Future Networks talks: Jennifer Rhee

As part of the Future Networks event, Jennifer Rhee will give a keynote address titled "Not Inevitable: Counternarratives for Other AI Futures". The talk counters widespread narratives that proclaim AI as inevitable, predictive, objective, authoritative, automated, and immaterial. Weaving together analyses of AI systems, tech narratives, policy, artworks, and fictions, Rhee's talk presents research that refutes these narratives and offers counternarratives that foreground AI technologies’ social impacts, ethical risks, and environmental impacts. These corrective counternarratives more accurately reflect how AI systems work and don’t work, how and whom these systems harm, and how these systems’ seemingly inevitable dominance has been repeatedly – and at times successfully – challenged on local scales.

Bio

Jennifer Rhee (Virgina Commonwealth University) is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and co-director of the AI Futures Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research focuses on race, gender, disability, and labor across robotics and AI technologies, tech narratives, visual and performance art, and speculative fiction. Her most recent book is the experimental co-edited collection, Informatics of Domination (Duke University Press, 2025).

Event

Future Networks is a two-day conference happening at York University in Toronto, Canada. The aim of the event is to provide tools to challenge present-day constellations of networked power and demonstrate how new, alternative digital networks can shape the future. The event is organized by Robert W. Gehl (York University) and Tero Karppi (University of Toronto Mississauga). https://future-networks.ca/index.html

Time and Location

October 30, 2025, 10-11am

519 Kaneff Tower, VP of Research Suite, York University

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