About Tech Justice Lab
The Tech Justice Lab (TJL) is a cross-college collaboration that prioritizes the development of interdisciplinary, justice-oriented undergraduate technology researchers and practitioners. The TJL builds on the Honors College’s mission of fostering well-rounded and highly engaged students, equipped with the interdisciplinary knowledge and skills to impact society for the better.
Interested students from any discipline, with guidance from TJL affiliated faculty, staff, community members, and peers, work together to evaluate and transform the social and ethical impacts of technology. Through research opportunities, courses, and programming, the TJL seeks to empower students to imagine what it means for technology to be “just,” and to envision ways to change how technologies are designed, implemented, evaluated, and contested, in order to bring about a more just future.
Major Goals:
- To create a community of education, research, and practice that allows students and faculty to work across disciplinary, organizational, and cultural boundaries in order to address unequal distributions of technological harms and benefits in society.
- to cultivate students’ capacities for critical thinking, self-reflexivity, and responsiveness concerning how historical and present-day power relations impact the research, design, development, and application of technology.
- To build upon existing efforts to create STEM majors at Purdue—both representationally and epistemologically—through the development of interdisciplinary curricula, inclusive mentorship practices, and campus-wide events that center the implications of technological design, development, and implementation.
- To support all students in acquiring both the social and technical knowledge needed for making critical interventions into tech justice.