Welcome to the Posthumanities Hub Seminar on ‘AI and the Posthumanities’ with an exciting list of speakers!

This event, engaging AI and non-AI researchers alike, aims to open up a space for the lively conversations on AI as a societal challenge for citizenship, the artistic imaginary, education, democracy, human and the more-than human, while mobilising various approaches, ranging from feminist and decolonial perspectives to sustainability and technology in society.

The seminar takes shape of a researchers’ ‘speed dating’ event, focused on exciting new perspectives on AI, where short (5 minute) presentations by each of the invited speakers will be followed by the joint discussion.

The session will be chaired by Lina Rahm, Adam Wickberg and Cecilia Åsberg, all from The Posthumanities Hub.

When: April 22, 2021, from 10:00-12:00 CEST. 

Where: On zoom. In order to take part in the seminar, please register by sending an email to the.posthumanities.hub@gmail.com by 20th April 2021 at noon (CEST) the latest.

Please see more info below.

Invited speakers:

Johannes Bruder is a researcher at the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures and the Critical Media Lab Basel. Johannes’s research targets infrastructures, technologies, and media that support epistemologies & empiricisms in art, design, science and their (sub)cultural distortions. His current research interests include interactions between psychological research and computing / AI, narratives and dispositifs of creative practice, and media studies of psychic life.

Teresa Ceratto-Pargman is associate professor (docent) of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at Stockholm university. Her research is situated at the intersection of Educational Technology and HCI. It seeks to contribute to the study of the increasing digitalisation of everyday practices and mainly to reflect on the opportunities and challenges that this process brings to epistemic and social practices in education. She is the PI of the WASP-HS research project “Ethical and Legal Challenges in Relationship to AI-driven Practices in Higher Education”.

Katherine Harrison is senior lecturer at the Department of Thematic Studies (Gender Studies) at Linköping university. Her research explores how material technical constraints and social norms intersect in the design and development of digital media technologies. She is currently engaged in two large research projects: “Robotic care practices: Creating trust, empathy and accountability in human-robot encounters” and “Sustainability means inclusivity: engaging citizens in early stage smart city development”

André Holzapfel is associate professor at the Media Technology and Interaction Design Department at KTH. His research is within the area of Sound and Music Computing, broadly focusing on analysis of audio and symbolic data as well as the analysis of motion capture signals. He is currently the PI of the WASP-HS-funded project “AI and the Artistic Imaginary: Socio-cultural consequences and challenges of creative-AI technology”. 

Åsa Johansson Palmkvist is a PhD student in Gender, Organisation and Technology in the Department of Industrial Economics and Management, KTH. Drawing on feminist theory, STS and organization studies, her PhD project aims at exploring how AI research links to the inclusion and exclusion of different people and enables and restricts specific ways of existing in this world.

Anne Kaun is professor in media and communication studies. Her research interests include media theory, mediated temporalities, algorithmic culture, automation and artificial intelligence from a humanistic social science perspective. She is currently leading the Swedish Network for Automated Decision-Making in the Public Sector, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. This network investigates the extensive implementation of automated decision-making in the welfare sector in Sweden to meet contemporary challenges including increasing costs and decreasing resources.

Cecilia Magnusson Sjöberg is Professor and Subject Director of Law and Information Technology at the Swedish Law & Informatics Research Institute, Stockholm University. In 1992 she was awarded a LL.D. degree, with a doctoral thesis addressing legal automation with special focus on digitalisation in public administration. She has many years of experience of legal system design and management, giving rise to issues around cyber security. As such, legal implications of e-government remain as one of her major fields of interest.

Simone Natale, is an Associate Professor at the University of Turin, Italy, and Assistant Editor of Media, Culture & Society. Natale’s research focuses broadly on media history, media theory and digital media. Simone is the author of the two monographs Deceitful Media: Artificial Intelligence and Social Life after the Turing Test (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture (Penn State University Press, 2016)

Jesper Olsson, is a Professor at Linköping University; his research explores the relationship between literature, art, and media – from phonographs to digital networks – and approaches media as ecologies and infrastructures in culture, society, and everyday life. Olsson is leading a number of research projects including the Linköping University-based research group Literature, Media Histories, and Information Cultures, covering questions of archives and databases, distribution and transmission, noise and meaning, inter- and trans-medial art, media technologies and cultural memory, media technologies and the history of the senses, bio-media, appropriation and remediation, trans- and post-literacy. Olsson is also the program director of the interdisciplinary research program The Seed Box.

Hannah Pelikan is a PhD Candidate at Linköping University. She won the graduation award of the faculty for electrical engineering, mathematics and computer science for her master thesis on the impact of robots on teamwork in the surgical operating room. Pelikan’s current projects involve Cozmo robots in family homes and autonomous buses in regular traffic. Hannah has previously published on the DaVinci surgical system and on the Nao robot. Her work contributes to the design of human-friendly robots that respect human interaction practices and thereby are more intuitive to interact with.

Bojana Romic, is an artist and media theorist. Romic is currently Marie Skłodowska Curie Seal of Excellence researcher and senior lecturer at Malmö University, working on a project The Robot as a Technocultural Icon. Her research is situated in the crossroads between audience studies, aesthetics of technology and image politics. 

Jenny Sundén is Professor at Karlstad University. Sundén’s work is situated in the intersection of digital media studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies (STS), feminist and queer theory, and affect theory. She currently works on questions of technological brokenness, disruption, and delay as a contribution to queer theory and queer lives, as well as on feminist uses of humour as forms of resistance in social media, focusing on how humour and laughter may rewire shame and acts of shaming.