In this week’s class, we will review the history of different traditions in psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science, with special attention to mainstream cognitive science and the traditions in psychology and cognitive science that influence the alternative approaches we discuss in the course.
Focus on texts in bold. Familiarize yourself with the other texts, but don’t stress too much about the details.
This week we will get an overview of the course topics and assignments, review the syllabus, and discuss the following articles.
Cross-listed as EMAC/ATEC 6372: “Approaches to Emergent Media and Communication: Cognition, Culture, and Communication” and ACN 6V81: “Special Topics: Cognition, Culture, and Communication.”
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This course covers radical theories of and methodological approaches to three core aspects of the study of the human: cognition, culture, and communication. We will look at challenges to common assumptions about these three aspects and work to build an alternative understanding of them relevant to work in emerging media and communications and human-computer interaction.
We will examine a host of radical challenges to this traditional picture of separate, hierarchically organized ontological categories. We will examine critical and constructive approaches that treat cognition as embodied and enacted, constituted by culture and communication, socially and technologically distributed, extended, and mediated, as well as approaches to culture and communication which recognize them as inherently cognitive activities, rather than the epiphenomenal residue of the operation of individual minds. Rather than individualism and reductionism, we should think of cognition, culture, and communication as mutually co-constituting. We should not study them separately, but instead we should examine cognitive-cultural-communicative (C3) processes and systems. We will look at different theories of the nature of C3 processes and systems as well as qualitative empirical methodologies for their study. Students will apply their understanding of C3 systems to emerging media systems in particular.
This course uses several theoretical perspectives and methodological frameworks, and many of them alternatives to the orthodox approaches in cognitive science, psychology, communication, anthropology, and sociology. Here are the main ones you will become familiar with in the course:
In general, methodological discussions in this course will focus on various forms of qualitative research method.
Textbooks are available at Off Campus Books
Addition required readings will be made available via course website.
Click to see readings and assignments.
David Graeber has been on my radar since the start of Occupy last year. Between his involvement there and a variety of commentaries and discussions on his book Debt, I was primed to be a fan. Then he wrote an essay about superheroes. What he has to say is not very insightful. I’m honestly pretty disappointed.
Women have as yet made little contribution to philosophy. But when women who are not mere students of other persons’ philosophy set out to write it, we cannot conceive that it will be the same in viewpoint or tenor as that composed from the standpoint of the different masculine experience of things.
– John Dewey, Philosophy and Democracy (1919)
Every class session you are expected to come to class having read the assigned readings for the day (“For the Perplexed” and “Going Further” readings are optional). You must also bring the texts for that class period with you as well. Both of these things are necessary for us to have rich and meaningful discussions of the readings. I’ve clarified the syllabus on this point.
For my birthday, my lovely Sabrina bought me two sets of frisbee golf discs and arranged for us to go out on the UT Dallas disc golf course. Unfortunately, the course only has 9 holes, which makes for a pretty short game of disc golf. In order to increase your playing pleasure, I present to you: the UT Dallas Disc Golf Course Back 9:
