Spring 2027 Seminar
INFO-I 609 (28941) / INFO-I 709 (28942)
Thursdays, 3:55 to 6:25
Hi!
In Spring 2027 I’m teaching a seminar on “communities” (in all the glorious, messy usage of that word) and “relationships” (ditto) in digital contexts. It is designed for doctoral students from any discipline, and master’s students may request to enroll. You do not need a technical background, just an interest in how technologies shape the way people initiate, develop, and/or maintain relationships, care for each other, or decide who belongs.
What the seminar is about
We will explore the role of digital technologies in modern social relationships. You will build a nuanced understanding of the strengths, limitations, and side effects of current technological dependencies with regard to how we structure and manage our social lives. Along the way, we will ask:
- What do we mean by an “online community,” and when is “community” the wrong concept?
- How do platforms shape the relationships they host, help, or hinder?
- How do people manage identity and audience across online spaces?
- What do care, vulnerability, and support look like online, especially during life transitions?
- Who decides what is allowed in a community, and who gets left out?
- What are the critiques of “community” itself?
What it will be like
Reading
This course is taught as a seminar. Each week, we will discuss the readings we have done for that week’s topic (typically 3-4 articles).
The first half of the semester follows a set reading list that gives students from different disciplines a shared vocabulary for “online community” and “digital relationship.” The second half is arranged around the questions and projects the class brings, so part of what we read together will depend on what the students are most interested in at that time.
Project
A semester-long project in your own area. You investigate a community, a platform, or a relationship context through an original study, a design project, an essay, a creative endeavor, or a literature review, with staged check-ins along the way. Several projects students have worked on in this class have been published (but that is not a requirement).
Examples of the kinds of projects you might pursue:
Study it
- Investigate what happens to a community’s relationships when it migrates platforms, such as Slack to Discord or Reddit to a fediverse server.
- Analyze a public community’s archive of posts, threads, or wikis to see how shared language and in-group identity develop over time.
- Interview moderators or volunteer organizers about the invisible labor of deciding who belongs and what’s allowed.
- Examine how people seek and offer support online during a major life change, and how they manage who sees what.
Design it
- Design and prototype a feature, tool, or moderation practice that supports a specific community’s values, then test it with real members.
- Create a speculative design, story, or artifact that imagines a future form of digital community, such as one mediated by AI companions or agents, and what it would cost.
Argue it
- Write an essay on what the concept of “community” reveals and obscures about a particular online space.
- Analyze how a platform sells “community” as a feature, and what gets commodified when it does.
- Review how your home discipline has defined “community,” and test whether those definitions hold up in digital settings.
You don’t have to fit these categories. Start from whatever question or method your own field cares about.
What you will be able to do
- Develop arguments for the strengths, weaknesses, and side effects of digital technologies in community and relationship management.
- Identify and evaluate research or design techniques related to your own goals.
- Identify and distinguish between types of communities and specific community theories.
- Select and justify appropriate community lenses for investigating a social phenomenon.
Possible readings
These, except the last two, come from the 2020 version of the course (the last time I was able to teach it!) and give a sense of the range. The final list will be set closer to the start of the Spring semester.
- Miranda Joseph (2002), Against the Romance of Community
- Eric Klinenberg (2018), Palaces for the People
- Tarleton Gillespie (2018), Custodians of the Internet
- Sarah T. Roberts (2019), Behind the Screen
- Alice Marwick and danah boyd (2011), “I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience”
- Nazanin Andalibi and Andrea Forte (2018), “Announcing Pregnancy Loss on Facebook”
- Oliver Haimson et al. (2015), “Disclosure, Stress, and Support During Gender Transition on Facebook”
- Jed Brubaker, Mike Ananny and Kate Crawford (2016), “Departing glances: A sociotechnical account of ‘leaving’ Grindr”
- Airi Lampinen et al. (2017), “Friendly but not Friends: Designing for Spaces Between Friendship and Unfamiliarity”
- Austin Toombs et al. (2024), “Future Dialogues: Personal AI Assistants and Their Interactions with Us and Each Other”
- Austin Toombs et al. (2022), “‘We’re so much more than the in-game clan’: Gaming Experiences and Group Management in Multi-Space Online Communities”
Interested?
Feel free to reach out to me with any questions! IU students should be able to find my email by just typing my name in the “to” line in Outlook. But there are more details on my contact page if that doesn’t work 😀