Teaching

CSC 2558: Qualitative Data Analysis and Writing for HCI (Summer 2025)

This summer seminar is designed for graduate students in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) who aim to enhance their qualitative research and academic writing skills. Qualitative research methods are common, though often poorly understood, in HCI. Over the term, students gain an understanding of qualitative data analysis methods, learn to craft polished research papers, and work towards preparing their own manuscripts for publication. This is a project-based course, with students expected to bring a qualitative dataset of their own to analyze and work with during class, with the goal of producing a paper that is submittable to the September deadline of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (CHI). Early sessions cover the philosophical foundations of qualitative research, data collection strategies, and methodological approaches such as ethnography, grounded theory, and thematic analysis. As the course progresses, students focus on coding data, developing themes, and drafting each section of a research paper. Emphasis is also placed on developing effective writing habits, self-editing techniques, as well as providing and responding to peer review. The course culminates in in-class presentations of student papers and the submission of a polished manuscript.

ENV 465: Toronto Climate Summer School (Summer 2024 & Summer 2025)

The Toronto Climate Summer School (TCSS) seeks to equip students with a range of methods, tools, and approaches to understanding and engaging in responses to conditions of climate change, as it takes place in and is enabled by the Toronto urban metropolis. While climate change occurs across the globe, attention to local settings and livelihoods gives both focused awareness of how the impacts intersect in context-specific ways, as well as how particular contexts are entangled with producing or continuing the causes of climate change. In Toronto, this context is entangled with the histories and ongoing processes of settler colonialism and extraction, industrialization, and urbanization in the heart of the Great Lakes region. At the same time, the uneven social and ecological geographies of modern cities, and how these emerge here, mean that issues of housing affordability, food security, and labour and migrant justice, intersect with the changing climate and environmental conditions of living and working in Toronto. This course therefore draws on multi-disciplinary fields including environmental history and political ecology, to think about what climate change means at the level of the city, and through a sustained, place-based focus on Toronto. This intensive six-week course combines daily lectures, skill-based workshops, field visits, brown-bag lunches with UofT experts and community partners, and a collaborative research project presented at a closing research symposium.

CSC 300: Computing and Society (Winter 2023 & Winter 2024)

This undergraduate course addresses a wide range of interconnections between computers and society. In this course, students learn the basic values that drive today’s computer industry and how those often strengthen or differ from many moral values held by different communities in our world. This course introduces students to various theories from philosophy and social sciences to develop a deep understanding of the ethical tensions around the relationship between computers and society. This class is designed to help the students gain this knowledge along with strengthening their writing, debating, and designing capabilities to make them the next-generation computer scientists who are ethical, responsible, and caring.

ENV 2002 (Special Topics): Climate Justice in the Greater Toronto Area (Winter 2024)

Climate change is, if anything, an issue that demands attention through the lens of justice. It is too often those who are least responsible for climate change who experience the worst of its effects. While this is increasingly being recognized in policy and academic settings, it is not at all clear that such recognition will lead to meaningful action, or even what vision of climate justice should guide such action. With a focus on Toronto, this graduate level seminar offers an introduction to urban climate justice issues in North America from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Students engage with a combination of foundational texts and emerging arguments, submit weekly response essays, and participate in seminar style discussion. The course covers key concepts in interdisciplinary climate change research and their specific connection to the GTA, such as the social production of climate vulnerability, the role of climate science in advancing or complicating efforts towards justice, climate activism, and government climate action.

CSC 2604: Design Theory and HCI (Winter 2021 & Winter 2023)

Over its forty-year history, HCI has undergone a remarkable expansion in the research methods, technologies, and areas of social life considered germane to the field. As a foundational concept, design too has changed over this period. What constitutes good design? Who designs? To what objects can design be applied in HCI? The answers to these questions have evolved as well. In this course we will trace parts of this trajectory. In doing so we’ll improve our understanding of the history of our field and add new concepts and approaches to the toolboxes we bring to HCI research and practice. This seminar-style course for graduate students begins with early visions of computing as a form of human augmentation through current discussions around participatory design, speculation, and design justice. Participants will both improve their understanding of the field as well as their ability to conduct research through a firm grounding in how design as a practice and set of research methods has been conceived of and debated throughout the history of HCI. A final project will provide an opportunity for students to make progress in their own research and writing through engagement with the readings and ideas covered as part of class.

ENV 2002 (Special Topics): Photovoltaic Imaginaries: Community Based Experiments in Sustainability Transitions (Fall 2022)

This graduate course combines seminar style reading and discussion and participatory design and prototyping with a community-based organization to investigate the particular forms of culture, sociality, and governance that emerge around small-scale, community-based solar energy systems. In addition to learning about solar technologies, students will also gain practical experience with community engaged research and learn about core concepts in science and technology studies (STS) and critical design.

ENV 2002 (Special Topics): Disasters from an Interdisciplinary Perspective (Winter 2022)

Perhaps no area of human-environment relations is as complex, engaging, and challenging as that of disaster. Disasters have inspired revolutions, religious fervor, and scientific and philosophical achievement. Today, as we continue to cope with the fallout of a global pandemic and climate disasters are part of the daily news, the topic is present everywhere. Understanding the impacts of disaster, what such impacts reveal about the social and political contexts in which they occur, and how our communities can best mitigate, prepare, and recover from disaster requires a breadth of knowledge from across a range of different areas The field of disaster research attempts to provide just this. This graduate level course provides an introduction to disaster research from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Students engage with a combination of foundational texts and emerging arguments, submit weekly response essays, and participate in seminar style discussion. Key topics covered will include the social production of disaster vulnerability, human behavior during emergencies, the uses and misuse of disaster data, social media and crisis, disaster and climate justice, and research ethics in disaster settings.

Contemporary experience of environmentalism is increasingly mediated through internet technologies. The dynamics of how people engage with social media often determine how they learn about topics such as climate change, environmental policy, and the nature of protest movements. At the same time, the power of governments and corporations to conduct mass surveillance via the internet can have a chilling effect on those who express dissent over social, economic and environmental policy. The current generation of students has grown up with social media, but rarely gets the opportunity to step back and think critically about its broader consequences, especially in the face of grand societal and environmental challenges. The aim of the course is to engage students in the School of Environment in critical thinking about the impacts and ethics of social media, and the ways in which it is used to foster or stifle social change. This advanced undergraduate course examines a range of issues related to the environment and digital technology, with a broad focus on the impacts of social media on environmental thinking and policy-making.