The Curriculum
A complete graduate seminar in AI narrative governance — one textbook, four companion texts, a full reading schedule — ready to teach across 17 programs.
The Gap
AI systems now generate political narratives at industrial scale — shaping elections, constructing public opinion, and determining whose story reaches the agenda and whose disappears. Every major research university has programs that study the mechanisms behind this problem. None has a course that teaches students to turn AI's own generative capacity into an instrument of democratic governance — to design the systems through which communities govern the narratives themselves.
The frameworks democratic societies need do not yet exist in any program's catalog.
The Course
The curriculum derives a complete governance architecture from first principles. It does not assume a home discipline. It assumes a governance problem.
Three Registers
Each unit teaches through three simultaneous modes: the analytical framework names the governance requirement; the autoethnographic guide (Forbidden Friends, 4th ed. — nearly 600 pages with unpublished conference papers in appendix) demonstrates why it matters to real lives; the Driftless Rivers Speculative Fiction Series simulates what happens when governance succeeds — and when it fails. No single register is sufficient. The course requires all three.
Learn about all five texts and why the course requires all three registers →
17 Programs
Runs as a special topics seminar, elective, or cross-listed offering.
For Your Dean
This curriculum is a ready-made institutional response — and an answer to the question every dean is now being asked.
✓ No new course development required — syllabus, reading schedule, and worksheets exist
✓ Cross-listing opportunity: one seminar serves 2–3 departments simultaneously
✓ Peer-reviewed theoretical foundations across six disciplines
✓ Complete text library on Amazon and Kindle now
✓ Practitioner-scholar available for guest lectures, adjunct teaching, or curriculum partnership
Field Sites
Every unit ends with a field exercise called The Field — a multi-step assignment in which students apply that unit's analytical framework to a real case drawn from their own community, professional experience, or policy interests. The exercises are cumulative: each unit builds on all previous ones. By Unit 12, the capstone requires students to apply the complete governance architecture — all six functional layers, all 22 requirements — to a real policy campaign in a real community.
The curriculum does not assign the field sites. It teaches students how to recognize them. A professor who brings a community partner into the seminar gives students something the textbook cannot provide on its own: a living organization with real cases, real constraints, and real stakes.
Institutional memory that predates any particular program. The organization's archive is consultable.
Infrastructure community trust has already sanctioned. The organization has standing to convene, to publish, and to act.
A self-financing mechanism, or the potential for one. It can govern without being captured by what it is governing.
The Capstone
A student who completes all 12 units with a consistent community partner produces a capstone deliverable that is not a simulation. It is a real governance proposal — built from 12 units of cumulative analysis, grounded in the organization's own cases, and tested against all 22 requirements of the MOCSIE architecture.
That document is the student's portfolio piece. It is also the organization's strategic plan.