CTSJ 115 Technologies of Resistance in the Middle East and North Africa
This course will examine the ambivalent effects of digital, networked technologies from social media to AI (with their underlying modes of understanding oneself and the world) in the modern Middle East and North Africa. In particular, in the context of the Middle East, the course will seek to identify and understand both (1) the new forms of popular liberatory action — for example, protest, organizing, revolt, sabotage, warfare, and the weaponization of AI— that are made possible or impossible by the widespread adoption of new technological modes of life, and (2) the new forms of state and para-state, surveillance, control, suppression, and disinformation that this technology makes available or encourages by its very structure and embedded premises. The course will bring together a study of critical theoretical work from both Western and Middle Eastern thinkers, the scholarly and vocational writing of technologists in both the West and the Middle East, as well as the manifestos, radical speculative projects and strategic documents of resistance groups.