While Departments and Programs in COEIT cover multiple, wide-ranging foci within specific disciplinary specializations, CRIT can identify, support, and promote Responsible Technology collaborations across disciplines. CRIT would fill a voiced need for an intellectual home for Responsible Technology scholarship, and an alternative community and mentoring for faculty and students. CRIT would be aimed at and available to all who consider themselves to do Responsible Technology work – this includes those from COEIT disciplines who aim to develop technology with responsibility as a first-order consideration as well as CAHSS disciplines who aim to guide and understand responsible technology.
The goal of the CRIT will be to provide training, grant, event, visibility, and other types of support to all Responsible Technology endeavors. From the perspective of research, the initial programming would be aimed at all Responsible Technology related work important to and represented of the strengths at UMBC including Sustainability, Health, and Privacy. From the perspective of teaching, CRIT could work with Departments and Programs to create and coordinate mechanisms for cross-disciplinary cluster teaching, and co-teaching, and also identify, create, and advertise marque courses in Responsible Technology. One primary lesson learned from our activities to date is there needs to be a coordinated “workforce” of instructors, researchers, and students that could support existing responsible technology programs and activities such as Grand Challenges Scholars, TA, and TF training.
CRIT would be essential in spotlighting, supporting, shaping, and growing innovative Responsible Technology cross-college collaborative scholarship at UMBC. If we are to address the most pressing societal problems of our times we will need to support education, research, engagement, and interventions that elevate Responsible Technology as a first-order consideration that reaches across the boundaries between COEIT and CAHSS. CRIT will provide an intellectual space to strengthen and cohere our cross-disciplinary scholarship and in doing so elevate the difference we make in our communities as well as the ways we make our mark. There is a niche in the higher education market among our institutional and aspirational peers that a cutting-edge Center for Responsible and Inclusive Technology at UMBC can fill. We would specifically continue and strengthen our ongoing working relationship with the Center for Social Science Scholarship as well as our nascent relationships with the Department of Philosophy and the School for Public Policy.