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                Call for Papers: Critical Borders: Radical (Re)visions of AI
19th and 20th October 2021

Hosted by the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) and
the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies, University of
Cambridge.



Keynote: Ruha Benjamin

Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, Director of
the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab and author of Race After Technology:
Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code.


Conference theme overview

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.

By “radical” we mean all manner of anti-racist, feminist, inclusive,
queer,
justice-focused scholarship that accounts for the intersectional nature of
power. We welcome all kinds of interventions with broad and differing
stances towards what constitutes radical work and where its priorities lie.
For example, in its critique of power, feminist scholarship, methods and
activism has robustly interrogated conditions of marginality and the
shifting dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. It has provided a set of
methodologies to examine how borders emerge, who these borders include and
who they exclude, and the radical politics that arise within these border
zones. Feminist, anti-racist, and queer scholarship by scholars like Sara
Ahmed and Gloria Anzaldúa has illuminated the formative role of emotions in
generating bodily and national borders (Ahmed 2004) and provided
groundbreaking re-imaginings of the border and what it means (Anzaldúa
2007). We are interested in a wide variety of critical approaches to AI
from the margins that interrogate how i) AI at the border and ii) the
bordering processes of AI, differentially affect and produce disabled,
queer, gendered, and racialised subjects.


Call for Papers

We invite radical (re)visions of AI at, with, and through the concept and
the material site of the border. We are structuring the conference around
the following five themes and we strongly encourage applicants to suggest
papers that speak to one or more of these themes in order to develop
fruitful discussions at panels:


   - The Prison as Border
   - AI, Nationalism and National Borders
   - Bodily Borderlands
   - Fiction and Fact
   - Liminality


The first theme is ‘The Prison as Border: AI, Carceral Technologies and
Prison Abolition’. Driven by Angela Davis and Gina Dent’s argument that
‘the prison is itself a border...that un-does the illusions of the powerful
nation-states on the one hand and the seeming disorganization and chaos of
capital's travels on the other’, we ask how AI technologies contribute to
the ‘specific political economy’ of the prison (Davis and Dent 2001:
1236-1237). Papers under this theme might examine topics like the
co-development of military technologies and policing tools, or the
globalisation of AI security regimes and technologies.

The second theme is ‘AI, Nationalism, and the Borders of the Nation
State’.
Papers might examine how AI development feeds into a colonial logic of
expanding the national “frontier” through narratives of progress; how the
refraction of AI across borders may fundamentally challenge the power of
the state; or how AI nationalism retrenches national processes of
bordering. Papers may also focus on the increasing use of AI technologies,
such as biometrics, to define the borders of the nation-state, and the use
of these technologies in spaces like border control and immigration
detention centres.

The third theme is ‘Bodily Borderlands’. How does AI trouble the
boundaries
between the body and technology, the fleshly and the machinic? More
importantly, how does AI trouble the concept of “the body” in and of
itself? Conceptual borders between bodies, hardware, and software have
inhibited accurate theorisations of how discrimination is encoded into AI.
Papers could therefore explore what the de-stabilisation of the distinction
between hardware and software (Frabetti 2014) can contribute to the
articulation of encoded injustice. Papers could also examine human-AI
inferfaces and ecologies, feminist and anti-racist (re)visions of the
posthuman, tactile and affective technologies, contemporary interpretations
of cyborg theory, and how new and emerging technologies push ordinary
notions of embodiment to their logical limits.

The fourth theme is ‘Fiction and Fact’, interrogating the dynamic
interplay
between AI technologies and narratives, stories, and imaginaries about AI.
Papers could examine the border between fiction and fact by demonstrating
how science fiction directly influences AI production and public
understandings of AI, or how AI technologies generate new modes of creative
production and storytelling. They could also examine the inequalities in
who is represented in stories about AI and who tells stories about AI, how
this affects the production of AI technologies, and how these imbalances
could be addressed.

The fifth theme is ‘Liminality’, and examines how AI’s classificatory
procedures create spaces of illegibility and in betweenness. Papers could
examine how data collection processes and machine vision render certain
subjects illegible or semi-legible, and interrogate both the perils and the
potentials of these positions of (il)legibility. Papers could also examine
how AI creates spaces of temporal suspension, or states of purgatory, with
(mis-)read subjects existing outside of social time.


Conference format

The conference will take place as a hybrid event, with attendees having the
option to attend online or in person, depending on the status of the
COVID-19 pandemic. If it would not be safe or possible to hold any aspect
of the conference in person, the conference will be shifted to an entirely
virtual format. The event will be a mix of panels, which this CFP invites
contributions to, and invited talks. If possible, we hope to include film
screenings, exhibitions of artwork, and demonstrations of new and
innovative technologies.


Submission Guidelines

Please upload a 300 word abstract to the Critical Borders submission form,
available here
.
Abstracts must be submitted by June 11th, 2021. Presentations should last
20 minutes. Please email any questions to criticalborders@lcfi.cam.ac.uk.
We will notify you regarding the status of your submission by June 30th,
2021.



Programme Committee


   - Dr Stephen Cave, Executive Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the
   Future of Intelligence;
   - Dr Kanta Dihal, Senior Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for
   the Future of Intelligence and Project Lead for the Global AI Narratives
   and Decolonizing AI research projects;
   - Professor Jude Browne, Director of the University of Cambridge Centre
   for Gender Studies and Principal Investigator for the Gender and
   Technology Project;
   - Dr Eleanor Drage, Research Associate for the Gender and Technology
   Project;
   - Dr Kerry Mackereth, Research Associate for the Gender and Technology
   Project;
   - Tonii Leach, Research Assistant for the Global AI Narratives project

*This conference is generously funded by the Obert C. Tanner Lectures on
Artificial Intelligence and Human Values; Christina Gaw; the Leverhulme
Centre for the Future of Intelligence; and the University of Cambridge
Centre for Gender Studies. *

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