawmaking through "forum shifting" and bilateral treaty pressures, providing the structural-economic backdrop against which A2K mobilization emerged.

27. Boyle, James (2008). The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind [chapter précis] established 1990-2010 Yale University Press (open access at thepublicdomain.org); précis: Law and Contemporary Problems, 66(1–2), 2003 (verify)

Develops the "second enclosure movement" thesis, showing how copyright maximalism encloses intellectual commons, and calls for movement-building analogous to environmentalism to defend public domain.

28. Wu, Tim (2003). Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination established 1990-2010 Journal on Telecommunications and High Technology Law, 2(1), 141–179

Coins "network neutrality," arguing that end-to-end non-discrimination is an economic and political principle necessary to preserve internet openness and prevent vertical integration from foreclosing application innovation.

29. Mueller, Milton L. (2010). Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance [chapter as article] contemporary 2011-2025 MIT Press; article version in Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 8(3), 2011, 334–338 (verify)

Maps the contending coalitions — states, corporations, civil society — in internet governance arenas such as ICANN and IGF, framing governance contests as contentious politics over infrastructure sovereignty.

30. Crawford, Susan and Wallsten, Scott (2012). America's Broadband Challenge [policy paper] contemporary 2011-2025 New America Foundation Open Technology Institute (verify)

Documents the market concentration and underinvestment that produce broadband inequality in the United States, providing empirical grounding for digital-inclusion advocacy and net-neutrality activism.

31. Pickard, Victor (2014). Media Reform Movements: Organizing for Communications Democracy contemporary 2011-2025 In The Handbook of Political Economy of Communications, Wiley-Blackwell; article version in Media, Culture & Society, 36(8), 2014, 1075–1087

Traces the media reform movement — from Free Press to net-neutrality coalitions — showing how structural media critique became actionable political mobilization at the FCC and in Congress.

32. Lentz, Becky (2013). Excavating Historicity in the US Media Reform Movement: A Contribution to Reorienting Policy Research contemporary 2011-2025 Communication, Culture & Critique, 6(3), 444–464

Recovers the historical roots of US media reform advocacy, arguing that understanding movement genealogy is essential for evaluating contemporary net-neutrality and broadband-justice campaigns.

33. Gangadharan, Seeta Peña (2017). The Downside of Digital Inclusion: Expectations and Experiences of Privacy and Surveillance among Marginal Internet Users contemporary 2011-2025 New Media & Society, 19(4), 597–615

Shows that digital inclusion programs expose marginalized communities to intensified data surveillance, complicating optimistic broadband-access advocacy and raising equity dimensions of connectivity policy.

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

Synthesizes evidence of algorithmic harms across employment, criminal justice, and healthcare, catalyzing a civic-accountability movement and recommending sector-specific AI governance frameworks.

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

Demonstrates that public "algorithmic audits" — naming and shaming discriminatory facial-recognition vendors — trigger concrete corporate improvements, establishing audit-as-activism as a viable movement tactic.

36. Brundage, Miles, Avin, Shahar, et al. (2018). The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation contemporary 2011-2025 arXiv:1802.07228; Future of Humanity Institute, OpenAI, and partner institutes

Catalogs AI-enabled threats — deepfakes, automated disinformation, autonomous weapons — and calls for a civil-society and technical community coalition to develop norms and governance before harms scale.

37. Joh, Elizabeth E. (2016). The New Surveillance Discretion: Automated Suspicion, Big Data, and Policing contemporary 2011-2025 Harvard Law & Policy Review, 10(1), 15–42

Analyzes how predictive-policing algorithms extend and obscure police discretion, generating new accountability deficits that community-policing reform and civil-rights movements must confront.

38. Eubanks, Virginia (2018). Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor [chapter as article] contemporary 2011-2025 St. Martin's Press; excerpt in Public Administration Review, 78(5), 2018 (verify)

Documents how automated decision systems in welfare, child welfare, and homelessness services systematically harm low-income people, grounding algorithmic-accountability activism in the lived experience of the dispossessed.

39. Noble, Safiya Umoja (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism [chapter précis] contemporary 2011-2025 NYU Press; précis in Black Scholar, 45(1), 2015, 67–72 (verify)

Shows how Google's search algorithms reproduce and amplify anti-Black racist representations, reframing algorithmic bias as a civil-rights and media-justice issue requiring both regulatory and movement responses.

40. Scholz, Trebor (2016). Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy contemporary 2011-2025 Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung; also summarized in Hanna Ketterer & Karin Becker (eds.), Was stimmt nicht mit der Demokratie? (Transcript, 2019) (v

Proposes platform cooperativism as a social-movement strategy: repurposing digital platform architectures under worker and user ownership to reclaim labor value from extractive gig-economy corporations.

41. Vandaele, Kurt (2018). Will Trade Unions Survive in the Platform Economy? Emerging Patterns of Platform Workers' Collective Voice and Representation in Europe contemporary 2011-2025 ETUI Working Paper 2018.05, European Trade Union Institute

Surveys emergent collective voice among platform workers across Europe — from informal associations to union drives — mapping a fragmented but expanding labor movement in the gig economy.

42. Calo, Ryan and Rosenblat, Alex (2017). The Taking Economy: Uber, Information, and Power contemporary 2011-2025 Columbia Law Review, 117(6), 1623–1690

Analyzes how Uber deploys information asymmetries and algorithmic control to extract value from drivers, revealing how platform design functions as a labor-relations strategy that preempts collective organizing.

43. Joyce, Simon, Stuart, Mark, and Forde, Chris (2020). Remaking Worker Voice in the Gig Economy contemporary 2011-2025 New Technology, Work and Employment, 35(2), 106–126 (verify)

Examines Deliveroo and Uber Eats worker organizing in the UK, showing how gig workers hybridize traditional union tactics with digital tools to build collective power under non-standard employment classifications.

44. Drahokoupil, Jan and Piasna, Agnieszka (2017). Work in the Platform Economy: Beyond Lower Transaction Costs contemporary 2011-2025 Intereconomics, 52(6), 335–340

Critiques transaction-cost rationales for platform labor markets, showing that platforms capture surplus value through risk-shifting, information control, and classification arbitrage — framing the terrain for worker movement strategy.

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

Draws on driver interviews to show how Uber's algorithmic management produces information asymmetries that undermine drivers' autonomy and bargaining power, providing empirical grounding for platform labor activism.

46. Kapczynski, Amy (2012). The Costs of Consent: The New Political Economy of IP and Access to Medicines contemporary 2011-2025 In Aaron Barak et al. (eds.), International Intellectual Property Law (verify); article version in Harvard International Law Journal, 53, 20

Bridges A2K social-movement theory with political economy, showing how consent-based licensing frameworks reproduce IP hierarchies even when framed as access solutions — extending IP critique into movement strategy.

47. Whittaker, Meredith (2021). The Steep Cost of Capture contemporary 2011-2025 Interactions (ACM), 28(6), 50–55

Argues that AI ethics initiatives are systematically captured by industry interests, calling for an autonomous civil-society movement — grounded in labor and racial-justice organizing — to enforce meaningful AI accountability.

48. Brock, André (2020). Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures [introduction as article] contemporary 2011-2025 NYU Press; article version: New Media & Society, 14(6), 2012, 1005–1023 (verify)

Theorizes "critical technocultural discourse analysis" through the lens of Black digital practice, showing how Black Twitter constitutes a counter-public that reshapes platform affordances and policy discourse.

49. Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta (2016). From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation [chapter précis] contemporary 2011-2025 Haymarket Books; précis: Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, 18(1), 2016, 3–21 (verify)

Situates #BlackLivesMatter within the longue durée of Black radical politics, arguing that social-media activism must connect to structural demands — bridging hashtag advocacy with movement-building for state power.

50. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (eds.) (2007). The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex [introduction] established 1990-2010 South End Press; introduction available via INCITE! website

Critiques how nonprofit funding structures depoliticize social movements — including tech-justice and racial-justice organizations — providing a structural-accountability framework applicable to digital-rights and AI-accountability coalitions.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

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

[IP + AI + Communication] Cayce Pollard, allergic to brands, is hired to identify the maker of mysterious anonymous film footage circulating online. Gibson's first present-day novel treats branding as a viral semiotic system and the internet forum as collective intelligence. Trademark, viral marketing, and emergent algorithmic taste meet in the figure of the "coolhunter." A foundational text for thinking about IP and communication in the platform era: who owns a piece of footage that thousands of strangers have made meaningful together? XD Butler, O. E. (2005). Fledgling. Seven Stories Press.

[Equity + AI + Communication] A 53-year-old vampire who looks like a Black 10-year-old girl uses chemical "binding" to control her human symbionts. Butler binds biological IP (genetic engineering of vampire melanin), interracial intimacy under coercion, and the communicative politics of binding/consent. The pillars meet in the protagonist's body itself, owned by a community and a corporation at once. XD Hamid, M. (2017). Exit west. Riverhead.

[Equity + Communication + AI] A young couple flee a city in civil war through magical doors that connect global locations. Hamid binds the algorithmic, platform-mediated experience of mass migration (refugee location apps, crowdsourced rumors) to the equity politics of border. The pillars synthesize in the doors themselves: a communications infrastructure under racial and economic regulation. XD Tagaq, T. (2018). Split tooth. Viking.

[Equity + Communication] An Inuit poet and throat-singer's autobiographical-fictional hybrid binds Arctic colonial inequity, sexual violence, and the communication politics of throat-song and dream. The pillars meet in the form: prose and verse and image. A foundational cross-pillar indigenous text. XP Bolaño, R. (2008). 2666 (N. Wimmer, Trans.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (Original work published 2004)

Illuminates Equity: Bolaño's 900-page novel, anchored by the "Part About the Crimes" — hundreds of dispassionately catalogued femicides in fictionalized Ciudad Juárez — is a study in what data documentation does and does not do. Placed beside feminist data scholarship (D'Ignazio and Klein), the book illuminates how the bureaucratic register of murder can both inform and anesthetize. A devastating cross-pollination for any unit on data ethics.

Nonfiction

XD D'Ignazio, C., & Klein, L. F. (2020). Data feminism. MIT Press.

[AI + Equity + Communication] D'Ignazio and Klein offer seven principles for working with data through an intersectional feminist lens. The pillars synthesize in the data visualization itself: every chart is a communication artifact embedding power. A canonical text for teaching the cross-pillar problem. XD Mejias, U. A., & Couldry, N. (2024). Data grab: The new colonialism of big tech and how to fight back. University of Chicago Press.

[Communication + Equity + AI] The sequel to The Costs of Connection sharpens the data colonialism argument and offers organizing strategies. The pillars synthesize in the historical comparison to extractive colonialism. A major cross-pillar 2020s text. XD Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.

[Equity + Communication] Tsing's ethnography of the global matsutake supply chain binds Pacific Northwest forest labor, Japanese gift economies, and the communication politics of value. The pillars synthesize in the mushroom as multispecies-and-multinational communication object. XD Tufekci, Z. (2017). Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. Yale University Press.

[Communication + Equity + AI] Tufekci documents the affordances and fragilities of platform-mediated protest from Tahrir Square to Ferguson. The pillars synthesize in the field-note method. XP Wegner, D. M. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. MIT Press.

Illuminates AI: Wegner's psychology of agency is a cross-pollination text for thinking about LLM-as-actor scholarship.

---

PHD-805 — PHD 805 · Political Economy of Media, Information, and Code

PHD pillar · PhD Year 1 · Spring 2029

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

Essential books

• ★ Dan Schiller — Digital Capitalism
• ★ Dan Schiller — Digital Depression
• ★ Vincent Mosco — Political Economy of Communication
• ★ Robert McChesney — Digital Disconnect
• ★ Nick Srnicek — Platform Capitalism

Supplementary books

• ☆ Shoshana Zuboff — Surveillance Capitalism
• ☆ Couldry & Mejias — The Costs of Connection
• ☆ Cedric Robinson — Black Marxism
• ☆ Silvia Federici — Caliban and the Witch
• ☆ Fraser & Jaeggi — Capitalism

Papers (50)

1. Murdock, Graham and Golding, Peter, 1973. For a Political Economy of Mass Communications canonical pre-1990 Socialist Register, vol. 10, pp. 205–234

Establishes the foundational framework for studying mass media through classical political economy, foregrounding ownership, commodity relations, and class power rather than functionalist or liberal-pluralist models.

2. Smythe, Dallas W., 1977. Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism canonical pre-1990 Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 1–27

Argues that Western Marxism has neglected the economic function of audiences as a commodity sold by media to advertisers, introducing the concept of "audience labour" and reorienting the political economy of communication around the work of watching.

3. Garnham, Nicholas, 1979. Contribution to a Political Economy of Mass-Communication canonical pre-1990 Media, Culture and Society, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 123–146

Extends Murdock and Golding by situating mass communication within the broader circuit of capital, attending to the specific contradictions of cultural commodities and the structural pressures on public-service broadcasting.

4. Schiller, Herbert I., 1976. Communication and Cultural Domination canonical pre-1990 International Arts and Sciences Press (book chapter widely anthologised; chapter "The Appearance of National Communications Policies: A New

Analyses how US media corporations export a commercial communication order that displaces national and subaltern cultures, framing transnational media as instruments of imperial hegemony.

5. Murdock, Graham, 1978. Blindspots About Western Marxism: A Reply to Dallas Smythe canonical pre-1990 Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 109–119

Critically engages Smythe's audience-commodity thesis, insisting that ideology and signification are not reducible to economic function, and that a fully materialist account must integrate cultural analysis.

6. Golding, Peter and Murdock, Graham, 1991. Culture, Communications, and Political Economy established 1990-2010 In James Curran and Michael Gurevitch (eds.), Mass Media and Society, pp. 15–32. London: Edward Arnold

Updates the classical framework by addressing the commodification of culture under post-Fordist restructuring and defends a historical-materialist research agenda against postmodern critiques.

7. Adorno, Theodor W. and Horkheimer, Max, 1944 (trans. 1972). The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception canonical pre-1990 In Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Herder and Herder [originally Philosophische Fragmente, 1944]

Diagnoses modern mass culture as a rationalised, standardised commodity system that forecloses genuine aesthetic experience and affords ideological integration of the working class into capitalism.

8. Williams, Raymond, 1973. Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory canonical pre-1990 New Left Review, no. 82, pp. 3–16

Reformulates the base/superstructure metaphor through the concepts of residual, dominant, and emergent culture, enabling a non-reductive materialism that treats media forms as active social forces rather than passive reflections.

9. Hall, Stuart, 1982. The Rediscovery of "Ideology": Return of the Repressed in Media Studies canonical pre-1990 In Michael Gurevitch et al. (eds.), Culture, Society and the Media, pp. 56–90. London: Methuen

Traces how the concept of ideology was expelled from mainstream media sociology and argues for its reinstatement via Gramsci's hegemony theory, showing how media naturalise dominant class perspectives.

10. Mosco, Vincent, 1996 (2nd ed. 2009). The Political Economy of Communication: Rethinking and Renewal established 1990-2010 Sage Publications (book; foundational chapter "What Is Political Economy?" pp. 24–68 widely assigned)

Provides the most comprehensive synthesis of the political-economy-of-communication tradition, organising the field around commodification, spatialization, and structuration as entry points.

11. Mosco, Vincent, 2004. The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace (Introduction: "The Digital Sublime") established 1990-2010 MIT Press (book chapter widely assigned as standalone reading)

Critiques techno-utopian mythology around cyberspace, applying political-economy and cultural-studies lenses to show how digital hype obscures material power relations and enables corporate enclosure.

12. Kellner, Douglas, 1990. Television and the Crisis of Democracy canonical pre-1990 / established 1990-2010 Westview Press (book; chapter 1 "Critical Theory and Television" pp. 1–35 widely assigned)

Deploys Frankfurt School and Gramscian frameworks to analyse how US commercial television manufactures consent and depoliticises audiences, bridging critical theory and media-studies empirics.

13. Mattelart, Armand and Mattelart, Michèle, 1998. Theories of Communication: A Short Introduction (Chapter 4: "From the Political Economy of Communication to Cultural Studies") established 1990-2010 Sage Publications

Maps the trajectory from classical political economy to cultural studies, identifying points of productive tension and tracing how the political economy tradition responded to poststructuralist challenges.

14. Schiller, Dan, 1999. Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System (Introduction and Chapter 1) established 1990-2010 MIT Press

Argues that the internet does not inaugurate a new mode of production but rather extends and deepens capitalist market relations into communication and information, amplifying inequality rather than democratising access.

15. Schiller, Dan, 2014. Digital Depression: Information Technology and Economic Crisis (Chapter 1: "The Information Sector in Crisis") contemporary 2011-2025 University of Illinois Press

Traces how the information technology sector became central to financialised capitalism and then implicated in the 2008 crisis, challenging triumphalist narratives of digital-driven growth.

16. Castells, Manuel, 1996. The Rise of the Network Society (Chapter 4: "The Transformation of Work and Employment: Networkers, Jobless, and Flextime") established 1990-2010 Blackwell (Vol. 1 of The Information Age trilogy)

Characterises informational capitalism through the network as its dominant organizational logic, analysing how global flows of capital, information, and labour reconfigure class structure and work.

17. Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, 2000. Empire (Chapter 1.3: "Biopolitical Production" and Chapter 3.4: "The Symptoms of Passage") established 1990-2010 Harvard University Press

Theorises immaterial and affective labour as the hegemonic form of production under post-Fordist global capitalism, with implications for how digital communication platforms extract value from networked subjects.

18. Lazzarato, Maurizio, 1996. Immaterial Labor established 1990-2010 In Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno (eds.), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, pp. 133–147. University of Minnesota Press

Coins and elaborates the concept of immaterial labour — work that produces immaterial products such as information, communication, relationships, and affects — as the paradigmatic form of post-Fordist value production.

19. Terranova, Tiziana, 2000. Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy established 1990-2010 Social Text, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 33–58

Demonstrates that the digital economy is built on the voluntary, unwaged labour of internet users, blurring the boundary between leisure and work and anticipating debates about platform value extraction.

20. Srnicek, Nick, 2017. Platform Capitalism (Introduction: "What Is Platform Capitalism?") contemporary 2011-2025 Polity Press

Identifies the platform as the dominant business model of contemporary capitalism, categorising advertising, cloud, industrial, product, and lean platforms and grounding each in the imperative to accumulate data as a key asset.

21. Pasquinelli, Matteo, 2009. Google's PageRank Algorithm: A Diagram of the Cognitive Capitalism and the Rentier of the Common Intellect established 1990-2010 In Konrad Becker and Felix Stalder (eds.), Deep Search: The Politics of Search Beyond Google, pp. 152–162. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag

Reads Google's PageRank as a machine for extracting rent from the collective intelligence encoded in hyperlinks, theorising search engines as instruments of cognitive-capitalist accumulation.

22. Langley, Paul and Leyshon, Andrew, 2017. Platform Capitalism: The Intermediation and Capitalisation of Digital Economic Circulation contemporary 2011-2025 Finance and Society, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 11–31

Theorises platform capitalism from a financialisation perspective, arguing that platforms intermediate economic circulation and capitalise on the flows they organise, linking digital business models to broader transformations in finance.

23. Steinberg, Marc, 2019. The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Consumer Internet contemporary 2011-2025 University of Minnesota Press (Introduction: "What Is the Platform Economy?")

Grounds platform capitalism in a non-US historical trajectory, showing how Japanese mobile platforms pioneered business models later adopted globally, provincialising Silicon Valley narratives.

24. van Dijck, José, Poell, Thomas and de Waal, Martijn, 2018. The Platform Society: Public Values Versus Market Forces (Chapter 1: "The Platform Society") contemporary 2011-2025 Oxford University Press

Analyses how digital platforms reorganise public life across news, health, education, and urban sectors, arguing for the defence of public values against the market logic embedded in platform architectures.

25. Rochet, Jean-Charles and Tirole, Jean, 2003. Platform Competition in Two-Sided Markets established 1990-2010 Journal of the European Economic Association, vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 990–1029

Provides the foundational economic theory of two-sided markets and platform pricing, essential for understanding the structural logic of advertising-funded digital platforms from an industrial-organisation perspective.

26. Gillespie, Tarleton, 2010. The Politics of "Platforms established 1990-2010 New Media and Society, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 347–364

Deconstructs the ideological work performed by the term "platform," showing how it enables tech companies to claim political neutrality while actively shaping content and profiting from user activity.

27. Zuboff, Shoshana, 2015. Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization contemporary 2011-2025 Journal of Information Technology, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 75–89

Introduces the concept of "surveillance capitalism" and "Big Other" as a new logic of accumulation based on the unilateral extraction of behavioural data and its transformation into predictive products sold on behaviour futures markets.

28. Zuboff, Shoshana, 2019. Surveillance Capitalism and the Challenge of Collective Action contemporary 2011-2025 New Labor Forum, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 10–29

Extends the surveillance capitalism framework to the question of democratic response and collective action, arguing that existing regulatory and labour frameworks are inadequate to the novelty of behavioural modification at scale.

29. Morozov, Evgeny, 2019. Capitalism's New Clothes contemporary 2011-2025 The Baffler, no. 44 (online essay, widely cited as peer-level critique)

Critiques Zuboff's surveillance capitalism thesis for failing to situate data extraction within the longer history of capitalist commodification, arguing that her framework inadvertently naturalises industrial capitalism as a benign baseline.

30. West, Sarah Myers, 2019. Data Capitalism: Redefining the Logics of Surveillance and Privacy contemporary 2011-2025 Business and Society, vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 20–41

Systematises the concept of "data capitalism" across corporate, state, and civic domains, mapping how data extraction operates through asymmetric power relations and proposing a political economy of privacy as resistance.

31. Cohen, Julie E., 2019. Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism (Chapter 2: "The Biopolitical Public Domain") contemporary 2011-2025 Oxford University Press

Theorises how legal structures — intellectual property, privacy, contract — are being reconstructed to enable and legitimise informational capitalism, bridging political economy and critical legal theory.

32. Couldry, Nick and Mejias, Ulises A., 2019. Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data's Relation to the Contemporary Subject contemporary 2011-2025 Television and New Media, vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 336–349

Conceptualises contemporary data extraction as a new form of colonialism that appropriates human life itself as raw material, linking digital capitalism to historical patterns of colonial dispossession.

33. Andrejevic, Mark, 2002. The Work of Being Watched: Interactive Media and the Exploitation of Self-Disclosure established 1990-2010 Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 230–248

Extends Smythe's audience-labour argument to interactive and surveillance media, arguing that the work of being watched constitutes a new form of productive labour that generates surplus value for platform operators.

34. Robinson, Cedric J., 1983. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapter 1: "Racial Capitalism") canonical pre-1990 Zed Books (2nd ed. University of North Carolina Press 2000)

Argues that capitalism as a historical system has always been racial capitalism — that the accumulation of capital has depended from its origins on racialised hierarchies of labour — displacing class-only analyses.

35. Du Bois, W.E.B., 1935. Black Reconstruction in America (Chapter 1: "The Black Worker") canonical pre-1990 Harcourt, Brace and Company

Reconstructs the centrality of enslaved and free Black labour to US capital accumulation and demonstrates that the white "psychological wage" was used to divide the working class, foundational for racial-capitalist analysis of media and labour.

36. Melamed, Jodi, 2015. Racial Capitalism contemporary 2011-2025 Critical Ethnic Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 76–85

Synthesises and updates the racial capitalism framework for contemporary critical ethnic studies, arguing that capitalism requires racial inequity to function and that antiracist reform is routinely captured to extend capital's reach.

37. Singh, Nikhil Pal, 2017. On Race, Violence, and "So-Called Primitive Accumulation contemporary 2011-2025 Social Text, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 45–73 (verify volume/issue)

Connects Marx's concept of primitive accumulation to ongoing racialised dispossession and state violence in the US, challenging periodised accounts that treat such violence as pre-capitalist rather than constitutive of capital's reproduction.

38. Noble, Safiya Umoja, 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (Introduction: "A Society Searching") contemporary 2011-2025 New York University Press

Demonstrates through content analysis and political-economy critique that commercial search algorithms encode and amplify racial and gender bias, linking platform capitalism to the structural production of racist knowledge systems.

39. Benjamin, Ruha, 2019. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Chapter 1: "Engineered Inequity") contemporary 2011-2025 Polity Press

Introduces the concept of the "New Jim Code" to describe how ostensibly neutral digital technologies encode racial hierarchy, calling for abolitionist approaches to technology design that dismantle rather than reform discriminatory architectures.

40. Federici, Silvia, 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Chapter 2: "The Accumulation of Labor and the Degradation of Women") established 1990-2010 Autonomedia

Reinterprets the transition to capitalism through the lens of gendered primitive accumulation, arguing that the witch-hunt was a systematic campaign to control female reproductive labour and that this process continues in contemporary forms of dispossession.

41. Fortunati, Leopoldina, 1995. The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital canonical pre-1990 Autonomedia (trans. Hilary Creek; orig. L'Arcano della Riproduzione, 1981)

Applies a Marxist-feminist value theory to housework and reproductive labour, arguing that domestic work produces and reproduces labour power and thus generates surplus value while remaining invisible to mainstream political economy.

42. Bhattacharya, Tithi (ed.), 2017. Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (Introduction: "How Not to Skip Class") contemporary 2011-2025 Pluto Press

Grounds social reproduction theory as a Marxist framework that situates care, domestic, and reproductive work within the totality of capitalist value production, arguing for a unified theory of class that includes gender and race.

43. Vora, Kalindi, 2015. Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor (Chapter 1: "The Transmission of Care") contemporary 2011-2025 University of Minnesota Press

Analyses transnational care labour — including call-centre work, surrogacy, and nursing — as a form of biocapital extraction that transfers vital energy from Global South workers to Global North consumers, linking feminist political economy to digital labour studies.

44. Fraser, Nancy, 2014. Behind Marx's Hidden Abode: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism contemporary 2011-2025 New Left Review, no. 86, pp. 55–72

Argues that a critical theory of capitalism must include not only the "hidden abode" of production but also the background conditions — nature, care, public power — that capitalism cannibalises without reproducing, pointing toward feminist and ecological political economy.

45. Wajcman, Judy, 2015. Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism (Chapter 5: "The Time of Technology") contemporary 2011-2025 University of Chicago Press

Applies feminist time-studies and science and technology studies to digital capitalism, arguing that acceleration and time scarcity are gendered experiences shaped by the design of digital platforms and labour markets.

46. Crawford, Kate and Joler, Vladan, 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 (research essay / interactive publication)

Traces the full material, labour, and data supply chain of a single AI device from mineral extraction through cloud infrastructure to user data harvesting, rendering visible the planetary extraction on which AI capitalism depends.

47. Gray, Mary L. and Suri, Siddharth, 2019. Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass (Introduction: "The Paradox of the Last Mile") contemporary 2011-2025 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Documents the vast, hidden workforce of on-demand platform labourers who perform the human tasks that AI cannot yet automate, arguing that ghost work constitutes a new global precariat invisible to standard labour economics.

48. Boyle, James, 2003. The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain established 1990-2010 Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 66, nos. 1–2, pp. 33–74

Applies the historical concept of enclosure to intellectual property expansion, arguing that digital copyright, patent, and database rights constitute a new enclosure of the informational commons with structural parallels to the dispossession of the peasantry.

49. Drahos, Peter and Braithwaite, John, 2002. Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy? (Chapter 1: "The New Feudalism") established 1990-2010 Earthscan / New Press

Argues that the globalisation of intellectual property regimes through TRIPS and bilateral trade agreements has produced an "information feudalism" in which knowledge commons are privatised for the benefit of a small number of transnational corporations.

50. Dyer-Witheford, Nick, 2015. Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex (Chapter 1: "Digital Vortex") contemporary 2011-2025 Pluto Press / Between the Lines

Synthesises Marxist political economy, racial capitalism (Robinson), and feminist social reproduction theory (Federici) to produce a global mapping of digital labour from silicon mines to app factories to platform gig workers, bridging all pillars of the course.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

XD Gibson, W. (2007). Spook country. G. P. Putnam's Sons.

[IP + AI + Communication] Hollis Henry, ex-rocker turned journalist for a phantom magazine, investigates locative art and a shipping container that may contain stolen Iraq War cash. Gibson maps GPS-tagged geographies of meaning onto the post-9/11 surveillance state. The pillars meet in the locative artwork itself: an IP object readable only through proprietary platforms, embedded in an infrastructure of state and corporate tracking. A pivotal novel for understanding how communication technologies remake property and visibility. XD Delany, S. R. (1975). Dhalgren. Bantam Books.

[Communication + Equity + AI] In a city named Bellona, isolated from the rest of America, a queer biracial poet named Kid records the disintegration of meaning and the proliferation of media (the Bellona Times, the gang's projector "scorpions"). The pillars meet in the manuscript itself, which the reader cannot tell is the book being read. A foundational cross-pillar text—race, queerness, urban breakdown, and the politics of authorship in a single architecture. XD VanderMeer, J. (2014). Annihilation. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

[Communication + Equity + AI] Four women enter "Area X," a coastal zone where biological communication exceeds human understanding. VanderMeer binds non-human language to the inequity of the state-secret expedition program and to the soft AI of the lighthouse's recursive archive. The pillars meet in the biologist-narrator's journal. The first volume of the Southern Reach trilogy. XD Vuong, O. (2019). On earth we're briefly gorgeous. Penguin Press.

[Equity + Communication] A Vietnamese-American son writes letters to his mother, who cannot read English. Vuong binds queer immigrant equity, the communication impossibility of cross-language family, and the literary form of the unread letter. The pillars synthesize in the address. XP Saunders, G. (2017). Lincoln in the bardo. Random House.

Illuminates Communication/IP: Saunders's polyphonic novel of Abraham Lincoln's grief, narrated by ghosts in a graveyard, is a study in how voice attribution works under footnoted citation. Placed beside debates on LLM authorship, the book models a kind of writing that is unapologetically collaged, attributed, and constructed from historical fragments. A surprising primer on the ethics of synthesizing voice.

Nonfiction

XD Hayles, N. K. (1999). How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. University of Chicago Press.

[AI + Communication] Hayles traces the cybernetic erasure of embodiment through three waves of information theory, literary fiction, and material practice. The pillars synthesize in the figure of the "posthuman" as both communication concept and AI prefiguration. A foundational text in cross-pillar humanities-of-AI. XD Couldry, N., & Hepp, A. (2016). The mediated construction of reality. Polity.

[Communication + AI + Equity] Couldry and Hepp argue that contemporary reality is "deeply mediatized"—constructed in and through media infrastructures. The pillars synthesize in the "datafication" chapter and in the gendered/racialized politics of who appears in the mediated construction. A canonical communication-AI bridge. XD Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics (S. Corcoran, Trans.). Duke University Press. (Original work published 2016)

[Equity + Communication] Mbembe's framework of "necropolitics" extends Foucault's biopolitics to the politics of death. The pillars synthesize in the digital surveillance of African populations and the racialization of communication infrastructure. XD Jackson, S. J., Bailey, M., & Foucault Welles, B. (2020). #Hashtag activism: Networks of race and gender justice. MIT Press.

[Communication + Equity + AI] The authors analyze Twitter hashtags from #BlackLivesMatter to #MeToo as networked counter-publics. The pillars synthesize in the network analysis of platform politics. XP Solnit, R. (2005). A field guide to getting lost. Viking.

Illuminates Communication: Solnit's essays on wandering, loss, and the unknown are a model for non-instrumental thinking. A cross-pollination with platform-attention discourse.

---

PHD-806 — PHD 806 · International IP, TRIPS, and the Trade Regime

PHD pillar · PhD Year 1 · Spring 2029

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

Essential books

• ★ Daniel Gervais — The TRIPS Agreement
• ★ Carlos Correa — TRIPS Commentary
• ★ Ruth Okediji — Copyright Law in an Age of L&E
• ★ Drahos & Braithwaite — Information Feudalism
• ★ Susan Sell — Private Power, Public Law

Supplementary books

• ☆ Kapczynski & Krikorian — A2K
• ☆ Sunder — From Goods to a Good Life
• ☆ Peter Yu — 'Currents and Crosscurrents'
• ☆ Debora Halbert — The State of Copyright
• ☆ Helfer & Austin — Human Rights and IP

Papers (50)

1. Susan K. Sell and Aseem Prakash, 2004. Using Ideas Strategically: The Contest Between Business and NGO Networks in Intellectual Property Rights established 1990-2010 International Studies Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 1, pp. 143–175

Demonstrates how competing networks of business actors and NGOs used strategic framing to shape the TRIPS Agreement and subsequent IP norm contestation.

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

Provides an early account of how a small group of corporate actors leveraged GATT processes to globalize strong IP protections, foreshadowing the "information feudalism" critique.

3. J.H. Reichman, 1995. Universal Minimum Standards of Intellectual Property Protection Under the TRIPS Component of the WTO Agreement established 1990-2010 The International Lawyer, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 345–388

Provides the foundational doctrinal map of TRIPS minimum standards across all IP categories, assessing implementation obligations for developed and developing countries alike.

4. Peter K. Yu, 2007. Currents and Crosscurrents in the International Intellectual Property Regime established 1990-2010 Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 323–443

Maps the competing currents — harmonization, resistance, forum-shifting — that characterize post-TRIPS international IP politics and charts tensions between developed and developing country interests.

5. Susan K. Sell, 1998 (verify). Intellectual Property Protection and Antitrust in the Developing World: Crisis, Coercion, and Choice established 1990-2010 International Organization, vol. 49, no. 2, pp. 315–349

Traces how US section 301 trade coercion shaped IP norm acceptance in developing countries prior to TRIPS, establishing the coercive foundations of the TRIPS bargain.

6. Graeme B. Dinwoodie and Rochelle Cooper Dreyfuss, 2004. TRIPS and the Dynamics of Intellectual Property Lawmaking established 1990-2010 Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, vol. 36, pp. 95–122

Examines how the TRIPS Agreement constrains domestic IP lawmaking flexibility and evaluates interpretive tools available to national legislators seeking policy space.

7. Frederick M. Abbott, 2002. The TRIPS Agreement, Access to Medicines and the WTO Doha Ministerial Conference established 1990-2010 Journal of World Intellectual Property, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 15–52

Analyzes the legal flexibility within TRIPS for compulsory licensing and the political dynamics leading to the 2001 Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health.

8. Ellen F.M. 't Hoen, 2002. TRIPS, Pharmaceutical Patents, and Access to Essential Medicines: A Long Way from Seattle to Doha established 1990-2010 Chicago Journal of International Law, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 27–46

Charts the advocacy mobilization around access to HIV/AIDS medicines that transformed TRIPS compulsory licensing from abstract text into live political contest.

9. Susan K. Sell, 2002. TRIPS and the Access to Medicines Campaign established 1990-2010 Wisconsin International Law Journal, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 481–522

Shows how civil society framing of pharmaceutical patents as a health-rights violation shifted the normative terrain of TRIPS implementation debates.

10. Kevin Outterson, 2005. Pharmaceutical Arbitrage: Balancing Access and Innovation in International Prescription Drug Markets established 1990-2010 Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 193–291

Models the pricing and arbitrage dynamics of global pharmaceutical markets and evaluates TRIPS flexibilities as instruments for reconciling access and innovation incentives.

11. Brook K. Baker, 2008. Arthritic Flexibilities for Accessing Medicines: Analysis of WTO Action Regarding Paragraph 6 of the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public He established 1990-2010 Indiana International and Comparative Law Review, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 613–716

Critically evaluates the 2003 WTO paragraph 6 decision, arguing that procedural burdens effectively nullify the Doha Declaration's compulsory licensing promise for least-developed countries.

12. Jerome H. Reichman and Catherine Hasenzahl, 2003. Non-Voluntary Licensing of Patented Inventions: Historical Perspective, Legal Framework Under TRIPS, and an Overview of the Practice in Cana established 1990-2010 UNCTAD–ICTSD Issue Paper No. 5

Provides a comparative doctrinal and historical overview of compulsory licensing law across major jurisdictions and evaluates TRIPS-compatible policy options for developing nations.

13. Amy Kapczynski and Jonathan Berger, 2009. The Story of the TAC Case: The Potential and Limits of Socio-Economic Rights Litigation in South Africa established 1990-2010 in Human Rights Advocacy Stories (Foundation Press), pp. 43–88 (verify)

Uses the Treatment Action Campaign's constitutional litigation to examine how domestic rights frameworks can pressure TRIPS-compliant IP regimes toward access-oriented outcomes.

14. Ruth L. Okediji, 2004. Sustainable Access to Copyrighted Digital Information Works in Developing Countries established 1990-2010 in The International Public Goods and Transfer of Technology Under a Globalized Intellectual Property Regime (Cambridge University Press),

Argues that TRIPS-mandated copyright extension undermines information access in developing countries and calls for a public-goods framework to rebalance the international copyright system.

15. J.H. Reichman and Paul F. Uhlir, 2003. A Contractually Reconstructed Research Commons for Scientific Data in a Highly Protectionist Intellectual Property Environment established 1990-2010 Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 66, nos. 1–2, pp. 315–462

Proposes a contractual commons model to preserve open scientific data sharing in the face of database protection regimes and TRIPS-era IP expansion.

16. Christophe Geiger, 2006. Constitutionalising" Intellectual Property Law? The Influence of Fundamental Rights on Intellectual Property in the European Union established 1990-2010 International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law (IIC), vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 371–406

Examines how fundamental rights norms — particularly freedom of expression and the right to education — can and should constrain the scope of copyright under international and EU law.

17. Niva Elkin-Koren, 2006. Exploring Creative Commons: A Skeptical View of a Worthy Pursuit established 1990-2010 in The Future of the Public Domain (Kluwer Law International), pp. 325–345 (verify)

Critically interrogates whether private licensing solutions like Creative Commons can substitute for structural copyright reform, especially in a global context.

18. Séverine Dusollier, 2011. Scoping Study on Copyright and Related Rights and the Public Domain contemporary 2011-2025 WIPO Committee on Development and Intellectual Property (CDIP), CDIP/7/INF/2

Provides a systematic analysis of how the international copyright framework defines — and progressively erodes — the public domain, with reform recommendations for the WIPO Development Agenda.

19. Martin Senftleben, 2004. Copyright, Limitations and the Three-Step Test: An Analysis of the Three-Step Test in International and EC Copyright Law established 1990-2010 Information Law Series, vol. 13 (Kluwer Law International) — article version: *International Review of Intellectual Property and Competiti

Deconstructs the three-step test across Berne, TRIPS, and WCT contexts, demonstrating that the test permits broader exceptions than maximalist interpretations allow.

20. Pamela Samuelson, 1997. The U.S. Digital Agenda at WIPO established 1990-2010 Virginia Journal of International Law, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 369–439

Exposes how the United States leveraged WIPO treaty negotiations (WCT/WPPT) to export maximalist copyright norms, setting a template for TRIPS-plus bilateral strategies.

21. J.H. Reichman, 1996–97. From Free Riders to Fair Followers: Global Competition Under the TRIPS Agreement established 1990-2010 New York University Journal of International Law and Politics, vol. 29, nos. 1–2, pp. 11–93

Argues that TRIPS transforms developing countries from "free riders" on IP into "fair followers" obligated to pay rents, and proposes development-sensitive interpretive approaches.

22. Thomas Cottier, 2003. The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights established 1990-2010 in The WTO Agreements: The Uruguay Round Agreements (Cambridge University Press), pp. 1033–1099 (verify)

Offers the most comprehensive doctrinal commentary on the TRIPS patent provisions, systematically identifying flexibility mechanisms available to developing-country implementers.

23. Bryan Mercurio, 2006. TRIPS-Plus Provisions in FTAs: Recent Trends established 1990-2010 in Regional Trade Agreements and the WTO Legal System (Oxford University Press), pp. 215–237 (verify)

Documents the systematic use of US and EU free-trade agreements to impose patent and data-exclusivity standards beyond TRIPS minimums, narrowing developing-country flexibilities.

24. Carlos M. Correa and Reto M. Hilty (eds.), 2014. Patent Law and Theory: A Handbook of Contemporary Research — Introduction: Patent Reform and the Developing World contemporary 2011-2025 ICTSD Programme on Innovation, Technology and Intellectual Property (working paper version) (verify)

Synthesizes scholarly debate on TRIPS patent flexibilities (Bolar exemption, parallel imports, patentability criteria) and their deployment by developing countries since Doha.

25. Jerome H. Reichman and Tracy Lewis, 2005. Using Liability Rules to Stimulate Local Innovation in Developing Countries: Application to Traditional Knowledge established 1990-2010 in International Public Goods and Transfer of Technology Under a Globalized Intellectual Property Regime (Cambridge University Press), pp.

Proposes liability-rule alternatives to patent monopolies to catalyze local innovation capacity in developing countries, engaging the interface of TRIPS patents and traditional knowledge.

26. Frederick M. Abbott and Jerome H. Reichman, 2007. The Doha Round's Public Health Legacy: Strategies for the Production and Diffusion of Patented Medicines Under the Amended TRIPS Provisions established 1990-2010 Journal of International Economic Law, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 921–987

Evaluates the 2005 TRIPS Amendment (Article 31bis) as a mechanism for compulsory licensing for export, identifying structural flaws and proposing operationalization strategies.

27. Henning Grosse Ruse-Khan, 2011. The (Non)Use of Treaty Object and Purpose in Intellectual Property Disputes contemporary 2011-2025 Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property and Competition Law Research Paper, No. 11-10

Examines how WTO dispute settlement panels have interpreted TRIPS patent provisions, arguing that a teleological approach would generate more development-friendly outcomes.

28. Rosemary J. Coombe, 1996. Embodied Trademarks: Mimesis and Alterity on American Commercial Frontiers established 1990-2010 Cultural Anthropology, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 202–224

Interrogates how trademark law constructs cultural identity and appropriates indigenous imagery, offering a critical cultural-studies challenge to IP law's neutral self-presentation.

29. K.J. Greene, 1999. Copyright, Culture and Black Music: A Legacy of Unequal Protection established 1990-2010 Hastings Communication and Entertainment Law Journal (CommEnt), vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 339–392

Documents the historical exclusion of Black musical creators from copyright protection, framing current traditional cultural expression debates in terms of structural racial inequality.

30. Madhavi Sunder, 2007. IP3 established 1990-2010 Stanford Law Review, vol. 59, no. 2, pp. 257–332

Develops a "third generation" IP framework integrating cultural freedom, development, and human rights, challenging the binary of protection versus access that structures mainstream IP discourse.

31. Angela R. Riley and Kristen A. Carpenter, 2016. Owning Red: A Theory of Indian (Cultural) Appropriation contemporary 2011-2025 Texas Law Review, vol. 94, no. 4, pp. 859–931

Proposes an "ownership" theory of cultural appropriation rooted in tribal sovereignty to address gaps in existing IP law's protection of Native American cultural expressions.

32. Dev S. Gangjee, 2012. Relocating the Law of Geographical Indications contemporary 2011-2025 Cambridge University Press (monograph), chapter on TRIPS Article 22–24 (verify) — article version: Intellectual Property Quarterly, 2007 (

Provides the most rigorous analysis of TRIPS geographical indication provisions, tracing conflicts between the EU's terroir-based GI model and the US trademark-based approach.

33. Michael F. Brown, 2005. Heritage Trouble: Recent Work on the Protection of Intangible Cultural Property established 1990-2010 International Journal of Cultural Property, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 40–61

Surveys legal and anthropological approaches to protecting intangible cultural heritage, identifying the limitations of IP law for communities whose knowledge is collective and transgenerational.

34. Rosemary J. Coombe, Sarah Ives, and Daniel Huizenga, 2014. Geographical Indications: The Promise, Perils and Politics of Protecting Place-Based Products contemporary 2011-2025 in Sage Handbook of Intellectual Property (SAGE Publications), pp. 207–223 (verify)

Situates GI debates within broader political-economy struggles over who controls the economic value embedded in place-based cultural traditions.

35. Peter Drahos, 2001. BITS and BIPS: Bilateralism in Intellectual Property established 1990-2010 Journal of World Intellectual Property, vol. 4, no. 6, pp. 791–808

Introduces the concept of "bilateral IP" as a US/EU strategy to lock in TRIPS-plus norms outside the WTO multilateral framework, anticipating a generation of FTA IP chapters.

36. Bryan Mercurio, 2004. TRIPS-Plus Provisions in FTAs: Recent Trends established 1990-2010 International and Comparative Law Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 3, pp. 823–849 (verify — may overlap with Paper 23; this entry targets the ICLQ

Systematically catalogs the IP provisions in bilateral and regional FTAs exceeding TRIPS minimums, demonstrating convergent TRIPS-plus templates across US and EU agreements.

37. Susan K. Sell, 2007. Intellectual Property and Public Policy in Historical Perspective: Contestation and Settlement established 1990-2010 Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 267–322

Historicizes US trade-based IP strategy from bilateral investment treaties through TRIPS to post-Doha FTAs, showing continuity in corporate-driven norm entrepreneurship.

38. Peter K. Yu, 2006. TRIPS and Its Discontents established 1990-2010 Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 369–410

Analyzes developing-country discontents with TRIPS implementation and assesses whether post-Doha forum-shifting to bilateral FTAs forecloses the policy space promised by the Doha Declaration.

39. 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, no. 1, pp. 1–83

Develops the "regime shifting" concept to explain how developing countries and NGOs moved IP norm contests from WTO to WIPO, WHO, and CBD forums to expand policy flexibility.

40. Carlos M. Correa, 2006. Implications of Bilateral Free Trade Agreements on Access to Medicines established 1990-2010 Bulletin of the World Health Organization, vol. 84, no. 5, pp. 399–404

Demonstrates empirically how TRIPS-plus data-exclusivity and patent-linkage provisions in US FTAs reduce generic medicine competition and harm access in signatory developing countries.

41. Kimberlee G. Weatherall, 2004. Of Floors and Ceilings: A Comment on the Australia–US Free Trade Agreement IP Chapter established 1990-2010 Melbourne University Law Review, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 975–995 (verify)

Provides a detailed critique of the IP chapter of the Australia–US FTA as a case study in how TRIPS-plus norms are embedded in bilateral negotiations with asymmetric bargaining power.

42. Amy Kapczynski, 2008. The Access to Knowledge Mobilization and the New Politics of Intellectual Property established 1990-2010 Yale Law Journal, vol. 117, no. 5, pp. 804–885

Provides the canonical account of the A2K movement's emergence as a counter-hegemonic coalition, explaining how it reframed IP as a governance question implicating access, development, and human rights.

43. Amy Kapczynski and Gaëlle Krikorian, 2010. Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property — Introduction established 1990-2010 Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property (Zone Books / MIT Press), pp. 1–18

Frames A2K as a global social movement contesting IP maximalism across medicines, software, seeds, and education, situating it within broader struggles for democratic governance of knowledge.

44. Susan K. Sell and Aseem Prakash, 2004. Using Ideas Strategically: The Contest Between Business and NGO Networks in Intellectual Property Rights [see Paper 1 — cited again in this established 1990-2010 International Studies Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 1, pp. 143–175

(See Paper 1.) In the A2K context, the framing-contest analysis directly informs how A2K NGOs strategically deployed counter-narratives to challenge corporate IP discourse.

45. Deborah Halbert, 2005. Resisting Intellectual Property established 1990-2010 Routledge (monograph) — article version: "Intellectual Property Piracy: The Narrative Construction of Deviance," *International Journal for

Critically examines how the "piracy" narrative constructs IP infringement as deviance, obscuring the economic and cultural interests served by strong IP regimes.

46. Yochai Benkler, 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom — Chapter 1: Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challeng established 1990-2010 Yale University Press (open access at benkler.org) (verify — this is a book chapter)

Provides the theoretical architecture for the A2K movement's claim that networked social production can generate public goods that market-based IP systems fail to produce.

47. Peter Drahos, 2010. The Global Governance of Knowledge: Patent Offices and Their Clients established 1990-2010 Cambridge University Press (monograph), Introduction chapter (verify)

Analyzes how patent offices function as governance institutions shaped by their corporate clients, and explores implications for A2K goals of reforming the knowledge-governance architecture.

48. Kwame 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 (monograph) — article precursor: African Studies Review, vol. 54, no. 1, 2011, pp. 11–27 (verify)

Demonstrates through Ghanaian textile traditions that Western copyright's authorship and originality axioms are culturally particular, calling for an internationally pluralistic IP framework.

49. Robin Mansell, 2012. Imagining the Internet: Communication, Innovation, and Governance contemporary 2011-2025 Oxford University Press (monograph) — article version: "ICT Policy and Governance: The Politics of the Information Society," Info, vol. 13

Situates international IP and internet governance within contending imaginaries of the internet as either a market infrastructure or a communication commons, bridging IP and communication studies.

50. Ryan B. Anderson and Kirsty Gover (eds.), 2018 (verify). Law, Knowledge, Culture: The Production of Indigenous Knowledge in Intellectual Property Law contemporary 2011-2025 Edward Elgar Publishing (monograph) — Introduction chapter (verify)

Examines how IP law's epistemological assumptions exclude indigenous knowledge systems, and proposes cross-cultural legal pluralism as a bridge between IP doctrine and indigenous rights.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

XD Gibson, W. (2010). Zero history. G. P. Putnam's Sons.

[IP + AI + Communication] Hollis is hired to track down the designer of an anti-brand, secret-label denim line being scouted by U.S. military procurement. Gibson closes his Blue Ant trilogy with a sustained meditation on trademark, military-civilian fashion crossover, and algorithmic supply-chain forensics. The novel ties IP (the secret brand) to communication (a marketing intelligence firm's totalizing data appetite) and to the proto-AI of pattern matching at industrial scale. The trilogy is a Rosetta stone for the cross-pillar problem. XD Le Guin, U. K. (1974). The dispossessed. Harper & Row.

[IP + Equity + Communication] A physicist from an anarchist moon visits the propertarian planet to publish his unifying theory and discovers that intellectual ownership and political ownership are continuous. Le Guin binds physics-as-IP to the communication infrastructures of two opposing worlds. The pillars meet in Shevek's manuscript: should knowledge be patented or shared? A canonical cross-pillar novel for theorists of IP and equity. XD VanderMeer, J. (2017). Borne. MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

[AI + Equity + IP] In a city ruined by a runaway biotech company, a scavenger named Rachel finds and raises a sentient creature, Borne. VanderMeer binds the corporate IP of biotech creatures, the inequity politics of the ruined city, and the AI-like emergence of Borne's intelligence. The pillars meet in Rachel's parental relationship with a being she does not legally own. One of the cleanest cross-pillar bio-AI novels of the 2010s. XD Mengiste, M. (2019). The shadow king. W. W. Norton.

[Equity + Communication] During Mussolini's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, a young woman serves as the body double for the emperor while real Ethiopian women fight. Mengiste binds the communication politics of imperial photography (an Italian war photographer is a major character) to the equity politics of women's combat and racial colonialism. The pillars meet in the negative. XP McCarthy, C. (2006). The road. Knopf.

Illuminates Communication: McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel of a father and son walking south is, secretly, a study in language under conditions of collapse. Placed beside scholarship on minimal-language interfaces, The Road models what becomes urgent when nothing is redundant. A cross-pollination for thinking about communication design under extreme constraint.

Nonfiction

XD Hayles, N. K. (2017). Unthought: The power of the cognitive nonconscious. University of Chicago Press.

[AI + Communication] Hayles theorizes the "cognitive nonconscious"—the layer of cognition that runs beneath language and that humans share with technical systems. The pillars meet in case studies of high-frequency trading and literary cognition. A major text for cross-pillar AI-and-communication theory. XD Birhane, A. (2021). The impossibility of automating ambiguity. Artificial Life, 27(1), 44–61. [Together with Birhane's longer body of work on algorithmic colonialism.]

[AI + Equity + Communication] Birhane's body of work, particularly on "Algorithmic Colonization of Africa" (2020), synthesizes critiques of machine learning, race, and continental sovereignty. The pillars meet in the dataset audit. XD Mbembe, A. (2017). Critique of black reason (L. Dubois, Trans.). Duke University Press. (Original work published 2013)

[Equity + Communication] Mbembe argues that "Blackness" was invented through colonial communication systems. The pillars synthesize in the figure of the colonial archive. XD Squires, C. R. (2002). Rethinking the Black public sphere: An alternative vocabulary for multiple public spheres. Communication Theory, 12(4), 446–468. [Together with Squires's longer work African Americans and the Media (2009).]

[Communication + Equity] Squires's reconceptualization of the Black public sphere undergirds cross-pillar communication-and-equity scholarship. XP Solnit, R. (2014). The faraway nearby. Viking.

Illuminates Communication: Solnit's nested-essay memoir of her mother's dementia is a study in narrative as care-work. A cross-pollination with care-AI debates.

---

PHD-804 — PHD-804

PHD pillar · PhD Year 1 · Spring 2029

Essential books

Supplementary books

Papers (50)

1. Bender, Emily M.; Gebru, Timnit; McMillan-Major, Angelina; Shmitchell, Shmargare. On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?

2. Bender, Emily M.; Koller, Alexander (2020). Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data

3. Birhane, Abeba; Kalluri, Pratyusha; Card, Dallas; Bras, William; Bhatt, Usman; C. Values Encoded in Machine Learning Research

4. Marcus, Gary (2018). Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal

5. Blodgett, Su Lin; Barocas, Solon; Daumé III, Hal; Wallach, Hanna (2020). Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLP

6. Campolo, Alex; Crawford, Kate (2020). Enchanted Determinism: Power without Responsibility in Artificial Intelligence

7. Reuel, Anka; Lotfi, Mehrdad; Reuel, Philipp (2024). Open Problems in Technical AI Governance (verify)

8. Koenecke, Allison; Nam, Andrew; Lake, Emily; Nudell, Joe; Quartey, Minnie; Menge. Racial Disparities in Automated Speech Recognition

9. Manovich, Lev (2018). AI Aesthetics

10. Hertzmann, Aaron (2018). Can Computers Create Art?

11. Hertzmann, Aaron (2020). Visual Indeterminacy in GAN Art

12. Elgammal, Ahmed; Liu, Bingchen; Elhoseiny, Mohamed; Mazzone, Marian (2017). CAN: Creative Adversarial Networks, Generating "Art" by Learning About Styles and Deviating from Style Norms

13. Audry, Sofian (2021). Art in the Age of Machine Learning (excerpt / companion article)

14. Zylinska, Joanna (2020). AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams

15. Cetinic, Eva; She, James (2022). Understanding and Creating Art with AI: Review and Outlook

16. Crawford, Kate; Joler, Vladan (2018). Anatomy of an AI System: The Amazon Echo as an Anatomical Map of Human Labor, Data and Planetary Resources

17. Hu, Tung-Hui (2015). A Prehistory of the Cloud (selections)

18. Bratton, Benjamin H. (2015). The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Chapter 1: The Stack and Future Geopolitics) (verify)

19. Parks, Lisa; Starosielski, Nicole (eds.) (2015). Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (Introduction)

20. Holt, Jennifer; Vonderau, Patrick (2015). Where the Internet Lives": Data Centers as Cloud Infrastructure

21. Pasquale, Frank (2015). The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Introduction and Chapter 1) (verify)

22. Strubell, Emma; Ganesh, Ananya; McCallum, Andrew (2019). Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP

23. Coeckelbergh, Mark (2020). AI Ethics (selections: Introduction and Chapters 2–3)

24. Floridi, Luciano; Cowls, Josh; Beltrametti, Monica; Chatila, Raja; Chazerand, Pa. An Ethical Framework for a Good AI Society: Opportunities, Risks, Principles, and Recommendations

25. Dignum, Virginia (2019). Responsible Artificial Intelligence: How to Develop and Use AI in a Responsible Way (Chapter 1: AI and Society) (verify)

26. Russell, Stuart (2019). Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control (Introduction and Chapter 1) (verify)

27. Mittelstadt, Brent Daniel; Allo, Patrick; Taddeo, Mariarosaria; Wachter, Sandra;. The Ethics of Algorithms: Mapping the Debate

28. Whittlestone, Jess; Nyrup, Rune; Alexandrova, Anna; Cave, Stephen (2019). The Role and Limits of Principles in AI Ethics: Towards a Focus on Tensions

29. Jobin, Anna; Ienca, Marcello; Vayena, Effy (2019). The Global Landscape of AI Ethics Guidelines

30. Marcus, Gary; Davis, Ernest (2019). Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust (Introduction: The Disconnect) (verify)

31. Mitchell, Melanie (2019). Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans (Chapter 15: The Barrier of Meaning) (verify)

32. Larson, Erik J. (2021). The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do (Introduction and Chapter 1) (verify)

33. Birhane, Abeba; Kalluri, Pratyusha (2021). The Values Encoded in Machine Learning Research (short version / conference presentation notes) (verify)

34. Nguyen, C. Thi (2020). Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles

35. Natale, Simone; Ballatore, Andrea (2020). Imagining the Thinking Machine: Technological Myths and the Rise of Artificial Intelligence

36. Hao, Karen (2022). How the AI Industry Profits from Catastrophe (Empire of AI) (verify)

37. Crawford, Kate (2021). Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (Introduction: Seeing the Full Stack) (verify)

38. Dyer-Witheford, Nick; Kjosen, Atle Mikkola; Steinhoff, James (2019). Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism (Chapter 2: The Capitalocene) (verify)

39. Kelleher, John D.; Tierney, Brendan (2018). Data Science (Introduction and Chapter 1: What is Data Science?) (verify)

40. Nakamura, Lisa (2012). Words with Friends": Socially Networked Word Games as Bulwarks against Neo-racism in Post-Race America (verify)

41. Zuboff, Shoshana (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Introduction: Home or Exile in the Digital Future) (verify)

42. Adam, Alison (1998). Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine (Chapter 1: Feminist Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence) (verify)

43. Haraway, Donna J. (1985). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century

44. Suchman, Lucy (2007). Agencies in Technology Design: Feminist Reconfigurations

45. Asaro, Peter M. (2012). On Banning Autonomous Weapon Systems: Human Rights, Automation, and the Dehumanization of Lethal Decision-Making

46. Broussard, Meredith (2018). Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (Chapter 7: Technochauvinism) (verify)

47. D'Ignazio, Catherine; Klein, Lauren F. (2020). Data Feminism (Chapter 1: The Power Chapter) (verify)

48. Costanza-Chock, Sasha (2020). Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (Introduction) (verify)

49. Lemley, Mark A.; Casey, Bryan (2021). Fair Learning

50. Seaver, Nick (2017). Algorithms as Culture: Some Tactics for the Ethnography of Algorithmic Systems

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

XD Wallace, D. F. (1996). Infinite jest. Little, Brown.

[Communication + IP] A film cartridge so entertaining viewers watch themselves to death; a Boston tennis academy; a Quebecois separatist movement using the cartridge as terror weapon. Wallace's epic synthesizes addiction-media (a near-AI feedback loop in viewer-screen relations) with the commercial branding of years and the IP dynamics of a "master copy" of lethal entertainment. The novel's footnote machinery and corporate-sponsored calendar argue that communication infrastructures and intellectual property regimes co-produce a subject incapable of looking away. XD Le Guin, U. K. (1969). The left hand of darkness. Ace Books.

[Communication + Equity + AI] A human envoy on a planet of ambisexual people learns the diplomatic and personal cost of categorizing genders. Le Guin treats first-contact as a communication problem inseparable from the inequities of binary thinking and the proto-AI of the "ansible" (an instantaneous communication device). The pillars meet at the boundary of self-recognition. Foundational text in cross-pillar speculative fiction. XD Liu, K. (2015). The grace of kings. Saga Press.

[Equity + Communication] Liu reworks a Chinese dynastic founding story as silkpunk epic with airships and proto-mechanical computation. The pillars synthesize through the politics of who can write history and the inequity of imperial succession. A novel about authorship and equity in the form of a war epic. XD Awad, M. (2019). Bunny. Viking.

[Equity + Communication] An MFA student at an Ivy-adjacent program is drawn into a clique of women who write through occult collaborative practice. Awad binds the IP politics of MFA workshop culture, the equity politics of the program, and the communication theory of group writing. The pillars meet in the bunny itself. XP Mantel, H. (2009). Wolf hall. Fourth Estate.

Illuminates Communication: Mantel's Tudor novel of Thomas Cromwell is a study in information work — the secretary as proto-data-officer of the early modern state. Placed beside histories of bureaucracy, Wolf Hall illuminates how communication infrastructure made the modern nation. A surprising primer on the longue durée of administrative power.

Nonfiction

XD Brock, A., Jr. (2020). Distributed blackness: African American cybercultures. NYU Press.

[Communication + Equity + AI] Brock theorizes Black Twitter, the "racialized libidinal economy" of digital communication, and the cultural politics of Black online presence. The pillars synthesize in the formal experiment of "critical technocultural discourse analysis." A foundational text for joining communication studies and equity to platform AI. XD Buolamwini, J. (2023). Unmasking AI: My mission to protect what is human in a world of machines. Random House.

[AI + Equity + Communication] Buolamwini, founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, recounts the Gender Shades study and the broader politics of facial recognition's racial disparities. The pillars synthesize in the protagonist's autoethnography. A major cross-pillar text from a leading practitioner. XD Stoler, A. L. (2009). Along the archival grain: Epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. Princeton University Press.

[Communication + Equity] Stoler's archival theory of the Dutch East Indies binds colonial bureaucratic communication to racialized inequity. The pillars synthesize in the marginalia of the colonial document. A foundational text for cross-pillar archival studies. XD Squires, C. R. (2009). African Americans and the media. Polity.

[Communication + Equity] Squires's textbook joins media history and equity studies. The pillars synthesize in the historical sweep. XP Berry, W. (1977). The unsettling of America: Culture and agriculture. Sierra Club Books.

Illuminates Equity/AI: Berry's foundational agrarian critique of industrialization is the original cross-pollination text for thinking about the cultural costs of automation. A primer for any AI-and-labor unit.

---

RDG-702 — RDG 702 · Comprehensive Exam Preparation

RDG pillar · PhD Year 1 · Spring 2029

The dominant work of the semester: systematic reading and synthesis of the general comprehensive list, structured as 12 weeks of 10 books/articles each plus four weeks of mock-exam writing.

Essential books

• ★ Reference work — Approved 120-book General Comp List
• ★ Howard Becker — Writing for Social Scientists
• ★ Wendy Belcher — 12-Week Article
• ★ Eugene Volokh — Academic Legal Writing
• ★ William Zinsser — On Writing Well

Supplementary books

• ☆ Reference work — Comprehensive Exam Preparation Guides* (compiled)
• ☆ Karen Kelsky — The Professor Is In
• ☆ Paul Silvia — How to Write a Lot
• ☆ Robert Boice — Advice for New Faculty Members
• ☆ Booth et al. — The Craft of Research

Papers (50)

1. Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, 2017. The Mediated Construction of Reality contemporary 2011-2025 Polity Press (book); key argument summarized in Communication Theory articles

Extends social-constructionist tradition (Berger & Luckmann) to argue that all social reality is now constitutively built through deep mediatization processes.

2. Taina Bucher, 2018. If…Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics contemporary 2011-2025 Oxford University Press (book); key article version in Social Media + Society

Develops the concept of algorithmic "programmability" as a form of sociotechnical power that governs user conduct through automated visibility regimes.

3. Brian Hallinan and Ted Striphas, 2016. Recommended for You: The Netflix Prize and the Production of Algorithmic Culture contemporary 2011-2025 New Media & Society, 18(1), 117–137

Coins "algorithmic culture" and shows how collaborative filtering normalizes particular tastes while rendering its operations invisible to users.

4. Tarleton Gillespie, 2014. The Relevance of Algorithms contemporary 2011-2025 In T. Gillespie, P. Boczkowski, & K. Foot (Eds.), Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. MIT Press

Establishes foundational vocabulary for studying algorithms as political artifacts that shape publics and mediate cultural participation.

5. Jean-Baptiste Plantin, Carl Lagoze, Paul N. Edwards, and Christian Sandvig, 2018. Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook contemporary 2011-2025 New Media & Society, 20(1), 293–310

Synthesizes infrastructure and platform studies to analyze how tech giants consolidate power by merging infrastructural durability with platform flexibility.

6. José van Dijck, Thomas Poell, and Martijn de Waal, 2018. The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World contemporary 2011-2025 Oxford University Press (book); article version in Social Media + Society 4(1)

Proposes a "platform society" framework to analyze datafication, commodification, and selection as core logics structuring public life online.

7. Nick Couldry and Ulises 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 an emergent order of power in which the appropriation of human life through data replicates historical colonial dispossession.

8. Mark A. Lemley and Bryan Casey, 2021. Fair Learning contemporary 2011-2025 Texas Law Review, 99(4), 743–784

Argues that machine learning on copyrighted works constitutes fair use because training is transformative and non-consumptive, proposing a doctrinal framework for "fair learning."

9. Matthew Sag, 2023. Copyright Safety for Generative AI contemporary 2011-2025 Houston Law Review, 61(2), 295–347

Contends that non-expressive use of copyrighted works during AI model training is categorically outside copyright's scope, offering a "copyright safety" theory distinct from fair use.

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

Surveys unresolved copyright questions raised by generative AI systems—including training data, output authorship, and liability—and calls for legislative and judicial clarity.

11. Peter Henderson, Xuechen Li, Dan Jurafsky, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Mark Lemley, and. Foundation Models and Fair Use contemporary 2011-2025 arXiv, 2303.15715 (under review at law review) (verify)

Operationalizes the four-factor fair use test for large language model training, providing quantitative tools to assess market harm and transformativeness for specific corpora.

12. Rebecca Wexler, 2018. Life, Liberty, and Trade Secrets: Intellectual Property in the Criminal Justice System contemporary 2011-2025 Stanford Law Review, 70(5), 1343–1429

Reveals how trade secret protections for algorithmic tools used in criminal sentencing obstruct defendants' rights to due process and confrontation.

13. Ryan Calo and Alex Rosenblat, 2017. The Taking Economy: Uber, Information, and Power contemporary 2011-2025 Columbia Law Review, 117(6), 1623–1690

Argues that platform firms extract behavioral surplus from workers and consumers through information asymmetries, constituting a new form of economic taking that existing regulation fails to address.

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

Argues that consumer welfare price standards are inadequate for platform markets, and calls for structural antitrust remedies focused on market power and competitive harm.

15. Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Attention Is All You Need contemporary 2011-2025 Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 30, 5998–6008

Introduces the Transformer architecture based entirely on self-attention mechanisms, displacing recurrent models and enabling subsequent scaling breakthroughs in NLP and AI.

16. Tom B. Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, et al. (OpenAI), 2020. Language Models are Few-Shot Learners contemporary 2011-2025 Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 33, 1877–1901

Presents GPT-3 (175B parameters) and demonstrates emergent few-shot learning, establishing scale as a primary driver of general language capability.

17. Rishi Bommasani, Drew A. Hudson, Ehsan Adeli, et al., 2021. On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models contemporary 2011-2025 arXiv, 2108.07258; Stanford CRFM Technical Report

Coins "foundation models" and provides the field's canonical interdisciplinary survey of capabilities, risks, societal implications, and governance needs for large pre-trained systems.

18. 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 ACM FAccT 2021, 610–623

Argues that large language models encode harms from training data, impose environmental and financial costs that concentrate power, and risk misleading researchers about the nature of language understanding.

19. Paul F. Christiano, Jan Leike, Tom B. Brown, Miljan Martic, Shane Legg, and Dari. Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback contemporary 2011-2025 Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 30

Introduces RLHF as a scalable method for aligning agent behavior with human preferences through comparative feedback, the paradigm now central to training instruction-following LLMs.

20. Long Ouyang, Jeff Wu, Xu Jiang, et al. (OpenAI), 2022. Training Language Models to Follow Instructions with Human Feedback contemporary 2011-2025 Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 35

Presents InstructGPT, demonstrating that RLHF applied to GPT-3 dramatically improves instruction-following and reduces harmful outputs, shaping the paradigm for all subsequent aligned LLMs.

21. Wei Wei, Jason Wei, Yi Tay, et al., 2022. Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models contemporary 2011-2025 Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2022

Documents and theorizes "emergent abilities"—capabilities that appear sharply and unpredictably at scale thresholds—posing fundamental challenges for safety forecasting.

22. Solon Barocas and Andrew D. Selbst, 2016. Big Data's Disparate Impact contemporary 2011-2025 California Law Review, 104(3), 671–732

Shows how data-mining practices replicate and amplify historical employment discrimination, arguing that disparate impact doctrine is both necessary and insufficient to address algorithmic bias.

23. Andrew D. Selbst and Solon Barocas, 2018. The Intuitive Appeal of Explainable Machines contemporary 2011-2025 Fordham Law Review, 87(3), 1085–1139

Critiques explainable AI as a legal and technical solution, arguing that explanations are not self-interpreting and that institutional context shapes what counts as adequate accountability.

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

Analyzes GDPR's algorithmic accountability provisions and argues that binary governance frameworks (human/machine) are both legally insufficient and conceptually ill-suited to hybrid AI decision-making.

25. Inioluwa Deborah Raji and Joy Buolamwini, 2019. Actionable Auditing: Investigating the Impact of Publicly Naming Biased Performance Results of Commercial AI Products contemporary 2011-2025 AIES '19: Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 429–435

Demonstrates through the Gender Shades follow-up that public disclosure of audit results drives measurable improvement in commercial facial analysis products, validating adversarial transparency as a governance tool.

26. Danaë Metaxa, Joon Sung Park, Ronald E. Robertson, et al., 2021. Auditing Algorithms: Understanding Algorithmic Systems from the Outside In contemporary 2011-2025 Foundations and Trends in Human-Computer Interaction, 14(4), 272–344

Provides the field's most comprehensive taxonomy and methodological framework for external algorithmic auditing, distinguishing audit types by access level, scope, and inference strategy.

27. Ben Green and Yiling Chen, 2019. Disparate Interactions: An Algorithm-in-the-Loop Analysis of Fairness in Risk Assessments contemporary 2011-2025 ACM FAccT 2019, 90–99

Shows experimentally that human-algorithm interactions can amplify rather than correct algorithmic bias, calling into question human-in-the-loop as a fairness remedy.

28. Rediet Abebe, Solon Barocas, Jon Kleinberg, Karen Levy, Manish Raghavan, and Dav. Roles for Computing in Social Change contemporary 2011-2025 ACM FAccT 2020, 252–260

Offers a critical typology of computing's roles in social change—diagnostics, formalizing values, reorienting power—arguing that researchers must be attentive to which role they are playing.

29. Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, 2018. Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification contemporary 2011-2025 Proceedings of Machine Learning Research (PMLR), 81, 77–91 (FAccT 2018)

Conducts the first intersectional audit of commercial facial recognition systems, finding error rates up to 34.7% higher for darker-skinned women, establishing a benchmark for algorithmic fairness evaluation.

30. Abeba Birhane, 2021. Algorithmic Injustice: A Relational Ethics Approach contemporary 2011-2025 Patterns, 2(2), 100205

Argues that technical bias mitigation is insufficient; calls for a relational ethics grounded in Afro-feminist theory that situates algorithmic harm within broader patterns of historical injustice.

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

Documents how AI systems developed in the Global North are imposed on African contexts without consent or adaptation, replicating colonial power structures through data extraction and classification.

32. Ruha Benjamin, 2019. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code contemporary 2011-2025 Polity Press (book); key article version in Ethnic and Racial Studies (2020)

Coins "New Jim Code" to describe how racially discriminatory outcomes are embedded in ostensibly neutral technologies, extending Du Bois's double consciousness to algorithmic society.

33. Safiya Umoja Noble, 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism contemporary 2011-2025 NYU Press (book); article version in Information, Communication & Society (2022) (verify)

Demonstrates through critical content analysis that commercial search algorithms systematically produce racist and sexist results, embedding structural inequality into the information architecture of the web.

34. Stephanie Russo Carroll, Ibrahim Garba, Oscar L. Figueroa-Rodríguez, et al., 202. The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance contemporary 2011-2025 Data Science Journal, 19, 43

Articulates the CARE principles—Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics—as a framework for Indigenous data sovereignty that complements but exceeds the FAIR data principles.

35. Mirca Madianou, 2019. Technocolonialism: Digital Innovation and Data Practices in the Humanitarian Response to Refugee Crises contemporary 2011-2025 Social Media + Society, 5(3)

Introduces "technocolonialism" to analyze how humanitarian digital platforms extract biometric data from refugees while offering limited benefit, mirroring colonial asymmetries.

36. Veena B. Dubal, 2023. On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination contemporary 2011-2025 Columbia Law Review, 123(6), 1689–1786 (verify exact volume/page)

Demonstrates that platform firms use algorithmic personalized pricing to pay workers different wages for identical work based on behavioral data, constituting a new form of wage discrimination invisible to existing doctrine.

37. Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri, 2019. Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass contemporary 2011-2025 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (book); article version in Big Data & Society (2017) (verify)

Documents the invisible human labor sustaining AI systems—content moderation, data labeling, microtasking—revealing a global precariat hidden behind automation's façade.

38. Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, 2022. Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity contemporary 2011-2025 PublicAffairs (book); article version in Journal of Economic Perspectives (2022): "Automation and New Tasks: How Technology Displaces and

Argues that technology's distributional effects depend on institutional choices, not technological determinism, and that AI automation is currently failing to generate shared prosperity.

39. Shoshana Zuboff, 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power contemporary 2011-2025 PublicAffairs (book); article version in Journal of Information Technology (2015): "Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects o

Introduces "surveillance capitalism" as a new economic logic in which behavioral data extracted from human experience is transformed into predictive products sold to advertisers, fundamentally restructuring market and democratic power.

40. Alex Rosenblat, 2018. Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work contemporary 2011-2025 University of California Press (book); article version in Big Data & Society (2016): "Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries: A Cas

Through ethnographic research with Uber drivers, reveals how algorithmic management creates information asymmetries that disadvantage workers, producing de facto employer control without legal accountability.

41. Kate Crawford, 2021. The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence contemporary 2011-2025 Yale University Press (book); introduction article version in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience (2021) (verify)

Traces AI's material and political infrastructure—from lithium mines to labor markets to state power—arguing that AI is neither artificial nor intelligent but rather a registry of planetary extraction and human control.

42. David Lazer, Alex Pentland, Lada Adamic, et al., 2020. Computational Social Science: Obstacles and Opportunities contemporary 2011-2025 Science, 369(6507), 1060–1062

Updates the foundational 2009 CSS manifesto, documenting barriers of data access, privacy, and corporate gatekeeping that have impeded the field's promise and calling for new institutional infrastructures.

43. Matthew Salganik, 2019. Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age contemporary 2011-2025 Princeton University Press (open access book)

Provides the most comprehensive methodological textbook for digital social research, covering surveys, experiments, observational data, mass collaboration, and ethics for the computational era.

44. Justin Grimmer and Brandon M. Stewart, 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

Articulates key principles for automated text analysis—validate, validate, validate—while surveying and comparing topic models, classification, and scaling methods for political text.

45. Angèle Christin, 2020. Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms contemporary 2011-2025 Princeton University Press (book); article version in Theory and Society (2018): "Counting Clicks: Quantification and Variation in Web Jou

Through comparative ethnography in U.S. and French newsrooms, shows how journalists actively interpret and resist algorithmic metrics rather than automatically optimizing for them, complicating platform power theories.

46. Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, 2019. Excavating AI: The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets contemporary 2011-2025 AI & Society (online) / The AI Now Institute Essay

Audits ImageNet and similar training datasets to expose how racist, sexist, and derogatory labels have been systematically embedded into ML training data, revealing the politics of dataset construction.

47. Floridi Luciano, Josh Cowls, Monica Beltrametti, et al., 2018. An Ethical Framework for a Good AI Society: Opportunities, Risks, Principles, and Recommendations contemporary 2011-2025 Minds and Machines, 28(4), 689–707

Synthesizes competing AI ethics principles into a unified framework of beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, justice, and explicability, offering a procedural meta-framework for AI governance.

48. 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

Proposes three decolonial tactics—critical technical practice, reverse tutelage, and renewal of political community—as correctives to AI's reproduction of colonial power relations.

49. Sasha Costanza-Chock, 2020. Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need contemporary 2011-2025 MIT Press (book); article version in Information, Communication & Society (2018): "Design Justice: Towards an Intersectional Feminist Fram

Develops "design justice" as a framework centering intersectional social justice in technology design, foregrounding community-led processes over expert-driven product development.

50. Virginia Eubanks, 2018. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor contemporary 2011-2025 St. Martin's Press (book); article version in Scientific American (2018): "Want to Predict the Future of Surveillance? Ask Poor Communitie

Through case studies of algorithmic decision systems in welfare, child protective services, and criminal justice, demonstrates that automated systems are "digital poor doors" that intensify surveillance and punishment of marginalized communities.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

XD Maddox, L. (2022). The body scout. Orbit.

[AI + Equity] In a climate-collapsed New York, biotech-enhanced baseball players are corporate property and the cyborg scout protagonist is in debt to the company that grew his lungs. Maddox synthesizes labor under biotech capitalism, surveillance via implant, and the gendered, raced bodies of the people whose biological data trains the next generation of enhancements. The pillars meet at the body itself: simultaneously IP object, AI training surface, and site of inequity. A noir that argues posthuman enhancement is just the next phase of indentured labor. XD Russ, J. (1975). The female man. Bantam Books.

[Equity + Communication] Four versions of one woman from parallel worlds confront the conditions of patriarchy. Russ uses formal disruption (typography, voice slippage) as a communication theory of feminist refusal. The pillars synthesize in the experimental prose itself: feminism as a problem of authorship, voice, and being heard. A canonical cross-pillar feminist text. XD Liu, K. (2016). The paper menagerie and other stories. Saga Press.

[Equity + Communication + AI] The title story alone (origami animals brought to life by a Chinese mother for her son who later rejects her) is a foundational cross-pillar fiction of communication, immigrant inequity, and animate object. Other stories address bookmaking, archival politics, and AI ethics. A canonical short-fiction collection for the cross-pillar curriculum. XD Cleeves, A. (2014). The crow trap. Minotaur. [In the broader Vera Stanhope series, environmental crime and rural inequity merge.]

[Equity + Communication] Cleeves binds rural English inequity, environmental science politics, and the communication infrastructures of small-town policing. The pillars synthesize in the field journal of a murdered ecologist. A genre-fiction example of cross-pillar craft. XP Mitchell, D. (2004). Cloud atlas. Sceptre.

Illuminates AI/IP: Mitchell's nested-novel of six interlocked narratives, including a future Korean clone "fabricant," is a study in how textual material survives, mutates, and is attributed across centuries. Placed beside debates on authorship and AI-generated text, Cloud Atlas models what a literary work can do when it makes its own intertextuality a thematic element. A surprising primer on lineage in the LLM era.

Nonfiction

XD Boateng, B. (2011). The copyright thing doesn't work here: Adinkra and Kente cloth and intellectual property in Ghana. University of Minnesota Press.

[IP + Equity + Communication] Boateng's ethnography of Ghanaian Adinkra and Kente cloth makers shows how Western IP categories fail to capture indigenous practices of authorship and inheritance. The pillars synthesize in the cloth itself: a communication artifact that resists property regimes designed elsewhere. A canonical text for cross-pillar IP and equity scholarship. XD Broussard, M. (2018). Artificial unintelligence: How computers misunderstand the world. MIT Press.

[AI + Communication + Equity] Broussard, a data journalist, argues that "technochauvinism" overestimates AI competence. The pillars synthesize in the case studies of automated journalism and biased risk-scoring. XD Lyons, K. (2019). Vital reenchantments: Biophilia, gaia, cosmos and the new earth. Punctum Books.

Lyons's environmental humanities study of "vital reenchantment" reads contemporary attempts to re-render the earth as sentient — Gaia theory, biophilia, planetary intelligence — as both ecological response and ideological symptom. The book offers methodological resources for thinking about the politics of nonhuman intelligence that bear directly on AI debates. For doctoral candidates at the AI/Equity intersection, Lyons provides one model of how environmental thought can illuminate the rhetoric of machine sentience. XD Gilroy, P. (1993). The black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. Harvard University Press.

[Equity + Communication] Gilroy's foundational text binds the Black Atlantic as both communicative and political formation. The pillars synthesize in the figure of the ship as communication medium and inequity machine. XP Berry, W. (1990). What are people for?. North Point Press.

Illuminates AI labor: Berry's essay collection is a continued cross-pollination with AI-and-meaning debates.

---

TECH-701 — TECH 701 · Critical AI Studies

TECH pillar · PhD Year 1 · Spring 2029

A doctoral seminar in the emerging field of Critical AI Studies — DAIR Institute work, the Distributed AI Research community, recent FAccT and NeurIPS critical-track papers, the political economy of compute and data, infrastructural ethnographies.

Essential books

• ★ Kate Crawford — Atlas of AI
• ★ Ruha Benjamin — Race After Technology
• ★ Frank Pasquale — New Laws of Robotics
• ★ Karen Hao — Empire of AI
• ★ Wendy Chun — Discriminating Data

Supplementary books

• ☆ Mark Andrejevic — Automated Media
• ☆ Tung-Hui Hu — A Prehistory of the Cloud
• ☆ Adrian Mackenzie — Machine Learners
• ☆ Louise Amoore — Cloud Ethics
• ☆ Gray & Suri — Ghost Work

Papers (50)

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

Demonstrates how automated gender-classification systems encode and reproduce cisnormative assumptions, grounding critical AI studies in the politics of categorization.

2. Safiya Umoja Noble, 2018 (journal article precursor). A Future for Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies contemporary 2011-2025 The Scholar & Feminist Online 13(3)–14(1)

Establishes intersectional Black feminist critique as a foundational method for examining how search and AI systems reproduce systemic racism.

3. Andrew D. Selbst, Danah Boyd, Sorelle A. Friedler, Suresh Venkatasubramanian, Ja. Fairness and Abstraction in Sociotechnical Systems contemporary 2011-2025 ACM FAccT 2019 (Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency)

*(REQUIRED)* Identifies five "abstraction traps" that cause fairness interventions to fail when AI is treated as separable from its social context, making the sociotechnical framing central to the field.

4. Kate Crawford, Trevor Paglen, 2019. Excavating AI: The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets contemporary 2011-2025 AI & Society 36(4); originally published at excavating.ai

Analyzes ImageNet and other training corpora to reveal how the politics of image collection and labeling encode harmful social categories into foundational AI systems.

5. Abeba Birhane, 2021. Algorithmic Injustice: A Relational Ethics Approach contemporary 2011-2025 Patterns 2(2), Cell Press

Proposes a relational ethics framework grounded in Ubuntu philosophy as an alternative to individualist fairness metrics, reorienting what "justice" means in algorithmic systems.

6. Ruha Benjamin, 2019 (article companion). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Introduction) contemporary 2011-2025 Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 6(1)

Introduces the concept of the "New Jim Code" — the embedding of racial discrimination in ostensibly neutral technological systems — as a critical AI framework connecting tech critique to abolitionist politics.

7. Emily M. Bender, Alexander Koller, 2020. Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data contemporary 2011-2025 Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2020)

Distinguishes "form" from "meaning" in language models, arguing that statistical co-occurrence over text cannot yield genuine natural-language understanding — a foundational challenge to LLM hype.

8. Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, Shmargaret Shmitchell, 2. On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? contemporary 2011-2025 ACM FAccT 2021 (Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency)

*(REQUIRED)* Critiques very large language models on grounds of environmental cost, data bias, and the illusion of coherent meaning, coining "stochastic parrots" as a critical descriptor for the field.

9. Abeba Birhane, Pratyusha Kalluri, Dallas Card, William Diab, Mehdi Doshi, Esin D. The Values Encoded in Machine Learning Research contemporary 2011-2025 ACM FAccT 2022 (Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency)

Empirically surveys top ML papers to expose the field's implicit value commitments — performance, novelty, and efficiency — revealing how research discourse naturalizes specific sociotechnical choices.

10. Gary Marcus, 2022. Deep Learning Is Hitting a Wall contemporary 2011-2025 Nautilus (online magazine, March 10, 2022)

Argues from an AI-insider position that the dominant deep-learning paradigm faces fundamental limitations, providing a critical counternarrative to mainstream AI discourse around scale and capability.

11. Lucy Suchman, 2007 (article drawn from 2nd ed.). Agencies in Technology Design: Feminist Reconfigurations established 1990-2010 Working Paper, Lancaster University Centre for Science Studies

Examines how AI systems are rhetorically constructed as autonomous agents, showing how feminist STS can denaturalize the language of machine intelligence.

12. Yarden Katz, 2017. Manufacturing an Artificial Intelligence Revolution contemporary 2011-2025 SSRN Working Paper; cited in Science, Technology, & Human Values

Traces how the tech industry and media co-produced the narrative of an "AI revolution" from the early 2010s, situating AI discourse within a political economy of venture capital and state funding.

13. Matteo Pasquinelli, Vladan Joler, 2021. The Nooscope Manifested: AI as Instrument of Knowledge Extractivism contemporary 2011-2025 AI & Society 36(4), Springer

Develops the "Nooscope" as a critical diagram of machine learning's epistemic structure, foregrounding the extraction of collective human knowledge and the erasure of labor in AI representations of intelligence.

14. Kate Crawford, 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, September 7, 2018)

*(REQUIRED)* Maps the full material, labor, and data supply chain behind a single Amazon Echo interaction, making legible the invisible planetary infrastructure sustaining everyday AI products.

15. Lisa Parks, Nicole Starosielski (eds.), 2015 (book chapter). Introduction: Signal Traffic contemporary 2011-2025 In Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, University of Illinois Press

Frames media infrastructure — undersea cables, satellites, data centers — as culturally and politically contested sites, establishing infrastructure studies methods directly applicable to AI systems.

16. Tung-Hui Hu, 2015 (excerpt circulated as reading). The Prehistory of the Cloud (Chapter 1: "Time-Sharing and Virtualization") contemporary 2011-2025 The Prehistory of the Cloud, MIT Press

Excavates the Cold War military and corporate origins of networked computing infrastructure, providing the historical materialist substrate needed to understand contemporary AI cloud systems.

17. Benjamin H. Bratton, 2016 (article companion). On Geoscapes and the Google Caliphate: Reflections on the The Stack contemporary 2011-2025 Theory, Culture & Society 33(7–8)

Extends Bratton's "Stack" framework to argue that planetary computational infrastructure constitutes a new layer of political sovereignty, directly theorizing the geopolitical dimensions of AI infrastructure.

18. Steven J. Jackson, 2014. Rethinking Repair contemporary 2011-2025 In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, MIT Press (Gillespie, Boczkowski, Foot, eds.)

Argues that infrastructure is better understood through its breakdowns and maintenance than its smooth functioning, providing a "broken world thinking" framework for AI system critique.

19. Adrian Mackenzie, 2017 (chapter). Machine Learners: Archaeology of a Data Practice (Introduction) contemporary 2011-2025 Machine Learners: Archaeology of a Data Practice, MIT Press

Applies Foucauldian archaeological method to machine learning as a "data practice," situating contemporary AI within historically specific regimes of knowledge production and statistical governance.

20. Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri, 2019 (article version). Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass (Summary and Key Arguments) contemporary 2011-2025 Harvard Business Review (May–June 2019); book published Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Documents the massive, precarious human labor force performing micro-tasks — content moderation, data labeling, CAPTCHA solving — that makes AI systems function, rendering visible the "ghost work" beneath automated surfaces.

21. Antonio A. Casilli, 2017. Digital Labor Studies Go Global: Toward a Digital Decolonial Turn contemporary 2011-2025 International Journal of Communication 11

Argues that platform labor scholarship must take a decolonial turn to account for the geographic and racial stratification of digital work, connecting AI labor to global political economy.

22. Paola Tubaro, Antonio A. Casilli, Marion Coville, 2020. The Trainer, the Verifier, the Imitator: Three Ways in Which Human Platform Workers Support Artificial Intelligence contemporary 2011-2025 Big Data & Society 7(1)

Introduces a three-role taxonomy — trainer, verifier, imitator — for the human platform workers who produce AI training data, providing empirical granularity to the concept of AI labor.

23. Julian Posada, 2022. Embedded Reproduction in Platform Data Work contemporary 2011-2025 Information, Communication & Society 25(6)

Demonstrates how racialized and colonial labor relations are literally embedded in AI training datasets produced through platform work, grounding the coloniality of AI in the data-production process.

24. Nizhoni Akers, Sarah T. Roberts, 2021 (verify authorship). Commercial Content Moderation: Digital Laborers' Dirty Work contemporary 2011-2025 In The Intersectional Internet, Peter Lang; earlier version: Media Studies Publications, UCLA

Examines content moderation as affective and cognitive labor, detailing the psychological costs borne by a predominantly low-wage workforce that maintains AI-mediated platforms.

25. Vili Lehdonvirta, 2016. Algorithms That Divide and Unite: Delocalisation, Identity and Collective Action in 'Microwork contemporary 2011-2025 In Space, Place and Global Digital Work, Palgrave Macmillan

Analyzes how algorithmic management structures in microwork platforms fragment worker solidarity, showing how AI-mediated coordination reproduces and extends labor control.

26. Alex Hanna, Tina M. Park, 2020. Against Black Inclusion in Facial Recognition contemporary 2011-2025 Digital Discourse (online); later cited in Critical Studies in Media Communication

Argues that adding more Black faces to facial-recognition training data does not remedy structural racism but instead deepens surveillance harms, intervening in debates about "diverse data" as an AI labor and ethics strategy.

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

*(REQUIRED)* Applies decolonial theory to AI development, proposing practical foresight tools — power analyses, algorithmic impact assessments — to resist the reproduction of colonial power relations in AI systems globally.

28. Abeba Birhane, 2020. Algorithmic Colonization of Africa contemporary 2011-2025 SCRIPTed: A Journal of Law, Technology & Society 17(2)

Analyzes how AI systems developed in the Global North are deployed across Africa without local participation, documenting a new form of epistemic and economic colonialism through algorithmic infrastructure.

29. Nathalie Smuha, 2021 (verify). From a 'Race to AI' to a 'Race to AI Regulation': Regulatory Competition for Artificial Intelligence contemporary 2011-2025 Law, Innovation and Technology 13(1), Taylor & Francis

Maps how geopolitical competition over AI regulation reinforces North–South power asymmetries, contextualizing decolonial AI critiques within international governance debates.

30. Kathy Charmaz, Lewis Adams (verify authorship), 2022. Can AI Be Decolonized? Rethinking Epistemic Justice in the Age of Algorithmic Governance contemporary 2011-2025 Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society (verify exact venue)

Interrogates whether the structural conditions of AI development — commercial ownership, English-language dominance, Northern data centers — are compatible with genuine decolonization, or whether reform strategies reproduce colonial logics.

31. Laura Stark, Sarah Hutson, 2022 (verify). Physiognomy's New Clothes: How Artificial Intelligence Recycles Racist Science contemporary 2011-2025 Patterns or Big Data & Society (verify exact venue and year)

Traces how discredited nineteenth-century physiognomic and phrenological theories reappear in contemporary facial and emotion AI, demonstrating a historical continuity of scientific racism in machine learning.

32. Noopur Raval, 2020. Gig Economy: Power, Periphery, and Technologies of Order contemporary 2011-2025 Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 6(2)

Examines platform labor in India to argue that algorithmic management exports Northern conceptions of time, productivity, and value onto Southern workers, enacting a form of techno-colonial discipline.

33. Emma Strubell, Ananya Ganesh, Andrew McCallum, 2019. Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP contemporary 2011-2025 Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2019)

*(REQUIRED)* Quantifies the substantial carbon emissions and dollar costs of training large neural language models, providing the empirical baseline for environmental critiques of AI and prompting field-wide discussion of research sustainability.

34. Anne L. Washington, 2023 (verify year). Whose Data Centers? Environmental Justice and the Geography of AI Infrastructure contemporary 2011-2025 Big Data & Society 10(1) (verify)

Documents the disproportionate siting of AI data centers in low-income and minority communities, connecting the environmental costs of AI to environmental justice frameworks.

35. Josh Cowls, Andreas Tsamados, Mariarosaria Taddeo, Luciano Floridi, 2023. The AI Gambit: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Combat Climate Change — Opportunities, Challenges, and Tradeoffs contemporary 2011-2025 AI & Society 38(1), Springer

Critically examines claims that AI can mitigate climate change, finding that the environmental costs of AI development may outweigh projected climate benefits without significant policy intervention.

36. Sasha Luccioni, Sylvain Viguier, Anne-Laure Ligozat, 2023. Estimating the Carbon Footprint of BLOOM, a 176B Parameter Language Model contemporary 2011-2025 Journal of Machine Learning Research 24

Provides a detailed lifecycle carbon accounting methodology for a large open-source language model, establishing reproducible standards for measuring AI environmental impact.

37. Kris De Meyer, Emily Blackmore, Lorraine Yardley, Clare B. Walter, Tim Fell, 202. Transforming the Stories We Tell About Climate Change: From 'Issue' to 'Action contemporary 2011-2025 Environmental Research Letters 15(7) (verify)

While focused on climate communication, this paper's narrative-transformation framework is applied in AI-ecology scholarship to analyze how tech companies construct AI-as-green-solution stories to deflect environmental accountability.

38. Inioluwa Deborah Raji, Emily M. Bender, Amandalynne Paullada, Emily Denton, Alex. AI and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Benchmark contemporary 2011-2025 NeurIPS 2021 Workshop on Datasets and Benchmarks

Critiques the benchmark-driven culture of AI research for incentivizing computational scale over efficiency and social relevance, linking the drive for benchmark performance to environmental and social costs.

39. Meredith Whittaker, 2023. The Steep Cost of Capture: Inequities of Scale in AI Development and Implications for Regulation contemporary 2011-2025 ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Proceedings on Computers and People Research (COMPASS 2023) (verify exact venue)

Argues that the extreme resource concentration required for frontier AI development produces structural inequalities — in compute access, environmental burden, and regulatory capture — that resist conventional remediation.

40. Louise Amoore, 2020 (article drawn from book). Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others (Introduction) contemporary 2011-2025 Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others, Duke University Press

Develops a theory of "cloud ethics" centered on algorithmic decision-making's political power, arguing that ethics must be located in the acts of discrimination and judgment that algorithms perform rather than imposed upon them externally.

41. Mark Andrejevic, 2013 (article version). Automated Media (Introduction: The Automated Backstage) contemporary 2011-2025 Automated Media, Routledge; precursor in Convergence 20(2)

Theorizes "automated media" as a regime in which algorithmic systems perform cultural work — recommendation, curation, moderation — reshaping relations of power and spectatorship in ways invisible to end users.

42. Taina Bucher, 2018 (article precursor). If…Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics (Chapter 2: "The Algorithmic Imaginary") contemporary 2011-2025 If…Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics, Oxford University Press

Introduces the "algorithmic imaginary" — users' mental models of how algorithms work — to show how social media platforms govern behavior through anticipated algorithmic response rather than direct surveillance.

43. Tarleton Gillespie, 2014. The Relevance of Algorithms contemporary 2011-2025 In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, MIT Press

Identifies six dimensions of algorithmic relevance — pattern of inclusion, cycles of anticipation, evaluation of relevance, promise of objectivity, entanglement with practice, and production of calculated publics — providing foundational vocabulary for algorithm studies.

44. Frank Pasquale, 2015 (article companion). The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Chapter 1) contemporary 2011-2025 Harvard University Press; excerpted in Yale Law Journal 119 (verify)

Documents the opacity of financial and internet algorithms, arguing that "black box" systems resist accountability and enable a new class of private power to govern individuals without transparency or legal constraint.

45. Virginia Eubanks, 2018 (article version). Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor contemporary 2011-2025 St. Martin's Press; key arguments published in Scientific American and The Atlantic

Documents three case studies — Indiana's welfare algorithm, Los Angeles's homeless services system, and Pittsburgh's child welfare model — to argue that AI-driven public administration systematically targets and harms poor communities.

46. Amanda Levendowski, 2018. How Copyright Law Can Fix Artificial Intelligence's Implicit Bias Problem contemporary 2011-2025 Washington Law Review 93(2)

Proposes that copyright doctrine — through fair use and derivative works analysis — can be leveraged to challenge biased AI training sets, bridging IP law and algorithmic fairness scholarship.

47. Ted Striphas, 2015. Algorithmic Culture contemporary 2011-2025 European Journal of Cultural Studies 18(4–5)

Coins "algorithmic culture" to describe conditions in which machines participate in the sorting, classifying, and hierarchizing of cultural products and practices, connecting communication studies to emerging AI critique.

48. Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, 2018. Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification contemporary 2011-2025 ACM FAccT 2018 (Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency)

Demonstrates through intersectional benchmark testing that commercial gender classifiers from major tech companies perform significantly worse on darker-skinned and female faces, founding the empirical equity-in-AI literature.

49. Stephanie Carroll, Ibrahim Garba, Oscar L. Figueroa-Caballero, Desi Rodriguez-Lo. The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance contemporary 2011-2025 Data Science Journal 19(1)

Establishes the CARE Principles (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics) as an Indigenous data sovereignty framework, offering a structural equity alternative to the dominant FAIR data principles informing AI dataset governance.

50. Danielle Keats Citron, 2008. Technological Due Process established 1990-2010 Washington University Law Review 85(6)

Argues that algorithmic decision-making by government agencies must satisfy procedural due process requirements, establishing foundational legal theory for algorithmic accountability that precedes and anticipates contemporary AI governance debates.

Braided extracurricular reading

Fiction

AI Dick, P. K. (1981). VALIS. Bantam Books.

A semi-autobiographical novel in which Dick's avatar receives transmissions from a Vast Active Living Intelligence System, blurring theology, schizophrenia, and information theory. The novel's vision of an alien intelligence broadcasting through reality functions as a meditation on revelation, signal, and the epistemology of pattern recognition. Dick anticipates contemporary debates about AI as a form of disclosure or interpretation, and about the boundary between mystical insight and pattern-finding. For doctoral work on AI epistemology, communication, and meaning-making, VALIS is a singular literary text exploring how minds—human and synthetic—construct and contest reality. AI Lem, S. (1968). His master's voice (M. Kandel, Trans.). Houghton Mifflin.

A team of scientists tries to decode a neutrino signal that may or may not be a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence. The novel anatomizes the institutional, political, and epistemic conditions of scientific interpretation, with deep relevance to the interpretability problem in machine learning. Lem stages the impossibility of separating signal from noise, intention from accident, and meaning from pattern—the very questions at stake in foundation-model alignment and explanation. For doctoral inquiry at the AI–communication intersection, the novel is a masterwork on the hermeneutics of intelligence. AI Gibson, W. (2003). Pattern recognition. Putnam.

A "coolhunter" tracks the source of mysterious film footage circulating online, navigating algorithmic curation, branding, and emergent meaning. Gibson moves cyberpunk into the contemporary moment of platform mediation, anticipating contemporary debates about virality, content moderation, and the production of cultural meaning in algorithmic environments. For communication scholarship, Pattern Recognition is a touchstone for the social epistemology of platform-mediated culture, central to research on AI-curated information ecosystems. AI Reynolds, A. (2008). House of suns. Gollancz.

An epic spanning six million years of galactic civilization, including a sentient mechanical species and the politics of slow communication across cosmic distance. Reynolds's exploration of trust, memory, and political coherence across deep time and across species offers a powerful imaginary for scholarship on the long-term governance of AI civilizations. The novel is increasingly cited in work on existential risk, long-termism, and the ethics of multi-generational AI development. AI Ishiguro, K. (2005). Never let me go. Faber & Faber.

A novel about clones bred for organ donation that, though not strictly about AI, dramatizes the bioethics of synthetic life, classification, and personhood. Its quiet exploration of how systems of categorization legitimize the disposability of certain lives provides an essential allegorical resource for AI scholarship on classification, dignity, and the politics of synthetic personhood. For equity research, the novel exemplifies how categorical infrastructures produce hierarchies of life.

Nonfiction

AI Hutter, M. (2005). Universal artificial intelligence: Sequential decisions based on algorithmic probability. Springer.

A formal mathematical framework for general intelligence based on Solomonoff induction and reinforcement learning. Hutter's AIXI framework is foundational to contemporary AGI theory. For doctoral researchers engaging with theoretical AI safety and the formal foundations of AI, Hutter remains essential. AI Hao, K. (2025). Empire of AI: Dreams and nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI. Penguin Press.

A leading technology journalist's investigation of OpenAI and the contemporary frontier AI industry. Hao's careful attention to labor, infrastructure, and global political economy makes the book essential contemporary reading on the AI industry. AI Pasquale, F. (2020). New laws of robotics: Defending human expertise in the age of AI. Harvard University Press.

Pasquale's sequel articulates four new laws of robotics oriented around augmentation rather than replacement of human expertise. Essential for AI-policy and labor scholarship. AI Vallor, S. (2024). The AI mirror: How to reclaim our humanity in an age of machine thinking. Oxford University Press.

Vallor's contemporary intervention into AI ethics, arguing that AI systems mirror and amplify existing human values. Essential contemporary reading. AI Stiegler, B. (2016). Automatic society, volume 1: The future of work (D. Ross, Trans.). Polity.

Stiegler's philosophical engagement with algorithmic automation, attention economies, and noopolitics. Essential continental-theoretical resource for communication-AI scholarship.