Democracy and Its Technologies: History, Design, Civic Practice

The digital infrastructures and tools that affect our lives, our communities, and our institutions are crucial to understand and shape, and Lafayette is at the forefront of doing so. Through interdisciplinary approaches, the scholarship, research, and pedagogy of Lafayette faculty invite us to develop more empowered intellectual proactivity. Across areas including but not limited to AI and machine ethics, critical information studies, administrative law and technology, creative arts and design, and engineering and scientific research, our faculty and students explore how technologies both inform and form the societies we inhabit.

Combined with a rich cocurricular framework across student residential life and activities that emphasize democratic principles and restorative practices, our faculty and staff will support student learning and engagement toward active global citizenship.

Specific goals toward this aim include:

• Build a campuswide Democracy and Its Technologies Initiative with national reach that includes faculty and staff lines, programming, new spaces for collaborative encounters, curricular engagement, and extensive public engagement
• Leverage Lafayette’s strengths across the liberal arts, engineering, interdisciplinary, and cocurricular programming to create forums for exploring AI, design, ethics, and equitable uses of technology
• Promote the conditions for civic participation and public discourse both on campus and across the globe through the practice of constructive dialogue across our shared community
• Integrate components of digital fluency and creativity across the curriculum, inviting students to build strategies and expertise across their four years at Lafayette regardless of major or minor
• Provide a cocurricular framework across residential life, student activities, and advising that fosters a diverse and inclusive learning ground for democratic and restorative practices