Humanizing Technology
A project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities
How does technology impact society? As an engineer, you will be faced with ethical choices about the technologies you create. Are you ready to expand your education with GE Humanities courses exploring the complexity and nuance of technology?
Join the Humanizing Technology Certificate Program!
The Humanizing Technology Certificate Program (HTCP) is a Humanities Division initiative targeted to early career Engineering students but open to all UCSC undergraduates. During the Summer Session, the program is also open to visiting students. The program features small class sizes and GE courses that examine the goals and impacts of technology in various ways.
How to Earn the Certificate
- Take three of the six Humanities courses listed below.
- There are no prerequisites and you can take the courses in any order you choose.
Each course fulfills a different GE requirement. Courses began in Winter 2023, and a new round of courses will be launched in 2023–24.
Connect with the Humanizing Technology Advisor
Students can connect with the Humanizing Technology Certificate advisor by sending an email or setting up an appointment on Slug Success.
Advisor: Maya Woolfe (she/her), Assistant Director of Student Achievement
- Email Advising
- Email advising is great for asking quick questions. Please email us at humadvising@ucsc.eduwith your UCSC email account, and provide your full name and student ID number (SID).
- Please allow 3-5 business days for a response.
- Appointments
- Schedule 30-minute appointments on Slug Successor the Navigate app.For help with Slug Success, please refer to these how-to guides.
Here is a direct link to the HUM Tech Advisors Appointment Availability
Enrollment for Fall 2023 classes is open now.
Fall 2023 courses:
HUMN 25 Humans and Machines, TA Gen Ed, TTh, 11:40 am-1:15 pm (Dustin Gray)
LIT 126H Artificial Intelligence and Human Imagination, CC Gen Ed, TTh 3:20 pm-4:55 pm (Zac Zimmer)
Winter 2024 courses:
HUMN 45 Race and Technology, ER Gen Ed, TTH, 11:40 am-1:15 pm (Felicity Amaya Schaeffer)
HUMN 55 Technologies of Representation, IM Gen Ed, TTh 3:20-4:55 pm (Rasmus Winther)
Spring 2024 courses:
HUMN 35 Language Technology, CC Gen Ed, (Kirsten Silva Gruesz)
HUMN 15 Ethics and Technology, PE-T Gen Ed, (TBD)
Summer 2024 courses:
HUMN 15 Ethics and Technology, PE-T Gen Ed, (Caitlin Flaws)
HUMN 25 Humans and Machines, TA Gen Ed, (Won Jeon)
HUMN 35 Language Technology, CC Gen Ed, (TBD)
HUMN 45 Race and Technology, ER Gen Ed, (Debbie Duarte)
HUMN 55 Technologies of Representation, IM Gen Ed, (Merve Ünsal Genç)
Courses
HUMN 15 Ethics and Technology (Perspectives on Technology Gen Ed, offered Spring and Summer 2024)
This course explores ethical, social, and political issues raised by existing and emerging technologies.
Watch the videos from Humanities and Baskin Engineering faculty. 
HUMN 25 Humans and Machines (Textual Analysis Gen Ed, offered Fall 2023 and Summer 2024)
This course explores the tension between humans and machines, between people and objects increasingly resembling them.
Watch the videos from Humanities and Baskin Engineering faculty. 
HUMN 35 Language Technology (Cross-Cultural Analysis Gen Ed, offered Winter 2023)
This course provides a comparative, historical framing of the development of communication technologies and practices, considering a variety of cultures and societies across human history.
Watch the videos from Humanities and Baskin Engineering faculty.
HUMN 45 Race and Technology (Ethnicity and Race Gen Ed, offered Spring and Summer 2024)
This course examines how the construction of race connects with constructs in science and technology.
Watch the videos from Humanities and Baskin Engineering faculty.
HUMN 55 Technologies of Representation (Interpreting Arts and Media Gen Ed, offered Winter and Summer 2024)
Focusing on technologies of representation like photographs, selfies, and surveillance data, this course explores how viewers and makers derive meaning from images and how power operates in their creation and circulation.
Watch the videos from Humanities and Baskin Engineering faculty. 
LIT 126H Artificial Intelligence and Human Imagination (Cross-Cultural Analysis Gen Ed, offered Fall 2023)
This course uses a cultural framework to study the promises and perils of AI, with a dual focus on the technosystems themselves and the role of AI in the social imaginary.
Listen to the podcast on KSQD and read the article about the course.
News & Events
Humanizing Technology Fellows Program welcomes four teaching fellows and two peer mentors for 2023–24.
Ethics and Technology/TEQ Deck Workshops, Spring Quarter 2023, co-sponsored with the Center for Public Philosophy.
Let's Talk About ChatGPT Panel Event, March 21, 12-1:30 p.m., recording available here.
Humanizing Technology Launch Event, November 7, 4-6:30 p.m., Crown College Plaza
About
“Humanizing Technology,” is a new certificate program that provides humanities training targeted to early-career engineering undergraduate students at UC Santa Cruz. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities under their Humanities Initiatives at Hispanic-Serving Institutions program, the project brings humanistic methods and thinking to contemporary issues in technology and engineering. It is led by principal investigator Jasmine Alinder (Dean of Humanities) and co-principal investigators, Pranav Anand (Professor of Linguistics) and Laura Martin (Porter College Lecturer and Project Manager at The Humanities Institute).
The Humanizing Technology Certificate Program (HTCP) encourages students to explore the impacts of new and existing technologies. At the same time, it helps students develop their critical thinking about social and cultural systems that inform these technologies, and provides them with tools for becoming socially responsible professionals. The HTCP offers engineering students a pathway to fulfill GE requirements with courses that have a direct relevance to their majors and career interests, and it gives students an opportunity to develop community and a sense of belonging in smaller learning environments.
The courses integrate humanities concerns and approaches with the biotechnological, computational, robotic, electronic, and data scientific technologies engineering students study and will develop in their careers after graduation. Overall, the certificate courses and program aim to give students a humanistic foundation for designing and implementing new technologies and to encourage a consistent awareness about the consequences of new and existing technologies as well as the historical, social, and political contexts of technological design and application, based on extensive case studies.
The courses were developed in an innovative, collaborative, and interdisciplinary framework, and were informed by stakeholder conversations with faculty, students, and staff in the Baskin School of Engineering. Partnering with The Humanities Institute and UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (CITL), the Humanities Division convened an instructional community of faculty and graduate students to plan and devise the certificate courses. Kendra Dority, Associate Director of Graduate Programs at CITL, created and led the summer course design institute, and, along with CITL’s Founding Director, Jody Greene, facilitated the workshops. Together, they guided the instructional teams through an evidence-based design process to develop their course themes, syllabi, learning objectives, assignments, and assessments.
The resulting courses are small and discussion-oriented, with assignments that encourage students to develop their own viewpoints on the sources and impacts of technological systems, and to convey those viewpoints clearly and confidently. Above all, the courses help students learn how to grapple with difficult questions that lack clear “right” answers.
Affiliated Faculty
Pranav Anand, Linguistics
Ben Breen, History
Martin Devecka, Literature
Kirsten Gruesz, Literature
Kate Jones, History
Matt O’Hara, History
Kyle Parry, History of Art and Visual Culture
Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Feminist Studies/Critical Race & Ethnic Studies
Amanda Smith, Literature
Zac Zimmer, Literature
Affiliated Graduate Students
Debbie Duarte, Literature
Caitlin-Anne Flaws, Literature
Dustin Gray, Philosophy
Mark Howard, Politics
Won Jeon, History of Consciousness
Marilia Kaisar, Film and Digital Media
Allison Nguyen, Psychology
LuLing Osofsky, History of Art and Visual Culture
Mia Tempestt Boykin, Literature
Merve Ünsal Genç, Film and Digital Media
Project Partners
Baskin School of Engineering
Teaching & Learning Center
The Humanities Institute
The Center for Public Philosophy
Thank you to our partners
