Announcing the 2023-24 Humanizing Technology Fellows

The Humanities Institute is pleased to announce a new cohort of graduate student Humanizing Technology Teaching Fellows and Peer Mentors for the 2023-2024 academic year. Humanizing Technology Teaching Fellows will serve as part of a second cohort of teaching fellows for the Humanities Division’s Humanizing Technology Certificate Program (HTCP), now in its second year. Teaching fellows will work alongside faculty and graduate student mentors who have previously taught in the program to redesign the certificate courses for Summer 2024, which the fellows will teach as Graduate Student Instructors.

This year’s Humanizing Technology Teaching Fellows are Debbie Duarte (Literature), Caitlin Flaws (Literature), Won Jeon (History of Consciousness), and Merve Ünsal Genç (Film and Digital Media). Each fellow will receive a $2,500 fellowship in Summer 2023 to participate in a design institute, conduct research, and complete a new online version of a syllabus for one of the certificate courses. Debbie and Caitlin are returning fellows who will be adapting their in- person courses to online modalities, and Won and Merve are new fellows who will be designing new versions of remote courses. In addition, students will be paid a GSI salary in Summer 2024 to teach the new version of their certificate course in one of the summer sessions.

New this year, fellows will also participate in a peer mentorship program. Congratulations to our two peer mentors for 2023-2024, Mark Howard (Politics) and Marilia Kaisar (Film and Digital Media), who were part of the instructional team last year (2022-2023). Mark and Marilia designed syllabi, learning outcomes, and assignments for their respective courses: Ethics and Politics, and Humans and Machines. This year’s peer mentors will advise incoming fellows as they redesign courses to be taught in Summer 2024. Mentors will attend the 1-month institute in August and share what they have learned and experienced in the process of designing and teaching the courses, and they will work with new fellows throughout the academic year to provide guidance and support.

Humanizing Technology is a certificate program that provides humanities training targeted to early-career engineering undergraduate students at UC Santa Cruz. The project aims to bring humanistic methods and thinking to contemporary issues in technology and engineering. 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. Learn about more about the Humanizing Technology Certificate program here: https://thi.ucsc.edu/projects/humanizing-technology/