Module Catalogue 2026/27

Pre Requisite Comment

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Co Requisite Comment

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Aims

We live our lives both online and offline, with boundaries between the two increasingly blurred. Much of how we now connect, communicate, imagine, and conduct ourselves is shaped by the digital technologies that proliferate within our everyday lives, from social media and surveillance technologies to algorithmic governance and artificial intelligence. Whilst these technologies evoke strong opinions - criticism and support in equal measure - this module introduces students to anthropological, sociological, and interdisciplinary perspectives such as Science and Technology Studies (STS), law, and ethics that help examine our digital lives in nuanced and critical ways.

The module equips students with conceptual, analytical, and methodological tools to reflect on how continually shifting digital infrastructures shape our human experiences. Students will consider questions such as: How do digital systems influence how we understand ourselves and mediate our relationships with others? What can anthropology and sociology tell us about living with and in ‘the digital’, and how do these experiences vary across contexts? What social inequalities, affordances, and dependencies do digital technologies perpetuate and create? How might increasingly complex technologies such as AI challenge long-held assumptions about information, knowledge production, personhood, privacy, sociality, materiality, and ethics? How do new technologies simultaneously expand, constrain, surveil, and challenge our understandings of how we ‘do’ and how we ‘become’ human?

Drawing on concepts such as belonging, agency, identity, sociality, power, citizenship, and (dis)connection, this module enables students to reflexively examine and critically assess what it means to be human in a digital world. Case studies, ethnographic examples, and contemporary debates weaving both macro and micro perspectives will put students into direct conversation with the digital systems and logics that are reconfiguring their own everyday practices and lives.

Outline Of Syllabus

The module will cover a range of different topics relevant to the module aims listed above. An indicative list of module content follows but is not fixed for any given iteration of the module, being flexible and responsive to relevant contemporary issues. When possible, we will also explore practical applications that connect module themes with students’ career choices:

1. Theorising Digital People and Digital Worlds
This theme introduces key anthropological and sociological frameworks for analysing digital technologies, tracing how scholars have understood the cultural, socio-political, epistemic, and material significance of digital lives. It provides students with a conceptual and contextual foundation that critically situates contemporary digital practices within broader social histories of technological use and change. The theme is also influenced by a consideration of both utopian and dystopian histories and speculative futures, providing an overview of technological ideologies and trends, from early dreams of digital commons to techno-feudal futures.

2. Digital Social Research
This theme considers how social researchers ‘study’ the digital, and the implications of digitisation on our methods, practices, and ethics. The distinctions between studying the digital, studying with the digital, and studying using the digital is discussed; and students are introduced to a range of tools, techniques, and guidelines deployed for digital social research.

3. Personhood, Sociality, and Culture
This theme examines how digital technologies illuminate core anthropological concepts of personhood, social interaction, and knowledge production. At stake are how ‘the digital’ reshapes the ways in which individuals relate to one another and to increasingly agentive models such as Alexa, social robots, and AI companions. Through ethnographic and theoretical perspectives, students explore how cultural beliefs around who is a person and how do we know is shifting in the digital era, and how forms of belonging and everyday social worlds are reconfigured in hybrid online/offline environments.

4. Power, Inequality, and Resistance in a Digital World
This theme investigates how race, gender, class, disability and other axes of inequality shape digital participation and experiences. We consider how these apparently newer online inequalities mirror and perpetuate long-standing and intersecting oppressions, such as when we examine the location of environmentally extractive AI data centres in spaces where historically marginalised communities live. This theme also explores ways in which the digital is political, with consideration of topics that underline big tech’s role in contemporary politics, for instance algorithmic bias, misinformation and the rage-bait economy, and election interference.

Intended Knowledge Outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:
1. Evaluate and critically apply key ideas, theories, and methods from anthropology, sociology, and related fields that conceptualise the relationships between humans and digital technologies.
2. Demonstrate an understanding of how digital infrastructures and logics shape concepts of personhood, identity, social relations, forms of sociality, and power in contemporary societies.
3. Assess ethical, legal, and political implications of emerging digital technologies (for instance, issues of surveillance, privacy, data governance, misinformation, and digital inequality).
4. Demonstrate an understanding of historical, contemporary, and/or speculative futures perspectives on digital lives, reflecting on how digital technologies transform understandings of what it means to be human.
5. Critically examine how digital technologies intersect with social inequalities (for instance, gender, race, class, disability, and citizenship), and evaluate how these intersections shape access, representation and participation in digital spaces.

Intended Skill Outcomes

By the end of the module, students will be able to:
1. Critically interpret and communicate well-reasoned arguments on the societal implications of digital technologies.
2. Reflect on and analyse their own digital practices and identities, linking personal experiences to broader sociological and anthropological theories of self, sociality, and personhood.
3. Collaborate effectively and pull together evidence across disciplinary perspectives (such as anthropology, sociology, law, ethics) to formulate informed positions on to contemporary digital issues.

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

Lecture sessions will be a combination of traditional lecture format and group work to maximize dialogue and discussion. They will introduce students to key concepts, theories, debates, and examples. They will include opportunities to question, discuss, and develop the ideas necessary to achieve the intended knowledge outcomes.

Workshops will be a combination of debate-focused and small group work to help support students in preparing for assessment, and to support the achievement of intended skills outcomes.

Students will have the opportunity in seminar to meet intended skills and knowledge outcomes via their student group presentations.

Independent study includes regular reading and preparation for lectures and seminars, as well as research, planning, and preparation of assessments.

Assessment Rationale And Relationship

Assessment One is a creative project in which students will select a contemporary social issue concerning ‘the digital’, in consultation with the module leader. Working in small groups (3-4), students will research the issue, analyse it using module materials, and evaluate the ethical consequences. Each group's findings will be presented to an audience of their peers in an oral presentation of about 10-15 minutes. This project will assess students' ability to utilize concepts, apply theoretical frameworks to real-world problems, and evaluate existing debates. It will support development in oral communication, as well as working in a small group to solve problems.

Assessment Two is a 2000-word portfolio in which students will choose a real, recent, digital example (an issue, article, controversy, observation, or artefact) as a starting point. Students will use their example to build a contextual picture of the everyday significance of their chosen topic. They will do so by collecting supporting, extended (digital) information about their example (such as blog and social media posts, articles, ethnographic notes, reflexive diaries, datasets) to help them account for the different perspectives or experiences of this
event or phenomenon, and to keep track of their information sources. Students will then use relevant theoretical frameworks to analyse it. The portfolio will address knowledge from the full range of lecture and seminar topics, assessing the ability to apply theoretical concepts and to assemble gathered data according to the larger module themes.

General Notes

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