Technology Otherwise: Designs for Just Sustainabilities

Humanity is now violating six of the nine planetary boundaries that represent a safe ecological space for human life, including climate change, without meeting its declared social goals of equity, justice, health, and human flourishing. Technology is often positioned as a magic solution to resolve the dilemma of ‘sustainable development’, but it is implicated in so much destruction and suffering that it is clear: its role is conflicted.

This course, (INF3106H: Technology Otherwise: Designs for Just Sustainabilities) begins with the difficult task of recognizing these challenges with neither flawed optimism nor fatalist pessimism. It locates students at the present juncture of interconnected crises with the task of figuring out what we should do next. Tech Otherwise means to make tech “differently, in the service of our collective and sustainable well being.” (TechOtherwise).

The course draws on frameworks such as degrowth, the pluriverse, and decolonization to invite students to explore how information technologies can be shaped otherwise in ways that genuinely support human and ecological flourishing, to imagine new pathways, and to decide how their own research plans may contribute to these goals. Topics include the social responsibility of tech workers; decolonization, limits to growth, degrowth, and post-growth; the meaning of technological innovation under capitalism, commons, and degrowth; cooperative paradigms of tech development; and sustainable development and its alternatives.

Note: PhD students only