© Natalia Luka

Sociology 190: AI & Society

(Instructor of Record: Spring 2025)

Syllabus here


AI is fundamentally a social technology. It is designed by teams of developers who are employed by corporations, governments, academic institutions, or non-profit organizations. Using massive amounts of (mostly) human generated and annotated data, the technology learns from what it is fed. AI promises tremendous strides for human societies, for instance, improving the output of human workers and speeding the pace of scientific research and development. However, left unexamined, it also reflects and automates the biases that come both from its designers and the data it was trained on. It consumes tremendous amounts of natural resources and leads us to important questions about what sort of energy expenditures we can justify. Without careful consideration of how this technology is designed and integrated into the systems we use, it can reproduce and amplify existing social inequalities– even as it holds immense promise to solve some of our most intractable social problems. This class brings students into dialogue with current debates in sociology, moral philosophy, and political science and asks what decisions they would make as leaders in this space in order to build the sort of society they wish to see.  

© Natalia Luka

Sociology 198: Writing for Theory

(Instructor of Record: Spring 2022)

Syllabus here


The idea behind this course is to give students the tools and preparation to excel in writing for Sociology 101: Classical Theory. This class will use a “workshop” format. The idea behind this course is that it should actually save you time by building your self-confidence as a writer and providing a supportive community that will motivate you to get these assignments done. Half of the course time will be dedicated to a mini-lecture. Each week will focus on one common problem in student writing. First, we will work together to identify this problem through realistic examples of student writing. From there, we will discuss what makes some pieces of writing more effective than others and develop writing strategies directly from these examples.