Critical AI Studies? Conference

On October 9th and 10th, 2026, the Center for the Humanities and Machine Learning will host the Critical AI Studies? conference, bringing together scholars of technology, culture, art and politics to discuss the impact of artificial intelligence on humanistic discourse. The conference will begin on October 9th at 8:30 AM and conclude on October 10th at 12:15 PM; a complete schedule can be found below. All presentations will take place on the first floor of Henley Hall. All are welcome to attend.

Friday, October 9

08:30–09:15

Breakfast

09:15–09:30

Welcome

Chancellor Dennis Assanis

09:30–10:00

Introductory Remarks

Fabian Offert and Owen Leonard, UC Santa Barbara

10:00–11:30

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

11:30–11:45

Coffee Break

11:45–13:15

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

13:30–14:30

Presenter Lunch

14:30–16:00

Panel 3

Moderator: Rita Raley

Paranoid Readings of Personified Media
Dez Miller, Emory University

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

16:00–16:15

Coffee Break

16:15–17:30

Keynote by Stephanie Dick, Simon Fraser University

Political Epistemologies of Computational Consolidation: Automating mathematics and reimagining society

Saturday, October 10

08:30–09:00

Breakfast

09:00–10:30

Panel 4

Moderator: Owen Leonard

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

10:30–10:45

Coffee Break

10:45–12:15

Panel 5

Moderator: Fabian Offert

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