"Artificial Intelligence: Propositions from the Arts + Humanities" is a series of lectures by artists and scholars whose work foregrounds the ethical obligations arising from the simulation of human intelligence and increased surveillance. These events engage the Society of Fellows 2025-26 annual theme, AI: Creativity + Intelligence + Automation.
This Digital Dialogue is between feminist STS scholars Neda Atanasoski University of Maryland) and Jennifer Rhee (Virginia Commonwealth University).
What does it mean that AI is increasingly evaluated by how it feels rather than how it reasons? This dialogue between feminist STS scholars will discuss what it means to develop “vital intelligences” as a counter to Silicon Valley’s dreams of Artificial General Intelligence that can stand in for friendship, care, and intimacy. It will address feminist approaches to intelligence as embodied, unruly, and relational, while staying attentive to the material conditions that make contemporary AI possible.
Moderator: Kris Paulsen, Associate Professor of History of Art (Ohio State)
Neda Atanasoski is Professor and Chair of the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park and Associate Director of Education for the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland (AIM). Atanasoski’s interdisciplinary research has focused on feminism and AI, feminist and critical race approaches to science and technology studies, AI and the future of work, militarism, and human rights and humanitarianism. She is the author of Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity (2013), co-author of Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (2019), and co-editor of Postsocialist Politics and the Ends of Revolution (2022) and Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen (2025).
Jennifer Rhee is Associate Professor of English and founder and co-director of the AI Futures Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research focuses on technoimaginaries across AI systems and cultural forms; AI and labor; AI’s infrastructures and ecologies; and how contemporary algorithmic systems reproduce histories of race, gender, and (dis)ability. She is the author of The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor (2018) and co-editor of Informatics of Domination (2025) and The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science (2020).