Upcoming Online Panel: (Un)Designing Posthuman Futures of AI
We are pleased to invite you to our very first online panel, co-hosted with the Posthumanism Research Institute, titled “(Un)Designing Posthuman Futures of AI,” taking place on Tuesday, September 29, 2026, from 1:00 PM–2:00 PM EST.
The panel brings together Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed (University of Toronto), Heidi Biggs (Georgia Institute of Technology), and Matt Ratto (University of Toronto), and will be moderated by our founding director, Çağdaş Dedeoğlu.
The panel will be of interest to researchers, scholars, practitioners, and students working across posthumanities, AI and technology studies, environmental humanities, STS, design, and futures studies.
Panel Description
Long-dominant paradigms that are rooted in anthropocentrism, Enlightenment rationality, and techno-solutionism are proving inadequate for addressing the challenges ahead in AI system design efforts. This online panel examines the entanglements of posthumanism, sustainability, and AI, exploring what it means to design AI systems in a way that is ecologically attuned, ethically distributed, and socially just and beyond those dominant paradigms in an era of planetary crisis and socio-technical complexity. The panel explores how responsibility might be reconceptualized to account for distributed agency, multispecies interdependence, and the material-discursive entanglements of human and nonhuman actants and examines the implications of this shift for AI-related industries. The panel will also engage the concept of agentic AI—systems that participate in shaping outcomes through semi-autonomous, relational, or co-constitutive dynamics.
Speakers:
Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed (University of Toronto)
Heidi Biggs (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Matt Ratto (University of Toronto)
Moderator:
Çağdaş Dedeoğlu (Yorkville University & The Posthuman Lab)
Supporting organisations:
Comments