AI Futures Lab
The Humanities Research Center's AI Futures Lab is an interdisciplinary hub dedicated to understanding the power relations that organize AI systems and imagining ethical AI practices and futures. The goal of the AI Futures Lab is to bring people from the humanities, arts, social sciences, and sciences together to collaboratively examine AI technologies and their impacts on the world, including how AI intersects with race, gender, sexuality, and disability, as well as with environmental concerns.
Meet the Team
Jennifer Rhee, Ph.D.
Lab Co-director
Jennifer Rhee is an associate professor in the Department of English and the Media, Art, and Text Ph.D. Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. She’s written about robotics and artificial intelligence in technology, visual and performance art, literature, and film in her book The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). She’s been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship for 2019 to 2020 to support her book project on digital counting technologies, race, 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.
Caddie Alford, Ph.D.
Lab Co-director
Caddie Alford is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing in the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, and affiliate faculty in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. Her rhetorical studies research interrogates emerging social media forms of persuasion and sociality, such as how the technics of private Facebook groups radicalize publics or how digitality intensifies fascist appeals. Her new book—Entitled Opinions: Doxa After Digitality (University of Alabama Press “Rhetoric + Digitality” series)—addresses social media rhetorics by creating an affirmative theory of opinions to identify and reclaim a spectrum of truths and their actions, from insular opinions to widely held social facts. Some of her work has appeared in The Quarterly Journal of Speech; Rhetoric Review; and enculturation. She served as the book review editor for the journal enculturation for three years. She is currently co-editing a rhetorical studies collection on “post-truth” rhetorics as they intersect with and inform digitality, politics, epistemologies, health, and so on.
Upcoming Meetings
All upcoming meetings will take place over Zoom. Please reach out to Jennifer Rhee (jsrhee@vcu.edu) for the invite link, or subscribe to the mailing list. All are welcome.
- Monday, Apr. 7th | Her Film Screening - Hibbs Hall rm 403, 6pm-9pm
- Monday, Apr. 14th, 1:30pm-2:30pm | AI Futures Lab Student Fellows Panel: Anu Nair and Weitong Sun (more information to come) - Zoom
- Tuesday, Apr. 15th, 1:30pm-2:30pm | AI Futures Lab Student Fellows Panel: Sedenia Dawit and Kate Ogden (more information to come) - Zoom
- In addition, Fellow Starr Goodridge will present on ongoing research
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Tuesday, Apr. 22nd, 2:30-4:00pm | Data Ecologies Network panel - Zoom
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On this panel, experts will be sharing their research on the theme of Data Ecologies. This is the first of 2 public panels. The Data Ecologies Network project is a collaboration between the AI Futures Lab and the Environmental Humanities Lab, and is funded by VCU’s Institute of Sustainable Energy and Environment.
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Wednesday, Apr. 23rd, 2:00pm - 3:30pm | The CHS Undergraduate Research Pecha Kucha - AI Futures Lab co-director Caddie Alford and Digital Rhetoric undergraduate student Sean Kalchbrenner will be co-delivering a presentation on the research the Lab is supporting as well as a dive into AI Slop on Facebook.