Welcome to CSC 2558H Tech Abuse in Interpersonal Contexts at the University of Toronto.
Safe access to digital technologies increasingly plays an important role in personal well-being. As such, it has become an increasingly powerful lever for coercive control tactics in abuse settings such as intimate partner violence, domestic violence, human trafficking, and more. This course will explore technology abuse in interpersonal contexts, introducing students to the types of tech abuse seen in practice; understanding tech abuse within abuse contexts more broadly; the role of dual-use technologies; products built for abuse and the ecosystem of vendors behind them; abuse-resistent technology design; and the design and delivery of survivor-support interventions in the form of tech abuse clinics.
Classroom: HS 100
Lecture time: 1:00pm-3:00pm Mondays
Instructor: Tom Ristenpart
Office hours: TBA
TAs: TBA
TA Office hours: TBA
Lecture schedule and readings can be found here. Note this is still preliminary and will be updated as we get closer to the start of the class.
This class is designed for students with a range of expertise and backgrounds, including social work, computer science, and more. As such, it will not assume students have a background in computer science or social work, rather material should be accessible to anyone familiar with daily use of digital technologies.
If you have any questions or concerns about your background please don’t hesitate to reach out to the instructor.
Registration dates for different University of Toronto units are available here. Note that we are reserving spaces in the class for School of Social Work students, who can register in August.
Readings will be a combination of best practice guides, news articles, and academic papers. There will typically be one item required to be read before class, with students expected to be prepared to discuss the reading. Each reading should require around 2 hours or less. See the tentative schedule linked above for readings.
The class will have several homework assignments. These will task students with various exercises, such as evaluation of abuse scenarios, critique of tech abuse survivor support professional interactions, and exploration of the potential for use of digital technologies in abuse settings. Homeworks will require short writeups (less than one page) and will be used to seed in-class discussions; students will be expected to be able to provide clear oral descriptions of their results when called on in class.
This will involve developing new or updating existing resource guides for survivors or advocates working with them. The project can be done with a partner. You can see examples of existing guides on the CETA resources page and the Tech Safe BC page. The deliverable will include the guide in PDF, web, or other suitable format, as well as constructive feedback on another group’s guide. The latter will be done individually. Students will be given an opportunity to improve their guides in response to feedback, with deliverables being the first and second versions of their guides along with the feedback they provided to other groups. The project will be graded based on topical relevance, editorial quality, utility to survivors including the extent to which it is client-centered and trauma-informed, and quality of feedback to the other group.
High quality guides will be made available publicly with permission of the student group; grading will not be affected by this choice.
The final project will task student groups with choosing a topic that relates to tech abuse and exploring it in more depth. Examples could include a literature and resource survey on tech abuse as it intersects with particular interpersonal violence contexts or survivor populations, investigation into specific technical tools used in abuse, or development of new training materials useful for tech abuse clinics. The deliverable will be a short presentation to be delivered in the last week of class. Each group should meet with the instructor at least two times to get feedback on their topic selection and progress.