The proposed MA in Technology, Culture, and Society empowers students to examine how computational methods generate knowledge while exploring their social, political, and ethical implications.

2026-07-22

The emergence of AI and machine learning has revealed a technostructure that is both extraordinarily complex yet largely centralised by corporate power. The current hype cycle around Artificial Intelligence (AI) is laden with nothing less than the rhetorics of a revolution at a species level. The automation of routine work practices is now ubiquitous and becoming ambient. To this, add the fact the shaping, ownership, promotion, research and development of these technologies and their applications is concentrated in the hands of a few transglobal corporations whose energy resource requirements are already undermining any sustainable planetary future. Such computational models (AI) have come to dominate disciplinary modes of knowledge production, short circuiting the very modes of individuation and thought construction by optimisation and standardisation techniques. The MA in Technology, Culture and Society seeks to address how the rarefied pursuit of AI and ubiquitous computation is symptomatic of a Western cultural understanding of technology that is fundamentally at odds with our biosphere and the well-being of the planet. The programme seeks to critically reflect on what forms of knowledge are produced (human or otherwise) through computational means (social media, AI, big data etc) while tracing the social, political and ethical consequences of these developments. In doing so the MA invites applicants from a broad range of backgrounds to participate in interdisciplinary seminars, workshops, and platforms to critically analyse the epochal contemporary technosphere and its implications. The ambition is for students to not only interrogate the opaque nature of contemporary technology but to generate new forms of speculative thinking that help inform a more sustainable and equitable technical future.

Ireland

2026-02-01