How does artificial intelligence reshape the conditions under which civic actors build, sustain, and govern themselves? Artificial intelligence is often framed as a technological or economic transformation. This course approaches it instead as a political and institutional shift with profound implications for civil society. As algorithmic systems increasingly structure attention, information flows, organizational strategy, resource allocation, and policy priorities, they alter the terrain on which democratic actors operate. Social movements, labor unions, universities, advocacy organizations, religious institutions, governments, and firms alike must adapt to an environment in which artificial agents participate in persuasion, coordination, surveillance, and decision-making.
Drawing on scholarship in social movements, democratic theory, and political sociology, the course examines how AI affects the core conditions of civic life: how people build relationships with one another, mobilize, how organizations build political power, how narratives spread, how risk is distributed, and how governance structures evolve. We will analyze contemporary arenas including labor and workplace surveillance, digital campaigning, environmental and infrastructure politics, and information integrity. Throughout, the central concern is human agency: to what extent does AI strengthen the capacity for collective action or instead intensify the concentration of power in new hands? Across decades of scholarship on democracy, one of the clearest findings is that strong meso-level institutions of civil society are essential counterweights against concentrated state power, corporate domination, and other forms of unaccountable institutional control.
The course includes experiential, practice-oriented components in which students will use state-of-the-art AI tools (including advanced research and coding assistants such as Claude Code) to analyze real-world civic problems, evaluate organizational strategies, and reflect on the democratic implications of AI.