Course content
Digitalisation creates positive opportunities but also systemic challenges for indviduals, organisations, and the society. The course enables students to develop critical insights into the problematic dimensions of digitalization, addressing their contentious and adverse effects on the various levels. The course helps students identify simplistic, naïve, technologically-determinst arguments around digital technologies in order to guide organisations and the society in developing more nuanced, complex and multidimensional strategies, policies, approaches, and practices that address the problematic as well as positive aspects of digitalization. The course prepares students to be able to critically assess the proposed technical solutions and policy interventions to reshaping the future of digitalisation in business and society.
The course draws on foundational and emergent conceptual frameworks and practice-based examples from Internet Studies, Critical Data/AI Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Sociology, Platform Studies, and Human Development. The course will cover the following key topics within the overall theme of impacts of digitalisation on individuals, organisations and society: (1) Big Data and Datafication; (2) AI and Automation; (3) Privacy; (4) Digital work and its discontents; (5) Human capabilities and human-centred digitalisation.
The course will follow a highly interactive approach, where students' active participation throughout is required. Students will be expected not just to consume knowledge offered by this course, but to actively co-create, connect and contribute knowledge, individually and collectively. To evidence active participation and ongoing learning activity throughout the course, students will be expected to present the outcomes of their reflective summaries of readings and participate in plenary discussions in class.
The key assignment of the course is a max 10 pages long paper covering one or several of the course topics. Students will choose a topic in consultation with the course convenor. As an option, a selection of possible topics will be offered by the course convenor, based on her current ongoing research projects, where relevant. The paper will make an original contribution to the topic. Given the short nature of the paper, it is unlikely that there will be enough time to engage in extensive primary data collection, therefore, there will be no expectation that students will do so. A feasible written output may instead test/refute an argument with literature-based evidence or unpack assumptions in powerful discourses. It may alternatively include students researching and developing concrete solutions to how the challenging trends and practices of digitalisation could be addressed at various levels (individual, organisational, societal) and within different domains (technology, business, legal/policy). This would involve a critical review of existing literature and solutions, and offering students' own solutions based on their analysis. The paper should be clearly related to the topics of the course and demonstrate achievement of the course objectives by the student.
Students will have an opportunity to get formative feedback on their writen assignment from the course convener and their peers prior to the exam, by presenting their paper in class at 2 points during the course: mid-way through the course and towards the end of the course (timeline to be specified on Canvas prior to the start of the course).
See course description in course catalogue