In recent years, technologies loosely grouped under the rubric of artificial intelligence (AI) have been rapidly implemented and institutionalized. These efforts promote AI as an inevitable technological advancement while reformist AI frameworks—otherwise called “equitable,” “responsible,” or even “benevolent”—often serve to legitimize its widespread adoption. Yet as decades of feminist interventions teach us, both celebratory and reformist narratives obscure and perpetuate the gendered, racialized, colonial, extractive, eugenicist, and militarized histories underpinning these technologies. The construction of AI as inevitable naturalizes the systems of power through which corporations, tech billionaires, governments, and higher ed institutions shape technological development and determine whose interests it serves. 

Drawing from feminist intersectional science and technology studies, abolitionist frameworks, data rights advocacy, and disability justice, the 51st Scholar and Feminist Conference approaches AI as infrastructure: material, political, ecological, and historical. By refusing the inevitability of AI through collective knowledge-making, we invite participants to conversations that center their agency in building and practicing technological and non-technological futures. What feminist responses and imaginings can help us move towards social justice, liberation, and collective world-building, across disciplines and lived experiences?

The conference will feature an open plenary, participatory workshops, and a joint keynote by Wendy H. K. Chun and Caroline Running Wolf. Workshop themes will include environmental extraction, eugenicist technologies, data centers and supply chains, militarization and warfare, gender and deepfake technology, and education and labor. 

The opening plenary and keynote address will be recorded and published on BCRW’s YouTube channel.

Image credit: Merieme Mesfioui

Co-sponsors: Incite Institute at Columbia University, The Center for Science and Society at Columbia University, and The Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study at Teachers College, Columbia University.