Dates and reading selections may change to reflect the pace and interests of the class. Unless otherwise noted, the material and tasks are due on the date they appear. Deadlines appear in red.
Part I: Play
Thursday, January 17 (Week 1)
- Introductions
- Setting up Slack
- Davidson Domains
- The Black Box
- Guilford’s Alternative Uses Task (1967)
Thursday, January 24 (Week 2)
- Johan Huizinga, selections from Homo Ludens (1938), pages 96-107
- Roger Caillois, selections from Man, Play, and Games (1958), pages 122-148
- Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” from Women’s Studies Quarterly (2013), pages 231–246
- Hack 1 assigned
Thursday, January 31 (Week 3)
- Mary Flanagan, chapters 1 and 2 from Critical Play: Radical Game Design (2009), pages 1-62
- Miguel Sicart, “The Design of Ethical Gameplay” from Beyond Choices (2013), pages 83-110
- Alex Layne and Samantha Blackmon, “Self-Saving Princess: Feminism and Post-Play Narrative Modding” from Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology (2013)
- Jaime Lee Kirtz, “Beyond the Blackbox: Repurposing ROM Hacking for Feminist Hacking/Making Practices” from Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology (2018)
- Hack 1 due
- Hack 2 assigned
Thursday, February 7 (Week 4)
- Lewis Hyde, selections from Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (1997), pages 3-14 and 252-280
- Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner, Introduction and Chapter 1 from The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online (2017), pages 1-57
Part II: Design
Thursday, February 14 (Week 5)
- Don Norman, “The Three Teapots” and “Three Levels of Design” from Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things (2003), pages 1-11 and 63-98
- Anne Balsamo, “Design” from International Journal of Learning and Media (2009), pages 1–10
- Carl DiSalvo, “Design and Agonism” from Adversarial Design (2012), pages 1-26
- Stan Ruecker and Jennifer Roberts-Smith, “Experience Design for the Humanities: Activating Multiple Interpretations” from Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities (2017), pages 259–270
- Hack 2 due
Thursday, February 21 (Week 6)
- Sara Hendren, “All Technology Is Assistive: Six Design Rules on Disability” from Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities (2017), pages 139–145
- Sasha Costanza-Chock, “Design Justice, A.I., and Escape from the Matrix of Domination” (2018)
- Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, “A/B” and “Design as Critique” from Speculative Everything: Design Fiction and Social Dreaming (2013), pages vii and 33-45
- Kari Kraus, “Finding Fault Lines: An Approach to Speculative Design” from The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities (2018), pages 162–173
- Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales” from Common Knowledge (2012), pages 505–524
- Hack 3 assigned
Part III: Hacking and Making
Thursday, February 28 (Week 7)
- Steven Levy, chapters 1 and 2 of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984), pages 1-31
- Gabriella Coleman, chapters 1 and 3 of Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (2013), pages 25-60 and 93-122
- Joy Lisi Rankin, Introduction and chapter 5 from A People’s History of Computing in the United States (2018)
- Play “The Founder” (2017)
Thursday, March 7 (Spring Break)
- No class, obviously
Thursday, March 14 (Week 8)
- Steven Jackson, “Rethinking Repair” (2014)
- Ernesto Oroza, “Technological Disobedience” from Makeshift
- Michael Sacasas, “Do Artifacts Have Ethics?” (2014)
- Librarian Shipwreck, Neil Postman’s 6 Questions (+1 from me) (2013)
- Richard Sennett, chapter 7 from The Craftsman (2008), pages 194-213
- Hack 3 due
- Hack 4 assigned
Thursday, March 21 (Week 9)
Will Holman, “Makerspace: Towards a New Civic Infrastructure.” Places Journal (2015)- Debbie Chachra, “Why I Am Not a Maker” from The Atlantic (2015)
- Evgeny Morozov, “Making It” from The New Yorker 13 Jan. 2014.
- Alexander Galloway, “Critique and Making” (2012)
Amy Burek, Emily Alden Foster, Sarah Fox, and Daniela K. Rossner, “Feminist Hackerspaces: Hacking Culture, Not Devices (the Zine!)” from Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities (2017), pages 221–231
Thursday, March 28 (Week 10)
- Hack 4 due
Part V: Remixing
Thursday, April 4 (Week 11)
- Jonathan Lethem, “The Ecstasy of Influence” from Harper’s Magazine Feb. 2007 59–71. (The preceding link goes to the web version; here’s the PDF version)
- Kenneth Goldsmith, selections from Uncreative Writing (2011)
- Virginia Kuhn, “The Rhetoric of Remix” from The Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures 9 (2012)
- James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins, Theft: A History of Music (2017), pages 50-113, 160-179, and 201-219
Jason Mittell on Videographic Deformations and the 10/40/70 method (2016)- Hack 5 assigned
Thursday, April 11 (Week 12)
- Rosa Menkman, “The Phenomenology of Glitch Art” from The Glitch Moment(um) (2011)
- Matt Applegate, “Glitched in Translation: Reading Text and Code as a Play of Spaces” (2016)
- Subjunctive Project assigned
Thursday, April 18 (Week 13)
- Hack 5 due (and viewing party)
Thursday, April 25 (Week 14)
- Subjunctive Project workshop
Thursday, May 2 (Week 15)
- Subjunctive Project Due