In the Company of Strangers: AI and the Value of Estrangement
Dr. Alexa Alice Joubin, Professor of English at George Washington University
Monday, Feb. 2, weather permitting
4 p.m. – 5 p.m.
Combs 139
Reception to follow
About the talk: AI makes us strangers to ourselves in a productive manner. AI can produce uncertainties, but AI also compels us use estrangement as cognitive and affective intervention. We put our embodied perception and emotions on the line when we interact with human and more-than-human entities. This hands-on workshop addresses two of the challenges in our era: (1) data poverty despite informational abundance due to AI’s inequitable filtration, and (2) disempowerment through exclusion, which is caused by technological opacity. The solution to information inequity is open culture, which transforms us from mere consumers of AI to informed participants in the digital world. The antidote to opacity and exclusion is participatory justice through meta-cognition (the ability to reflect on one’s own thought processes).
About the speaker: Alexa Alice Joubin is a leading voice on AI, social justice, and higher education. She is Director of the Digital Humanities Institute and Professor of English, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Theatre, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures at George Washington University. She is a faculty of the Trustworthy AI Initiative and an affiliate at the NSF’s Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society. In 2024, she was named the inaugural Public Interest Technology Scholar.
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