Programs : Brochure

How is AI a social justice issue? Can AI ever be an ethical tool in creative production, critical thought, and collective liberation? In this class, we'll bring together conversations from the humanities and computational studies to discuss the biases and colonial legacies built into AI, its disproportionate environmental impacts, and its often invisible human labor. Amidst these problems, we'll examine projects that strive to use AI radically and ethically in such forms as critical mapping projects, data visualizations, and queer storytelling. As Appalachia emerges as a growing data center hub, we will focus intensively on AI's physical infrastructures and which communities AI serves, targets, and neglects worldwide and locally. Throughout, we will partner with the Atlanta Interdisciplinary AI Network to learn about current research and grassroots activism surrounding AI justice and how AI affects the South across regions, culminating in a week of travel to Atlanta. By the end of our course, students will devise and present proposals for the future of AI on Warren Wilson's campus.