If you would like to present your work, engage in a discussion, and receive feedback from the PCAI group, email us! (PCAI email at the bottom of the website)

Check back in October!

Turner, F. (2019) Machine Politics: The rise of the internet and a new age of authoritarianism. In: Harper’s Magazine (January 2019) 25-33 https://fredturner.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj27111/files/media/file/turner-machine-politics-harpers-magazine-2019-01.pdf

Interview with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, authors of “End Times Fascism – and the Fight for the Living World“ in the Blood in the Machine podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rR5UjU3k7Ts https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-may-kill-all-humans-industry-leaders

Sustainable to Whom? In-Situ AI and Peasant Struggles in Colombia

Many 'AI for sustainability' initiatives pursue ambitious goals such as emissions reduction, yet local impacts and alternative approaches have been largely overlooked. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Colombia, this talk analyses two initiatives: one by Microsoft in the Amazon and another by peasant communities in the High Andes. Through this analysis, it traces the emergence of 'in-situ AI', highlighting its capacity to engage with local ecological struggles and address environmental injustices. Nevertheless, questions remain about the capacity of in-situ AI to address urgent, planetary-scale environmental challenges.

More information about the speaker: https://slehuede.me

Cyborgs, care robots, robodogs: is the idea of relations to machines feminist? 

Feminist philosophy in general has paid particular attention to relationality, as a reaction to the Western Enlightenment ideal of atomistic rational selves that has served to exclude many, including women. For some feminists, this humanist ideal places women on the side of the non-humans and grounds the need for a posthuman philosophy of interconnected and interrelated beings. But in a world where machines are so deeply intertwined with capitalist exploitation and masculinist ideologies, is it furthering feminist purposes to consider that we have relations to machines?

Eloïse Soulier is a PhD candidate and research associate in the Ethics in IT Research Group at the University of Hamburg, chaired by Professor Judith Simon. Her dissertation work explores relational conceptions of autonomy and what these can contribute to the discourse on human autonomy in the context of digital technologies, drawing from feminist moral philosophy. More broadly, drawing from feminist epistemology and feminist philosophy of language, she researches the ways in which our conceptual choices shape the – digital - realities we live in, and whether and how we can act on it. 

Recent publications: 

Soulier, Eloïse Changyue. "Should we speak of machine agency? A case against conceptual extension." Ethics and Information Technology 28.1 (2026): 17. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-026-09893-2.

Branford, J., Soulier, E., & Fichtner, L. (2025). Generative AI and democratic culture. Philosophy & Technology, 38(3), 123. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-025-00953-x.

Kraft, A., & Soulier, E. (2024, June). Knowledge-enhanced language models are not bias-proof: Situated knowledge and epistemic injustice in AI. In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 1433-1445). https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3630106.3658981

We will read The deep border, Louise Amoore 2022 https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1215811.

We also suggest as complementary reading Chapter 2 of Petra Molnar's 2024 book, The Walls Have Eyes.

Epistemic Truth and AI: a Feminist Epistemology reading from a Critique of ‘Objectivity’

This work-in-progress presentation is on the first/second chapters of my PhD dissertation. I work on feminist and decolonial epistemologies, applied to AI reflections on ethics through  an empirical case-study in a research centre in the UK. (i) My first argument is about the belief that mathematically driven technologies can be more 'objective' in their showcasing of reality. This grants epistemic authority to engineers of AI technologies, which sort of erases the importance of subjective experiences within the making of AI systems. Therefore, (ii) this influences people's true perceptions of reality, which is often conflated with objectivity (objectivity <-> reality). This reinforces the general view that AI is socially preferential for the good of humanity, and pushes for a positivist account of reality in the Global North. I finally (iii) explore the possibility for a contextualist framework of truth through the experience of AI, to 1) restore objectivity as situated assumptions, 2) to nuance the impact of AI technologies to create meaning within social reality.

Hayles, N. Katherine, 'Technosymbiosis: Figuring (Out) Our Relations to AI', in Jude Browne, and others (eds), Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines (Oxford, 2023; online edn, Oxford Academic, 23 Nov. 2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192889898.003.0001

Drage, E., & Frabetti, F. (2023). The Performativity of AI-powered Event Detection: How AI Creates a Racialized Protest and Why Looking for Bias Is Not a Solution. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 49(5), 1045-1072. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439231164660

To wrap up the academic year, we organise a final reading and discussion session on the question ‘What’s ‘Good’ in ‘Good AI’? We will be discussing a chapter from Simon Lindgren’s Critical Theory of AI (2023) and an article written by Mona Simion entitled "Two Dilemmas for Value-Sensitive Technological Design" (2024) in the Feminist Philosophy and Emerging Technologies handbook. The aim is to (notably) discuss our preconceptions of what a 'good', less harmful or evaluative AI could be/is thought to be in our current neoliberal economy.

10.45               Welcome

11:00               Introduction (Judith Campagne and Marilou Niedda)

Session 1         Chair: Judith Campagne

11:15 – 11:45 Anthony Longo (Antwerp University): ““Un-Boxing the Algorithm: A Phenomenological Response to the "Black Box Metaphor".”

11:45 – 12:15 Eloïse Soulier (University of Hamburg), “Concepts, normativity and AI: two approaches”

12:15 – 12:30 Break

Session 2         Chair: Eloïse Soulier

12:30 – 13:00 Judith Campagne (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), “Contesting the Contesting of Automation”

13:00 – 13:30 Kim Ann Woodley (Ruhr University Bochum), “Debunking the historical stigmatisation of emotions in computational emotion recognition”

13:30 – 14:15 Lunch

Session 3        Chair: Kim Ann Woodley

14:15 – 14:45 Heather McKnight (Brighton): "Nano-Utopian Temporalities in The Darkness of the Lived AI - Exploring Intimacy, Identity, Language and Law" [online]

14:45 – 15:15 Marilou Niedda (Utrecht University) “Epistemology of ignorance and datafication – To interrogate the necessity for secrecy in AI through marginalised groups’ experiences”

15:15 – 15:30 Break

Session 4         Chair: Marilou Niedda

15:30 – 16:00 Mykhaylo Bogachov (Maastricht University), “Understanding fair synthetic data: a normative perspective.”

16:00 – 16:30 Michiel De Proost (UGent), “AI ethics and the diversity of forms of life: A feminist perspective”

16:30                Wrap up and Farewell

Organisation: Marilou Niedda (Utrecht), Eloïse Soulier (Hamburg), Marte Henningsen (Maastricht), Kim Ann Woodley (Bochum), Judith Campagne (Brussel). With support of the Centre for Ethics and Humanism (ETHU), Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

On the 9th of April, we are excited to welcome Asher Kessler, who will present his latest paper "Longtermism, Big Tech, and the Rebalancing of Historical Time: A Benjaminian Critique", in which he discusses the perception and valuation of time in the big tech industry in the Silicon Valley.

Asher is currently finishing his PhD at LSE in the Media and Communications department. His research focuses on Facebook/Meta, where he examines how high-level actors in and around the company came to think and speak about time, space, and their ability to change the world around them. He analyses how actors in and around Facebook/Meta utilise the language and times of progress and exponentiality to produce a sense of historical time which is preoccupied with the future.

For more information about his research, you can consult his website: https://asherkessler.com/

There will be a 20-minute presentation followed by a Q&A and discussion.

Plant, Sadie, From “Scattered brains, neurotics” to “Intuition”, then from “Wetware, dryware, silicon” to “quanta”. In Zeros + Ones: Digital Culture Women and the New Technoculture. 1998.

Adam, Alison, Chapter 9 “The Ethical Dimension of Cyberfeminism.” In Reload/Rethinking Women + Cyberculture, 158-174. Edited by Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth, 2002.

Katz, Yarden. “Artificial Whiteness.” In Artificial Whiteness. Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence, by Yarden Katz, 153-182. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020

D’Ignazio, Catherine; Klein, Lauren. F. “Collect, Analyze, Imagine, Teach.” In Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, 49-73. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2023

Browne, Jude. “AI and Structural Injustice. A Feminist Perspective.” In Feminist AI. Critical Perspectives on Data, Algorithms and Intelligent Machines, edited by Jude Browne, Stephen Cave, Eleanor Drage, and Kerry McInery, 328-346. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023.

Gebru, Timnit, and Émile P. Torres. 2024. “The TESCREAL Bundle: Eugenics and the Promise of Utopia through Artificial General Intelligence”. First Monday 29 (4). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13636.