Join us for our monthly Frid-ai Reading Group! This November, we’ll be visited by Dr. Rachel Kuo (Gender & Women’s Studies; Asian American Studies), who will lead an interactive discussion titled “A People’s History of AI and Resistance.”

This event will take place on Friday, November 20 from 10:00am-11:30am in the University Club, Room 313.

Complete the form linked below to join the email list for AI&U’s Frid-ai monthly reading group. We use this email list to send information about monthly topics and distribute reading materials in advance of our Friday meetings.

A People’s History of AI and Resistance

“The conditions and the very existence of social movements enable participants to imagine something different.” – Robin D.G. Kelley, 2002

Contemporary AI technologies expand new formations of racial capitalism. Cedric Robinson describes racial capitalism as the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society, pursuing racial directions alongside social ideology. As a mode of analysis, racial capitalism draws attention to entanglements of geospatial racial and imperial violences as well as unfolds an insurgent politics.  

As social movements generate new knowledge, theories, and questions about society, this session engages histories and presents of different movements including labor organizing, internationalist feminist struggles, environmental justice, police and prison abolition, and anti-war and militarism campaigns as they intersect with technological development (i.e. automation, algorithmic prediction, to generative AI). Join us for an interactive timeline activity and discussion to collectively map different histories and theoretical frameworks. 

Rachel Kuo (she/her/hers) writes, teaches, and researches race, feminist politics, social movements, and digital technology. Her book Movement Media: In Pursuit of Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2025) brings together archival research and ethnographic fieldwork to demonstrate how technologies enhance and foreclose possibilities for political organization across uneven racial and class difference. She works closely with community partners in developing her research, and her longer-term research goals and questions center and engage emergent questions and practices from grassroots social movements. Her research has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Social Science Research Council. She is a founding member and current affiliate of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies and also a co-founder of the Asian American Feminist Collective. She is co-editor of the anthology We Are Each Other’s Liberation: Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities (Haymarket Books, 2025). Her writing has also been published in Media, Culture, and Society, Political Communication, Social Media and Society, New Media and Society, Journal of Communication, and Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. She has also co-edited the World Without Cages and Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities projects with the Asian American Writer’s Workshop.  She has a PhD and MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University, and BA in Journalism from the University of Missouri.