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Critical AI Studies? Conference

Date Start
Date End
October 10, 2026
Location
Henley Hall, 1st floor

 Free Event - All Welcome

 

  Overview

Join us at the Critical AI Studies? Conference, hosted by the Center for the Humanities and Machine Learning. This two-day event brings together scholars of technology, culture, art and politics to discuss the impact of artificial intelligence on humanistic discourse. This event features keynote talks, research presentations, and interdisciplinary discussions on the societal implications of using AI to create, interpret, and understand information and culture.
 

 Program 

   
   

Friday,

October 9
   

8:30am

Breakfast
   

9:15am

Welcome
  Chancellor Dennis Assanis
   

9:30am

Introductory Remarks
  Fabian Offert and Owen Leonard, UC Santa Barbara
   

10:00am

Panel 1
 

Moderator: Fabian Offert

From Corporeal to Corpora: Latent Diffusion and the Neural Economy

Eryk Salvaggio, University of Cambridge

Beyond the Output: Interpreting Intellectual Agency in AI-Mediated Practice
Nafisa Baba-Ahmed, King's College London

Technical Hermeneutics
James Dobson, Dartmouth College
   

11:30am

Coffee Break
   

11:45am

Panel 2
 

Moderator: Owen Leonard

Lure of the Literal
Tyler Shoemaker, Texas A&M

On the Ontology of Number, or the Limits of Structuralism
Jonah Henkle, UC Irvine

Features of You: Tracing the Featurisation of Publics through Paradigmatic Shifts in the Evolution of Recommender Systems
Anna Schjøtt, Roskilde University
   

1:30 pm

Presenter Lunch
   

2:30pm

Panel 3
 

Moderator: Rita Raley

Paranoid Reading and AI Output
Dez Miller, Emory University

Free Indirect Doxa: Formalist Techniques for Critical AI Studies
Gabriel Hankins, Clemson University
   

4:00pm

 Coffee Break
   

4:15pm

Keynote by Stephanie Dick, Simon Fraser University
   
   

Saturday, 

October 10
   

8:30am

 Breakfast
   

9:00am

Panel 4
 

Moderator: Fabian Offert

Beyond Bias: Critical AI Studies, Race, and Political History
Jason Ludwig, UC Santa Barbara

Political Monolingualism: LLM-Generated Narratives under Role‑Prompted Geopolitical Perspectives (Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and US)
Xuenan Cao, San Francisco Bay University

AI Timescales: Critical Listening to the Microtemporalities of Autoregressive and Diffusion Language Models
Sal Hagen, University of Amsterdam / New York University
   

10:30am

 Coffee Break
   

10:45am

Panel 5
 

Moderator: Owen Leonard

Latent Worlds: AI and the Novel
Hannes Bajohr, UC Berkeley

Surface Reading with an (Awkward) Laugh: Humor as a Method for Critical AI Studies
Pavel Savgira, UC Los Angeles

 

 Organizers

  • Fabian Offert, History and Theory of Digital Humanities, UCSB

  • Rita Raley, English, UCSB

 Speakers

  • Dennis Assanis - UC Santa Barbara

  • Fabian Offert - UC Santa Barbara

  • Owen Leonard - UC Santa Barbara

  • Eryk Salvaggio - University of Cambridge

  • Nafisa Baba-Ahmed - King's College London

  • James Dobson - Dartmouth College

  • Tyler Shoemaker - Texas A&M

  • Jonah Henkle - UC Irvine

  • Anna Schjøtt - Roskilde University

  • Rita Raley - UC Santa Barbara

  • Dez Miller - Emory University

  • Gabriel Hankins - Clemson University

  • Stephanie Dick - Simon Fraser University

  • Jason Ludwig - UC Santa Barbara

  • Xuenan Cao - San Francisco Bay University

  • Sal Hagen - University of Amsterdam / New York University

  • Hannes Bajohr - UC Berkeley

  • Pavel Savgira - UC Los Angeles

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