NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, the 370 Jay Project, and the NYU Tandon Department of Technology, Culture and Society invite you to a new discussion in the series “Co-Opting AI.”

This event will examine how artificial intelligence systems that rely on data extraction and automated large-scale data classification and processing can solidify heteronormative and ableist socio-technical infrastructures. It will draw connections between queer studies and activism, disabilities studies, and critical technologies studies to consider how “queering AI” can serve both as critique and as a creative practice that interrogates and challenges discrimination in technology. ASL and CART will be available.

For this event, the Co-Opting AI is partnering with the new “Disabilities and the Digital” series, hosted between scholars from the U.S., Germany, and Turkey. This new series brings together perspectives from North America, Europe, and the Middle East and will convene conversations on embodiment, bodily belongings, disability, and the digital at the intersection of sociology, cultural studies, disability studies and activism. The point of departure is to strengthen the international dialogue along the most recent developments. The aim is to generate conversations and impulses for a sustainable international community that explores the role of digital technologies in the heterogenization of society.

Arjun Subramonian (they/them) is a brown queer neurodivergent PhD student and Cota-Robles fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Their research focuses on inclusive graph machine learning & natural language processing, drawing from mathematical theory and LGBTQIA+ perspectives. They are a core organizer of Queer in AI, a NeurIPS 2022 Affinity Workshops chair, and a NAACL 2022 DEI chair. They previously organized QWER Hacks and taught machine learning and AI ethics at under-resourced schools in Los Angeles. Arjun graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science from UCLA, where they received the School of Engineering’s Outstanding Bachelor of Science, Chancellor’s Service, and Student Welfare awards. Twitter: @arjunsubgraph.

Dr. Louise Hickman is an activist and scholar of communication, and uses ethnographic, archival, and theoretical approaches to consider how access is produced for disabled people. Her current project focuses particularly on access produced by real-time stenographers and transcriptive technologies in educational settings. She uses an interdisciplinary lens drawing on feminist theory, critical disability studies, and science and technology studies to consider the historical conditions of access work, and the ways access is co-produced through human (and primarily female) labour, technological systems, and economic models and conditions.  Louise is currently a Research Assoicate at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge.  Louise previously worked as a Senior Research Officer at the London School of Economics and Political Science Department of Media and Communications and at Ada Lovelace Institute’s JUST-AI Network on Data and AI Ethics. She continues to co-convene the JUST AI’s working group on rights, access and refusal. An academic, artist, activist, she earned her PhD in Communication from the University of California, San Diego in 2018, and held a postdoctoral position in the Feminist Labor Lab at UC San Diego.

Since 2016, Louise has also worked as an access consultant and speaker for Parkeology, a U.S. based public art program.

Dr. Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss is a cultural and media theorist, feminist and educator currently affiliated with the GenderConceptGroup at Technical University Dresden’s Digital Gender Project as a postdoc. Sara’s current research explores dimensions of technological relationality, materiality, and aesthetics. More specifically, Sara interrogates AI imaginaries and their material realities through feminist, queer and decolonial theorizing, currently focussing on speculative AI projects and the arts. Sara is on the board of diffrakt. centre for theoretical periphery in Berlin, an editor at kritisch-lesen.de and affiliated researcher with the Data Politics Lab, a collective committed to exploring political dimensions of technological governance.

The Co-Opting AI event series is convened by Mona Sloane. They are hosted at IPK and co-sponsored by the 370 Jay Project, and the NYU Tandon Department of Technology, Culture and Society.