Do we control technology, or is technology controlling us? In Amanda Licastro's course "Virtual Bodies, Virtual Worlds," students engage with sci-fi literature and films that investigate our surveillance culture while exploring Swarthmore College Libraries resources. Students enrolled in this full-credit English Literature course get hands-on experience with cutting-edge technology in the Makerspace, interact with Special Collections at Swarthmore Libraries, and meet industry professionals who are shaping the future of immersive realities. Licastro, who is the Libraries' head of digital scholarship initiatives, says that students' final projects will be to design their own virtual reality and artificial reality applications that tackle important issues like gender representation, racial disparity, and climate change using the 15 Meta Quest headsets provided by the Libraries' digital scholarship team.

“Professor Licastro's course has fundamentally transformed my understanding of surveillance and virtual reality technologies in our contemporary world,” says Olivia Medeiros-Sakimoto ’25, who is majoring in Ethics through Film, Design, and Human-Computer Interaction. “Today, we routinely sacrifice privacy for convenience, blurring the line between fictional dystopias and our present reality. Through the work of scholars such as Safiya Noble (UCLA) and Sasha Costanza-Chock (Northeastern University), I've gained insight into both critical and hopeful perspectives on technology, developing a stronger, more nuanced vocabulary to articulate my own enthusiasm and unease for the future.”

The pop-up exhibition “A Statement on Surveillance,” on display on the first floor of McCabe Library through Monday, April 28, was inspired by a session led by Special Collections archivists who guided Licastro’s students through varied and provocative examples of protest art from the robust collections housed at Swarthmore College Libraries. The course also got a shout in a recent issue of The Phoenix. Want to know more about how library experts can help you integrate emerging technologies into your academic work? Contact digitalscholarship@swarthmore.edu.