Appearances & Discussions

I appeared at the York Festival of Ideas in collaboration with the Gender and Technology Centre Cambridge and Dr Eleanor Drage. This interactive discussion focused on the bridge between critical theory and the AI indusry, values and desires for living within and alongside AI systems. 
 

The questions driving the discussion were:

• What salient justice issues, or almost intractable issues embedded in the way industry works, help to outline the need for an intersectional feminist approach to artificial intelligence? 

• What is a desire in relation to future forms of living together? How do you encourage and create an individual sense of autonomy to ask: what do I value? Is there a kind of epistemic injustice involved when it comes to understanding how to talk about how we want to live? 

• What are the kinds of desires or values that an intersectional feminist lens presents for demanding how to live together among artificial intelligence?

• What are the critical grey areas when it comes to putting in the groundwork to create an AI ethics?

• Feminism is justice work. Do you think emerging technology, its surrounding industry and future forms of living have much to do with justice work?

• To what extent does imagination overlap with ethical questions in your work – what are the kinds of epistemic leaps needed? 

In collaboration with the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies Cambridge and Dr Inanna Hamati-Ataya, I produced and appeared in a discussion exploring global futures, the nature of transformations through the history of agricultural breakthroughs and the relationship between politics, knowledge, deep history and understanding future transformations. 

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The questions driving the discussion were:

• Your work traces the wisdoms we have won and lost along the way. What does combining nature and society and back again do? Is it about trying to tell a different story; “a common story” that captures everything we are: as natural and social?

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• What lead to you to looking closely at the ways knowledge is formed and constituted in order to create a new understanding of the global?

• What is the meaning of this history, this global story? Is this a necessary question to go forward with, to come up against the ethical horizons in the present?

• Mathematical modelling, etc, what does the “rise” or centred nature of these methodologies when it comes to making sense of the climate crisis; movement and migration etc, mean for knowledge production? Where does it leave communities, people, individuals, wisdom?

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• Entangled histories of emerging technology, including agricultural practices, climate crisis and innovation: throughout your work you have focused on agrarian orders and agricultural production. Why?

• Can you tie this to questions around emerging problems and the endeavour to create solutions to crises. Climate crisis is a disruptor of patterns of innovation. But the contemporary crisis makes clear that we can no longer solve modern problems solely, or perhaps even primarily, with the same categories that created them. In your work, do you think about the potential paths and trajectories that could have been? Can these ‘could have beens’ also be knowledge about us?

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• In your work you are thinking on a long temporal scale. The relationship between deep history and the question of ‘what we have become’ creates questions around whether certain models were the only ones possible, and whether they have made us what we are, and if that is the case, whether it’s possible to think outside of them. How do you design solutions to transformations that now constitute a threat in the next 50 years? How does all of this complicate the notion of transformation and resistance?

• Climate crisis is a disruptor of patterns of innovation. But the contemporary crisis makes clear that we can no longer solve modern problems solely, or perhaps even primarily, with the same categories that created them. In your work, do you think about the potential paths and trajectories that could have been? Can these ‘could have beens’ also be knowledge about us?

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An interactive discussion and workshop with Professor Tamar Makin and artists on the role of brain plasticity, design and adaptability along the themes of future applications of prosthetics. 

I brought together Experimental Physicist Antonella de Santos and historian Franziska Kohlt for a collaborative, interdiscpilinary discussion focused on the kinds of “tools” do we have to make and remake - even dismantle! - our relationship with the future.
 

A range of questions were asked: 

• How do we know what we know?
   

• And how can we go beyond that?
   

• What are the (metaphorical) tools relevant for futures thinking?
   

• How does discovery happen, and how does it shape understanding of becoming future?
   

• What is the value in exploring unknowns?
   

• The search for new physics beyond the standard model is an experiment that leaves many questions unanswered. What role do questions play in discovery? How do you go about creating the questions for experiments?
   

• How do you view discoveries? Are they gateways; starting points; end points; new knowledge; mistakes; coincidences?

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