Technowomanism in Praxis: 

Critical Engagement at the Intersection of Social Justice and Technology

A Summer 2025 Course at Union Theological Seminary in the city of New York

Course Description

In this course, students learn about technowomanism, an ethical framework grounded in womanism that focuses on social justice issues in and around technology, as a tool for critique and assessment. The very notion of what constitutes as a technology will be challenged and expanded as together we will explore theological, ecological, and ancestral technologies alongside contemporary technologies. Through weekly readings, responses, presentations, in class activities, and a digital humanities project, students will leave the class with tools to assess and address a litany of social justice issues surrounding technology including those impacting the global majority, racial/ethnic groups, people with disabilities, people of different genders and sexualities, and the environment. This class is ideal for students interested in deepening their understanding of technology’s impacts on society, and how they can apply these learnings to their vocation.

What is this course about?

  • Knowledge Building

    Equip students with a lightweight yet working knowledge of integral contemporary technologies alongside exposing students to an expansive understanding of non-normative technologies (theological, ecological, ancestral, etc).

  • Critical Engagement

    Create space for students to critically engage with how varying technologies create new and exacerbate existing social justice issues for the environment, the global majority, people with disabilities, different racial/ethnic groups, and people across genders and sexualities.

  • Praxis

    Teach students about technowomanism as a lens through which to identify social justice issues with technology and a tool to assess and address them in an effort to encourage them to develop their own praxis for technowomanism.

  • Digital Humanities

    Give students the opportunity to produce digital humanities projects, write critically about their perspectives and personal intersections with the class topic, and discuss as well as present their ideas and thoughts together.

Readings

These are not meant to be an exhaustive catalogue but instead a starting point for conversation, discussion, and engagement

Getting Started

  • Bell, Genevieve. (2006). No More SMS from Jesus: Ubicomp, Religion and Techno-spiritual Practices. In: Dourish, P., Friday, A. (eds) UbiComp 2006: Ubiquitous Computing. UbiComp 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4206, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 141-158. https://doi.org/10.1007/11853565_9 

  • Shamika Goddard. 2015. Pedagogy from Peasant Wars to the Baltimore Riots via Google Earth. CH 108: History of Christianity, Part 2: Western European (c100-c2000), pp. 1-16

Media:

Technowomanist and Ethical Foundations

Technowomanist and Womanist Readings:

  • Shamika Goddard. 2015. “Techno-Womanism: A Moral Imperative for Social Justice, Faith, and the Digital Space”. Masters Thesis. Academic Commons, pp. 16-22. 

  • Shamika Goddard & Xeturah Woodley. 2019. Techno-womanism: Foundations for Social Justice in and through the Technosphere. In K. Graziano (Ed.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference. Las Vegas, NV, United States: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE), pp. 657-664.  https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/207712/ 

  • Coleman, Monica. 2013. “Introduction.” In Ain’t I a Woman, Too?: Third Wave Womanist Religious Thought. Coleman, M. A., & Maparyan, L. (Eds.). Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.

  • Harris, Melanie. L. 2010. Third-Wave Womanism: Expanding Womanist Discourse, Making Room for Our Children. In: Gifts of Virtue, Alice Walker, and Womanist Ethics. Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113930_7 

  • Sims, Angela D., Emilie M. Townes, Katie G. Cannon, Katie Geneva Cannon. (Eds.). 2011. Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader. United States, Presbyterian Publishing Corporation.

  • Hill Collins, Patricia. 2008. Black Feminist Thought. Perspectives on Gender. London, England: Routledge.

  • Delores Williams. 1993. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-talk. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, pp. 143-177.

Ethical Foundations:

Media:

Technological Foundations

  • Parris, Adah. 2022. "What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be". The Black Experience in Design : Identity, Expression & Reflection. (Eds.) Anne H. Berry, Kareem Collie, Penina Acayo Laker, Lesley-Ann Noel, Jennifer Rittner, Kelly Walters. New York, NY: Allworth Press, pp. 349-357.

  • Zahra Takhshid. 2025. ::Roundtable:: ChatGPT and the Marjaʿ. Islamic Law Blog. https://islamiclaw.blog/2025/04/10/roundtable-chatgpt-and-the-marja%CA%BF/ 

  • Broussard, Meredith. 2018. Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. The MIT Press, pp. 13 - 39

Media:


Tech + Race and Ethnicity

Black Liberation:

  • Cone, James H.. 2020. A Black Theology of Liberation. United States, Orbis Books, pp. 22-42.

Hispanic Liberation:

  • Isasi-Diaz, Ada Maria. 1996. Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the 21st Century, pp. 59-85.

Asian Liberation:

  • Lee, Sang Hyun. 2003. “Marginality as Coerced Liminality: Toward an Understanding of the  Context of Asian American Theology” in Realizing the America of Our Hearts: Theological Voices of Asian Americans, ed. Fumitaka Matsuoka and Eleazar S. Fernandez, pp. 11-28.

  • Nirmal, Arvind P.. 1994 “Towards a Christian Dalit Theology” in James Massey, ed. Indigenous  People: Dalits: Dalit Issues in Today’s Theological Debate, pp. 214-230.

  • Brock, Rita Nakashima. 2007. Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women's Religion and Theology. United Kingdom, Presbyterian Publishing Corporation.

Native American Liberation:

  • Smith, Andrea. 1998.  “Walking in Balance: The Spirituality-Liberation Praxis of Native Women” in Jace Weaver (ed.) Native American Religious Identity: Unforgotten Gods, pp. 178-198.  

  • Longchar, W. 2013. Liberation Theology and Indigenous People. In: Cooper, T. (eds) The Reemergence of Liberation Theologies. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311825_13 

  • Nessan, Craig L. 2017. "Liberation Theologies in America." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion. Oxford University Press. p. 9-11 https://oxfordre.com/religion/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-493

  • Deloria, Jr., Vine. 1977. “A Native American Perspective on Liberation” in Mission Trends  No. 4, pp. 261-270.  

  • Warrior, Robert Allen. September 11, 1989. “Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians,” Christianity and Crisis, pp. 261-265. (Also response by W.E. Baldridge and Warrior’s response, Ibid, May 28, 1990, pp. 182-183.)

Indigenous Data Sovereignty:

Race and Tech Issues:

  • Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity, pp. 1-46.

Media:

Tech + Gender and Sexuality

Gender Liberation Theology:

  • Grey, Mary. 2007. “Feminist Theology: A Critical Theology of Liberation.” Chapter. In The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology, edited by Christopher Rowland, 105–22. Cambridge Companions to Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Nessan, Craig L. 2017. "Liberation Theologies in America." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion. Oxford University Press https://oxfordre.com/religion/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-493 Feminist Liberation Theology (p. 5-7)

Queer Liberation Theology

Gender and Sexuality Tech Issues:

Media:

Tech + People with Disabilities

Disability Theology:

Disability Tech Issues:

  • Shew, Ashley. 2023. Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement. First edition. W W Norton, ch 2 and 6.

Media:

Tech + Planet Earth

Ecojustice Liberation Theology:

Ecofeminism:

  • McFague, Sallie. 2001. Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril, pp. 71-123.

  • Sallie McFague, 1993. “An Earthly Theological Agenda,” in Carol Adams (ed.), Ecofeminism and the Sacred, pp. 84-98.

Ecojustice Tech Issues:

  • Bashir, Noman, Priya Donti, James Cuff, Sydney Sroka, Marija Ilic, Vivienne Sze, Christina Delimitrou, and Elsa Olivetti. 2024. “The Climate and Sustainability Implications of Generative AI.” An MIT Exploration of Generative AI, March. https://doi.org/10.21428/e4baedd9.9070dfe7. 

  • Mwema, Esther, & Abeba Birhane. 2024. Undersea cables in Africa: The new frontiers of digital colonialism. First Monday, 29(4), pp. 1-28. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13637 

  • O’Donnell, James and Casey Crownhart. 2025. Climate change and energy: We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/ 

  • Bender, Emily M., Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell. 2021. On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 610–623. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922 

Media:

Tech + Our Collective Future (Eschatology and the Singularity)

Singularity Readings:

  • Kurzweil, Ray. 2014. The Singularity is Near. In: Sandler, R.L. (eds) Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp. 393-406. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137349088_26 

  • Kurzweil, Ray. 2024. The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge With AI. Penguin Publishing Group.

Eschatology Readings:

  • Johnson, Wendell G. (Ed.) 2017. End of Days: An Encyclopedia of the Apocalypse in World Religions. ABC-CLIO Santa Barbara, CA,

    • pp. 1-3 (African Ethnic),

    • pp. 74-81 (Buddhist),

    • pp. 133-136 (Feminist),

    • pp. 171-174 (Hindu),

    • pp. 186-190 (Islamic Sunni),

    • pp. 200-204 (Jewish),

    • pp. 251-254 (Native American)

  • Tanner, Kathryn. 2007. ' Eschatology and Ethics', in Gilbert Meilaender, and William Werpehowski (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Theological Ethics (online edn, Oxford Academic, 2 Sept. 2009), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199227228.003.0004. 

Media: