MC439      Half Unit
Media, Technology, and the Body

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Requisites

Additional requisites:

There are no pre-requisites for this course. Students should apply via LSE for You without submitting a statement.

Please do not email the teacher with personal expressions of interest as these are not required and do not influence who is accepted onto the course.

Every day we re-encounter our bodies through the mediations of technology. A sleep tracking app tells you about your bad night’s sleep; your phone tells you which Underground stations are “step-free” but doesn’t know about the broken lift at Victoria station, and it doesn’t know about your knee pain; in the mail you receive some DNA results from a popular ancestry website (it’s not the one that partners with drug companies; but it is the one that partners with law enforcement); your job, your university, and your grocery store ask you to select a race and a gender every time you fill out a form; on your way home your noise-cancelling headphones run out of battery; and adding insult to injury your phone tells you your “screen time” has increased 8% since last week. This class is prompted by such moments, by asking how sites of conflict and breakdown can illuminate the ways our bodies are understood, tested, and reconfigured through technology.

Beginning with the assumption that there is no single, stable understanding of “the normal human body,” this course introduces a wide range of interdisciplinary theories to interrogate human bodies and their relationships to technology. From the measurement of perception, to the micro-analysis of bodily gestures, to the surveillance of bodily functions, to the representation and coding of race, gender, and sexuality, media and communication studies has long interrogated the technologization of human bodies.

In addition to key readings from our field, this course also introduces students to the encounter of body–technology problems from the perspective of science and technology studies, disability studies, surveillance studies, feminist and queer theory, critical design studies, and the history of technology. Through these theories and debates, we will familiarise ourselves with approaches for documenting, describing, and analysing how notions of human bodily similarity and difference are encoded and hardwired in the technologies, media, and environments of everyday life.

10 hours of seminars and 10 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

The formative coursework includes a two-part mapping exercise:

1. Individual students will catalogue sites of conflict and friction between bodies and technologies. They will mark the site on a map and include 500-800 words describing the site and the conflict it produces.  The compilation of these sites will serve as a shared database of techno-bodily conflict;
2. Students will outline how these sites could become research prompts for a larger project and annotate three potential sources to analyse a single site.  Annotations should total between 400–500 words.
3. The mark will be measured based on the completeness of the above.

• Simone Browne, "Branding Blackness: Biometric Technology and the Surveillance of Blackness." In Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, 88–129: Duke University Press, 2015.
• Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, "Race and/as Technology, or How to Do Things to Race." In Race after the Internet, 44-66: Routledge, 2013.
• Sasha Costanza-Chock, “Design Justice, A.I., and Escape from the Matrix of Domination.” Journal of Design and Science (2018).
• Mack Hagood, "Quiet Comfort: Noise, Otherness, and the Mobile Production of Personal Space." American Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2011): 573–589.
• Aimi Hamraie, "Normate Template." In Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
• Georgina Kleege, "Audio description described: Current standards, future innovations, larger implications." Representations 135, no. 1 (2016): 89–101.
• Lisa Nakamura, “Digital Racial Formations and Networked Images of the Body.” In Digitizing Race: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
• Sarah Sharma, "Dharma at the Desk: Recalibrating the Sedentary Worker." In In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics, 81–107. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
• Susan Leigh Star, "Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions." The Sociological Review, vol. 38, no. S1, 1990, pp. 26-56.

Poster (10%)

Essay (90%, 3000 words)