The central, critical question of Black Studies is: What does it mean to be human? This is a question about living in our contemporary moment. It is a question about how to live in the future. In Digital Black Studies, students will look specifically at the place where questions of race, Blackness, and coloniality intersect with the problems of digital and virtual life. We will explore topics including surveillance, the carceral system, Black capitalism, and digital sociality in the contributions of scholars like Ruha Benjamin, Andre Brock, and Alondra Nelson, among others. We will compare the methodologies used by different digital race scholars, like Wendy Hui Kyong Chun who theorizes race itself as a technology or Safiya Noble whose work Algorithms of Oppression unveils how technology reifies racial discrimination. Over the semester, students will add their own research to interrogate the intersection of technology, race, and power, and will ultimately identify the shape of this new field as it is and as they would like to see it evolve.