Conference

© Elise Racine / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

This two-day symposium takes Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures by Kalindi Vora and Neda Atanasoski as a generative starting point for urgent feminist and antiracist conversations about technology in our current moment. Central to the book are the concepts of the surrogate human effect and technoliberalism, which together diagnose how liberal promises of freedom are sustained through conditions of structural unfreedom. While technology may not directly cause unfreedom, it automates, scales up and accelerates the reproduction of racial, gendered, and colonial hierarchies through its entwinement with global capitalism, militarism, and empire. The symposium aims to probe how these insights might guide historical and contemporary approaches to the accelerating integration of AI, robotics, and algorithmic systems into a variety of geopolitical milieus.

Across the sessions, the symposium asks: What visions of technological futures are possible—or necessary—when viewed from the standpoint of feminist, decolonial, and antiracist critique? How does scholarly work today help us understand and contest the uneven distributions of power, agency, and vulnerability that characterize our technological present?

Gathering a diverse group of scholars whose work speaks to critical questions of racism, empire, labor and technology, the symposium invites participants to reflect on their own research through the lens of Surrogate Humanity. Panelists will reflect on the book’s framing concepts as a springboard to engage with pressing issues such as the rise of tech oligarchies, the consolidation of technofascist regimes, the emergence of a new AI Cold War, and grassroots organizing around the impacts of generative AI.

To register, please contact mlinski@uni-bonn.de

Schedule:

• June 30

  02.00pm - Welcome Address by Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora

  02.30pm - 1. Student Panel:

  • Dalia N. Obiedat - Surrogates of Resistance: Arab Atheists, ChatGPT, and the Technopolitics of Freedom and Desire;

  • Leila Mahmutovic: Automated Affection and Recognition without Relation: On Feeling Understood by Something that Can't Hear You

  • Moderator: Julia Kastner

  03.30pm - Break

  04.00pm - Panel:

  • Nishant Shah - Living in our times: How digital technologies became pandemic technologies

  • Erin McElroy - Imperial Geographies of AI: Property Schemes of a Silicon Empire (with Neda Atanasoski)

  • Goda Klumbytė - Diagrammatics of AI: Tracing and Diffracting Epistemologies of Machine Learning Algorithms

  • Moderator: Julia Maria Mönig

• July 1

  10.00am - Networking Session and Coffee - Feminist AI Network and AI Queens* of Bonn

  10.30am -Neda Atanasoski: Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen.

  12.00pm - Networking Lunch 

  01.30pm - 2. Student Panel:

  • Inga Triebel: Pluralist Feminisms and the Technosphere: Perspectives on Technoliberalism in Light of the Controvery about the Digital Feminist Collective Las Brujas del Mar (Mexico).

  • Vahab Sourinejad: Beyond Being Outsmarted. The Danger of Human Stupidity in the Age of AI through the Lens of Dialectic of Enlightenment.

  • Moderator: Lennard Landgraf

  
  02.30pm - Break

  03.00pm - Panel:

  • Neda Atanasoski - AI Between Annihilation and Life

  • Kalindi Vora - Potential Humans (Potential AIs)

  • Moderator: Markus Gabriel

  
  05.00pm - Wrap-Up