Featured course:

IAT 480 Special Topics in Interactive Arts and Technology: Unveiling Indigenous Wisdom in Computer Science

This course in critical cultural computing is designed for Upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students with a keen interest in challenging computing knowledge domains and surveys the rich fabric of Indigenous knowledge within computing.

Learning Objectives:

1. Cultural Computing and Technology: Identify and analyze the intersections between cultural practices and digital technologies. Understand the impact of technology on cultural preservation, revitalization, and expression.
2. Colonialism and Computing: Recognize and critique the colonial barriers faced by marginalized peoples in computing technologies. Analyze the historical and ongoing impact of colonialism on computing practices and representation.
3. Critical Examination of Computing Practices: Critically evaluate current computing practices and their social, cultural, and ethical implications. Understand the role of technology in shaping societal norms and values.
4. Computational Representations: Represent cultural, traditional, and social activities computationally. Explore the use of computational tools and techniques to express cultural concepts and ideas.
5. Cultural Processes and Computational Concepts: Analyze computational concepts as products of cultural processes. Understand the relationship between cultural values and computational design.
6. Computational Behaviours and Physical World Systems: Compare and contrast computational behaviours to physical world systems. Explore the use of computational models to simulate and understand natural phenomena.
7. Culturally-centered design and research methods: Integrate (and be able to justify and critique) appropriate project-aligned research and user testing processes that consider cultural perspectives, values, and needs in order to evaluate ideas and projects, uncover culturally relevant precedents, and contextualize one's own projects within cultural frameworks.