This lab explores the ethical complexities of documenting, preserving, and engaging with human suffering and atrocity, particularly in the digital age. On the one hand, we have a moral responsibility to preserve a record of atrocity, but in so doing, we risk becoming tourists of tragedy, drawn in by its voyeuristic allure. Students will explore issues such as the hidden labor of content moderators, who bear the psychological toll of filtering harmful content, and question the fairness of this distribution of moral injury. Students will also explore the challenges of digital preservation, collective memory, and the manipulation of visual evidence in an era of deepfakes and algorithmic curation. How can we ethically record suffering, navigate our obligations to remember or forget, and avoid desensitization or exploitation? During the fall semester, students will read a variety of approaches to these topics from philosophy, psychology, and literature in order to understand the issues, before turning to developing individual or group projects in the spring that are intended to either highlight the complexities for a wider audience or suggest their own interventions for managing those complexities.

Applications open in Fall 2025