In the ‘Feminist AI and Collective Wellbeing’ symposium, we invite researchers, artists, and practitioners to explore and contest the promises and pitfalls of AI in shaping collective wellbeing.
Promises of AI include better societal wellbeing through improved healthcare, relieved workloads, or efficient usage of natural resources. Yet not everyone’s wellbeing counts evenly, as AI simultaneously depends on and disrupts collectivity, for instance, through its pressure on shared environmental resources, worker health, and data exploitation and extractivism. How can we reimagine these dynamics, and centre collective wellbeing so that it becomes a basis for caring and sustaining relationships around AI development and implementation?
Our goal is not to provide definitive answers or fixed definitions of wellbeing and collectivity, but to open a shared space for inquiry, provocation, and speculation. By foregrounding feminist, decolonial, and ecological perspectives, we aim to imagine futures in which AI development and adoption are aligned with collective wellbeing.
The symposium invites participants to explore how these relationships and entanglements might be reimagined, and how AI can be critically reshaped, reoriented, or even refused in pursuit of more collective and caring futures.
Through international keynotes and a workshop on art-based AI inquiry, we invite participants to reflect on these questions:
What collectives are prioritized in the development of AI? Whose wellbeing is valued, and whose is erased to maintain the wellbeing of others?
How can communities engage with AI on their own terms? What material resources, infrastructures, or type of data would they need to do so?
What collective futures and imaginaries might we create together, rooted in shared wellbeing rather than extractive logics?
Can AI ever be truly aligned with collective wellbeing, or are there cases where the most ‘caring’ act might be to refuse or resist AI altogether?
18 November - Part 1 | 10.00 – 15.00
Workshop on art-based AI inquiry for collective knowledge generation
Organizers: Feminist Generative AI Lab with Virginia Tassinari and Vera van der Burg
Guests: Soyun Park, Mafalda Gamboa, and Elvia Vasconcelos.
In this workshop, we explore art-based inquiry as an alternative form of knowledge generation, which can complement and enrich traditional approaches to research in AI. We invite participants to engage with new, unusual, artistic, and embodied forms of exploration, to reflect on the symposium theme.
Please note that the workshop has limited spots. Lunch is included.
18 November - Part 2 | 15.00 – 17.00
Keynotes + Discussion + Drinks
Please note you can choose to register only to this part of the symposium.
Details coming soon.
19 November | 10.00 – 17.00
PhD Day
Following the symposium on November 18th, we invite PhD candidates to join us for a dedicated day of peer exchange, collaborative feedback, and dialogue. The PhD Day offers PhD candidates working on topics such as AI, feminism, care, collectivity, sustainability, digital labor, and related themes an opportunity to continue explore the theme of the symposium in relation to their own research themes and practices in an interdisciplinary environment.
The PhD day program will include peer review sessions that allow participants to share work in progress and to receive feedback from their peers; interactive activities that addresses the challenges of working as a PhD researcher; as well as community building and networking opportunities.
Details and registration coming soon.