iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

4. How to fight the implementation of AI across the university and the admin class

000

Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Rita Raley at UCSB: next steps for Critical AI Studies. 1. Replicability, how do we replicate or generalize from particular outputs 2. What is the critical or the critique in Critical AI if criticality has run out of steam 3. Critical study of the institution as part of the field

120

Reposted by Gabriel Hankins

"Makers of cars, airplanes, tobacco products and opioids have all been forced by lawsuits to change how they do business. They made their products safer, restricted access to them or both."

05718

Reposted by Gabriel Hankins

Ken Wissoker @kwissoker.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

So happy to see the always fabulous Sarah Sharma! Here with her super-smart and needed new book “Insufferable Tools: Feminism Against Big Tech” at the @dukepress.bsky.social booth at #4S2026

Author in grey jacket and black skirt holding their book at book display at 4S conference.

18619

"Every project for consolidating knowledge is also a constitution for our collective life" -- with mathematics as a key example.

Her STS book on automating mathematics / mathematical thinking in postwar US is forthcoming! look forward to it, very timely

110

Juan Meneses @dissentum.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Listening to Stephanie Dick: “Political Epistemologies of Computational Consolidation: Automating Mathematics and Reimagining Society” at Critical AI Studies?

111

Reposted by Gabriel Hankins

JOB ALERT: The English Department at UNC Charlotte is hiring a tenure-track Assistant Professor in African American and/or African Diaspora Literature. The position is *research-intensive* and the *teaching load is 2/2* See the full ad below 👇 Please repost and disseminate through your networks!

jobs.charlotte.edu

Assistant Professor of English in African-American and/or African Diaspora Literature

Assistant Professors are invested in working closely with and mentoring English undergraduate and graduate students, and fully participating in service to the English Department, with opportunities to...

156

Jim Casey @jimccasey1.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

(Rita and Fabian are quite clear that investigating mechanisms is itself a necessary step in AI critique, as @eryk.bsky.social 's talk on latent diffusion image models is showing as well: this is great /horrific on that cyberneticforests.substack.com/p/how-to-rea...)

030

Reposted by Gabriel Hankins

UC Santa Barbara is hiring! Asst Professor, Media Industries & AI recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF03168 The Dept of Film & Media Studies is super interdisciplinary and has many of my favorite new friends at UCSB. I am not involved in the search but happy to answer Qs about life here.

recruit.ap.ucsb.edu

Assistant Professor in Media Industries and AI

University of California Santa Barbara is hiring. Apply now!

013

Fabian Offert @zentralwerkstatt.org · 08/10/2026

I think you well framed one set of problems at the end in particular, but yeah it's a shared problem in both places, @zentralwerkstatt.org is keeping it open as well

020

Reposted by Gabriel Hankins

Tomorrow and Saturday at @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social, free and open to all. Stop by if you're in the area!

0163

be sure to check out the de Bolla Concept Lab volume / work on these questions in the 18th C! really useful breakdown of some of these terms.

000

@zentralwerkstatt.org -- As part of disciplinary or interdisciplinary formation -- key challenges for "Critical AI studies": (1) General questions of how a field forms (2) which tools, from which fields, are necessary for Critical AI (3) Discursive visibility, also in public

130

(4) How to render legible certain forms of political action? i.e. anti-data center organizing as one goal (5) Relation to the technical disciplines / how to engage with these, particularly explainable ML, NLP, where theories of language and new approaches are being developed.

000

My sense is that the Santa Barbara group is very much committed to decomposing mechanisms, material-semiotic specificity as @ritaraley.bsky.social and @zentralwerkstatt.org have argued -- vs as "AI as despositif" -- a contribution to "understanding AI as sociotechnical phenomenon" (Owen Leonard).

240

Very interesting to think about the framing here vs. the Duke Humanistic AI conference ably led by @richardjeanso.bsky.social and @hoytlong.bsky.social among others.

270

Here at the Critical AI Studies? conference at Santa Barbara -- we're still very much in formation here apparently. But it's quite clear that it's not quite just a Critical ML conference, focused on more technical mechanisms.

2141

pretty crazy Ryan -- look forward to the write-up here!

Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 07/10/2026

Reposted by Gabriel Hankins

I think more and more that @eduede.bsky.social has a crucial point. "Intelligence," "understanding," "writing" — AI is fragmenting these concepts by putting us in a position to see that the phenomena we thought they fused are only *correlated* and can be unbundled.

97514

Oh I love that -- smart! I'll be dunning you for examples -- for a fanfic / feminist small corpora critique class in my case

Yeah I worry about that too -- but the NLP world just moves too fast for my current setup, I'll need better linking / search to track papers there. Even one weekend of NLP+AI research at Duke has overloaded my current system for sure

000

It literally stopped working in any way for me -- but maybe that's changed -- Devonthink is pretty incredible now.

Oh interesting, I'll have to think about that one

Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Reposted by Gabriel Hankins

For every story like the Cornell gang rape, there are thousands more that couldn’t make it into the light. I wrote about a few dozen of them at one university in On the Wrong Side. The university’s treatment of survivors is eerily similar to what Jane Doe at Cornell experienced.

bookshop.org

On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence

"Bedera dispels deeply ingrained campus rape myths and puts the innate violence of the campus sexual assault reporting process into focus."--Jezebel"The book's grim conclusions are tempered with a hop...

2449148

Reposted by Gabriel Hankins

Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

The main reason you haven’t heard about campus sexual violence in a few years is because Trump and SCOTUS have made it much, much harder for survivors to come forward. You might vaguely remember that Title IX was a big battleground in his first term. And that we lost.

31878638

Reposted by Gabriel Hankins

Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Really important thread. If you're disturbed by the shameful news out of Cornell, please follow @nbedera.bsky.social and read her work about Title IX and the systems at US universities that support harassers and rapists, which are not unique to Cornell. Title IX and HR are not our friends.

1187

Reposted by Gabriel Hankins

Greg Barnhisel @gbarnhisel.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Jump on this, people--Sarah does such good, urgent, unique, sophisticated work.

053

oh damn I may need to do this too!

cmrn knzlmn @ckunzelman.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

What are DH / DLS / NLP folks using for notebooks now? The new Zotero is pretty good, Evernote is useless now, and I'm considering Devonthink once more -- the associated knowledge features seem pretty impressive.

552

Reposted by Gabriel Hankins

If you are a graduate student in the humanities (construed as broadly as possible), what is the MOST EXCITING book published in the last five years to you? Please repost if you’re not a graduate student!

29494485