Responsible Tech University Ecosystem
All Tech Is Human has been busy understanding and mapping the emerging Responsible Tech ecosystem since our founding in 2018. In particular, we have developed a deep understanding around careers in Responsible Tech, skills desired and needed, and education journeys.
We are now bringing these insights to you in our new Responsible Tech University Ecosystem Mapping Project. The first of step creating and sharing this table of Academic Programs in Responsible Tech.
Our organization relies on a unique “grassroots-power model” that rapidly circulates power and ideas across a multi-sector, multi-stakeholder, and multidisciplinary interconnected community. By having relationships that cut across universities (student leaders + professors), industry, and the diverse range of individuals looking to break into or expand their careers in the nascent Responsible Tech space, we have a unique understanding of the field and how it can be accelerated. Our bottom-up approach of having hundreds of relationships and bringing them together in our global network allows us to move at the speed of tech and avoid the turf wars and bureaucracy that often slow down major institutions. We then connect our growing knowledge and network with multiple nodes to rapidly circulate insights, while simultaneously incorporating feedback and new information.
We welcome global community input on additional programs that should be included.
About This Project
Our Responsible Tech University Ecosystem Mapping Project was launched by program director Rebekah Tweed through our University Ambassadors program at the start of 2022. We began with input from our 80+ ambassadors detailing the academic degrees, certificates, research centers, faculty, and student clubs at their own universities for use as an internal resource so that students interested in Responsible Tech could connect with one another on their own campuses and reach out to peers, faculty, and student clubs for support and deepening engagement. We recognized the need to expand this resource and share it with the wider responsible tech community and have been broadening its scope for months.
We chose to accelerate our timeline for release as layoffs have swept the tech industry and tech workers consider their upskilling options. Building on the excellent work of others, like Dr. Casey Fiesler’s crowdsourced database of tech ethics courses and syllabi, we have created this table of socio-technical academic programs, as we’ve noticed an influx of programs dedicated to tackling thorny tech and society issues. While this initial release is a simple list of academic degree and certificate programs, we plan to incorporate additional categories of faculty, student clubs, and research institutes, as well as funding opportunities into future iterations of this resource.
We know that many academic programs that spawn significant interest in responsible tech are not explicitly multidisciplinary socio-technical programs, although many have clearly stated aims of matriculating socio-technically minded graduates — from technical programs like Computer Science, Data Science, and Information Science to social sciences and humanities programs like Communications, Philosophy, and Digital Humanities. We are building a separate list of these single-discipline programs but are not including them in the table at this time.
We have endeavored to make the socio-technical academic programs as comprehensive as possible, as we have not yet seen those compiled into one resource, and we need your help! Please submit additional programs that we have missed at the link below. Specific disciplines like STS, HCI, Tech Policy, and Cybersecurity have been explored elsewhere, so while we have listed as many of these programs as we encountered, those disciplines are not comprehensive, and we intend to expand these areas of the list to become more comprehensive in the future.
We welcome global community input on additional programs that should be included — please submit through our form here.