WGS Intellectual Forum: Pre-doctoral diversity fellows Misty De Berry + Judith Rodríguez
14E-304
Please RSVP to wgs@mit.edu. Lunch will be provided.
"Gender, Empire and Al" is a symposium and design workshop to both reflect on critical questions and design generative paths forward to addressing them. The day will start with a keynote by award-winning journalist and MIT alumna, Karen Hao, on her book "Empire of Al". Select MIT faculty will facilitate discussion groups to unpack problems outlined in Hao’s talk and possible solutions. Over lunch, we will hear from our second keynote speaker, Paola Ricaurte, who leads the Latin American Feminist Al Research Network and was named as one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in Al in 2025.
In the afternoon, we will hold hands-on design workshops to tackle specific issues like reproductive justice, Al and propaganda, technofasciscm, and biases in medical imaging. Attendees will also have the option to propose and work on designs of their own creation. We believe that together we can solve complex issues and generate more just and feminist visions for Al and society.
Djamila Ribeiro will highlight black feminist authors in Brazil and examine how they contributed to breaking hegemonic standards in academic circles. Djamila will provide context about several racist myths in Brazilian history and how pivotal feminist authors helped debunk these fallacies.
Workplaces have traditionally been viewed as “straight spaces” in which queer people passed. As a result, historians have directed limited attention to the experiences of queer people on the job. Queer Career rectifies this, offering an expansive historical look at sexual minorities in the modern American workforce.
This talk will consider how contestation around science and medicine appears in litigation and the role of courts in validating controversial, and often incorrect, ideas about abortion from fetal personhood, maternal life, and the safety of abortion.
This talk traces the political power of motherhood and childrearing in Arabic thought between 1850 and 1939. It shows how writers used ideas about childrearing (tarbiya in Arabic) to address key issues in modern social thought, such as freedom, labor, and democracy.
Learn how symbols intersect to represent and unite through alter art. Lennon Hernandez Wolcott will discuss historical and cultural elements to create an Ofrenda (an Offering), through personally crafted mini ofrenda shadow boxes (Nichos) and review the elements for Día de los Muertos (water, wind, earth, fire). Each participant will be shown how to make elements of a Nicho box and then assemble them to create their own.
Please join us in this book talk with Prof. Bruno Perreau. In “Spheres of Injustice”, Perreau studies anti-discrimination policies and politics in France and the US. He shows that reactionary groups abuse the notion of minority by demanding to be protected just as minorities are, while the notion of a “protected class” risks at times encouraging competition among minorities and the very concept of minority is being transformed.
