Informatics of Domination
October 27, 2025
Meet VCU Authors: Jennifer Rhee
Start time: 12:00 p.m.
End time: 1:00 p.m
Location: Online via Zoom
Join us for a Meet VCU Authors talk with Jennifer Rhee, Associate Professor of English at VCU, along with Zach Blas and Melody Jue, co-editors of Informatics of Domination.
Description
Informatics of Domination is an experimental collection addressing formations of power that manifest through technical systems and white capitalist patriarchy in the twenty-first century. The volume takes its name from a chart in Donna J. Haraway’s canonical 1985 essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.” Haraway theorizes the informatics of domination as a feminist, diagrammatic concept for situating power and a world system from which the figure of the cyborg emerges. Informatics of Domination builds on Haraway’s chart as an open structure for thought, inviting fifty scholars, artists, and creative writers to unfold new perspectives. Their writings take on a variety of forms, such as essays on artificial intelligence, disability and protest, and transpacific imaginaries; conversations with an AI trained on Black oral history; a three-dimensional response to Mexico-US border tensions; hand-drawn images on queer autotheory; ecological fictions about gut microbiomes and wet markets; and more. Together, the writings take up the unfinished structure of the chart in order to proliferate critiques of white capitalist patriarchal power with the study of information systems, networks, and computation today. This volume includes an afterword by Haraway.
About the Author
Jennifer Rhee is an Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. In her research Rhee analyzes artificial intelligence and robotics technologies in relation to race, gender, and labor. More specifically, she examines the different visions of humanness that shape AI technologies and bring these technologies into conversation with theorizations of AI in speculative fiction and art. Her scholarship and teaching are in the areas of speculative fiction studies, literature and science, feminist science and technology studies, critical AI studies, and ecocritical media studies.
Rhee regularly teaches courses on speculative fiction and contemporary American literature, as well as ENGL 301 (Introduction to the English Major). She welcomes working with graduate students interested in studying speculative fiction, exploring connections between literary works and science and technology, and analyzing AI technologies using humanities methods and perspectives.
Zach Blas is Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto.
Melody Jue is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.