The Humanities Institute Research cluster, “Humanities in the Age of AI,” is pleased to invite you to their lunch meeting scheduled for Monday, April 8th at 12pm in HUM 210. This month’s meeting will feature guest speakers Theresa Hice-Fromille (Ohio State University) and Sarah Papazoglakis (Lit PhD, ’18) on Afrofuturism for Tech: Creative Approaches to Design and Policy.

The Speculative Fictions and Futures Project was initiated in 2022 by Sarah Papazoglakis and Theresa Hice-Fromille. With an initial archive of 39 speculative fiction texts, the first stage of the project identified 10 common themes for an inclusive metaverse. The Afro-, Latinx-, Indigenous-, and Asian-futurist texts analyzed explore many marginalized perspectives on the hopes, fears, and challenges brought forth by emerging technologies. The project’s 25 recommendations provide builders (digital artists, computer scientists, linguists, policy experts, etc.) with concrete suggestions and real-life examples to implement in metaverse construction. The focus of this presentation is on the ways the project data can be used to creatively consider a pressing issue: the ethical codes that will shape the construction and use of emerging technologies. Incorporating lessons from diverse speculative texts encourages cultural inclusivity in ways that solely focusing on existing legal frameworks cannot.

SPEAKER BIOS

Theresa Hice-Fromille (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Geography at The Ohio State University with a PhD in Sociology and designated emphases in CRES and Feminist Studies from UC Santa Cruz. In 2022 she completed a summer THI public humanities fellowship with Meta’s Reality Labs where she co-developed a diverse speculative fictions archive that critically taxonomizes the technologies and futures portrayed in Afro-, Indigenous-, Asian-, and Latinx-futurist cultural productions. Throughout 2022 and 2023 she led presentations and equity workshops for developers that draw on insights garnered from this archive to inspire equitable and conscientious technological innovation. She is currently extending this work to include youth participatory action research (YPAR) and workshops for young people in the so-called “Silicon Heartland.”

Sarah Papazoglakis holds a PhD in Literature from University of California, Santa Cruz and is currently a Trust Strategist at Meta’s Reality Labs. In this role, she builds privacy and responsible innovation frameworks for emerging VR technologies and bridges the gap between AI research and consumer product use. Sarah draws from her humanities PhD to help product and engineering leaders imagine and define positive social impacts of future technologies and scope the requirements needed to build privacy- and trust-by-design into foundational product architectures.

The research cluster boasts a diverse group of core participants. This includes six esteemed faculty members from various disciplines, graduate students representing politics, history, literature, philosophy, feminist studies, and film and visual studies, and undergraduate scholars from computer science, computational media, and creative writing. To learn more about current cluster projects and further information about upcoming speakers visit: https://thi.ucsc.edu/clusters/humanities-in-the-age-of-artificial-intelligence/

The Humanities Institute (THI) will graciously cater lunch for this meeting. Once we have obtained our meals, we will gather and take our seats. The first 10 minutes have been set aside to elucidate the cluster’s overview. Following this, we will go ahead with individual introductions. After a short five-minute recess, speakers will commence their presentations, anticipated to last for approximately 20 minutes. A structured dialogue on the topic will follow.

For those who prefer to schedule in advance, please note the dates for our brown bag meetings throughout the academic year: 10/2 (lunch provided), 11/6, 12/11, 1/8 (lunch provided), 2/12, 3/4, 4/8 (lunch provided), and 5/6.

THI will graciously cater on the three specified dates. For the remaining meetings, attendees are cordially invited to bring their lunch.