S&F 51 Feminist Futures Beyond AI: Refusing Inevitability

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 conference is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

The opening plenary and keynote address will be live-streamed, recorded, and published on . The livestreaming link will be posted on the BCRW website shorty before the conference.

Live ASL interpretation will be provided. For additional accessibility needs, please email [email protected].

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.

For full conference information and schedule please visit the

Info: Welcome by Maja Horn (Director, BCRW and Professor and Chair, Department of Spanish and Latin American Cultures, Barnard College) and Sandra Moyano Ariza (Associate Director for Research, BCRW)

Info: Understanding AI Infrastructure: Empire, Eugenics, and Extraction

Info: Workshop topics will include environmental extraction, eugenicist technologies, data centers and supply chains, militarization and warfare, gender and deepfake technology, and education and labor

Info: Wendy H. K. Chun (Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media, Professor in the School of Communication, and Director of the Digital Democracies Institute, Simon Fraser University) Caroline Running Wolf (Co-Founder and Director, First Languages AI Reality (FLAIR))
Moderated by Patricia Clough (Professor Emerita of Sociology and Women’s Studies, The Graduate Center and Queens College, CUNY)

Event venue & nearby stays

Diana Event Oval, Barnard College, 3009 Broadway, New York, United States

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.

Get the app →

Discover more events by tag