Faculty Fellows: Technologies of the Apocalypse with Professor Meg Leta Jones
The Faculty Fellows program is an opportunity to bring together like-minded members of the Georgetown community for discussion and creative practice. At these gatherings (also known as “salons” or “jam sessions”), the expanded Ethics Lab team comes together to share ideas and research, discuss best practices, and identify areas where their work overlaps through engaging, and often playful, facilitation. No two Fellows events look the same; each 90-minute session is guided by the interests, research, and current projects of the Fellow hosting.
As her turn to host a Faculty Fellows salon approached, Professor Meg Leta Jones (CCT) saw an opportunity to experiment with a final project idea for her upcoming fall course—Global History of Computers & the Internet—which explores computing technologies across time and space. She wondered: What might happen if students were asked to look at technologies of the past, or even an imagined future (like in science fiction), to rebuild a post-apocalyptic world?
To explore her early ideas with the Fellows cohort, Jones invited participants to imagine there was a blank slate following an apocalypse… What kind of technologies would be necessary in an apocalypse? What would be their key features? What kind of training would we need to use the technology? What ethical challenges might there be?
In the beginning, the Fellows and Ethics Lab team members brainstormed associations they made with an apocalyptic world, generating a “mood board” to set the stage for their technological musings. Picturing a place of ecological devastation, heightened violence, and total displacement, participants dreamed up tools for communication, navigation, and even defense. One group imagined methods for private communication among distributed family members, while another focused on accurate and trustworthy mapping and its implications for locating safe, habitable environments.
The variety of expertise and experience in the room contributed greatly to the vibrancy of the jam session, says Jones. Reflecting on the experience, she has begun building on her initial project idea in order to tailor it more specifically to the historical framing the course provides.
Jones expressed her appreciation for the pedagogical development opportunities the Faculty Fellows program provides: “It has been such a treat to go in every month and get my brain pulled in so many directions. The value that you walk away with is huge because you spend quality time with Georgetown colleagues in a way that expands your thinking on totally different subjects, and it inevitably gets you thinking more creatively.”
The Faculty Fellows pilot program was made possible through the generous support of Monica Lopez and Sameer Gandhi.