Wendy gives Keynote at Critical Borders Conference, Cambridge

Wendy will be giving the keynote address at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies ‘Critical Borders: Radical (Re)visions of AI’ Conference.

The aim of this conference is to critically interrogate issues of bordering in artificial intelligence (AI). This conference examines both how AI operates at material borders, including national and bodily borders, and how AI produces or transgresses imagined, theoretical and ideological borders, such as categories of race, gender, age and class. Compelled by Gayatri Spivak’s insistence that we attend to borders (Spivak 2016), taking into account when border crossings are a violation and when they are pleasurable, we ask: what kinds of border-crossing are induced by AI, and what kinds are prohibited? Which borders does AI reinforce, and which borders does it render obsolete? We aim to explore the tension between the possibilities of transgressing boundaries, especially in the context of binary categorisation, and the risks of equating boundary subversion with emancipatory political practices. In particular, we are interested in scholarship that examines how AI’s transgression of boundaries can unintentionally entrench, rather than challenge, gendered and racialised norms.