I’m coming up to two months in my fellowship at Data & Society, and I’m trying my best to appreciate it, and not take any of it for granted. The fact that I’m getting paid to read, learn, discuss and debate is still a little bit surreal!

One thing that I have been thinking a lot about is the privileges and the opportunities that the fellowship grants me. Along with the fantastic Data & Society network and community, it’s been such a nice break to be assigned reading lists and books in preparation for discussion groups, debates and seminars.

With that in mind - and as someone who thoroughly appreciates when others make curricula public - here’s everything that I’ve been assigned to read over the past two months.

Books

• Beamtimes and Lifetimes, by Sharon Traweek. A study by an anthropologist of the world of high-energy physicists.

• The Democratic Surround, by Fred Turner. This made for a great transition read for me coming from Germany to the United States, though as colleagues at Data & Society pointed out, it does focus heavily on white people, and at some points seems almost dismissive of important issues like the civil rights movements.

• Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil. This book just got released, and others at Data & Society wrote a series of responses to it which are also a great read.

• The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick.

Articles and stories

• Race, Class and Gender as Categories of Analysis and Connection, by Patricia Hills Collins. This has probably been my favourite article so far! It talked a lot about practical issues that I think about a lot.

• A Theory of Justice, by John Rawls - as a non-academic, I have to admit that this was pretty hard to get through. Explanations of it what it was trying to say, though, made a lot of sense to me - but the fact that his arguments around inequality were expressed in (what seemed to me) a highly inaccessible way, came across as highly ironic to me.

• Generic Processes in the Reproduction of Inequality: an Interactionist Analysis, by Michael Schwalbe et al.

• The New Atlantis, by Ursula K. LeGuin. (yep, I’m totally pinching myself that reading and discussing this forms part of what is now my part-time day job…)