Advanced Topics in Community Change

Topic Description: This course provides a comprehensive and critical exploration of “artificial intelligence” (AI) and its evolving role with the field of social work and beyond. Students will establish a foundational understanding of “AI” systems and architectures—including machine learning, large language models (LLMs), computer vision, generative systems, and predictive analytic and surveillance systems—to demystify how these systems function in practice. Building on this technical literacy and drawing from a variety of fields, the course examines the material and immaterial realities of automated systems: histories, data, labor, resources, policy, and impacts, as well as the ideological, speculative, and sociopolitical project of “artificial intelligence”. Through the lens of critical pedagogy and P.O.D.S. (Privilege, Oppression, Diversity, and Social Justice), students will analyze case studies of “AI” in the real-world and their relation to the goals of social work. The course encourages future practitioners critically understand and move beyond “Boomer” and “Doomer” perspectives, instead developing a nuanced orientation rooted in the material and immaterial realities and impacts of “AI” that allows them to effectively and thoroughly navigate, utilize, and resist automated systems in their professional practice, in service of communities, and throughout their lives.