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On Thursday – Friday, 15–16 October 2026 at 09:00–17:30 CDT (14:00–22:30 UTC) each day, the Charles Babbage Institute (CBI) at the University of Minnesota hosts the virtual ‘MOSAICS Symposium.. MOSAICS is an acronym for ‘Meanings, Ontologies and Structures of Artificial Intelligence in Culture & Society’.
Themes include AI and mind, data ontologies, postcolonialism, social hierarchies, power imbalances, inequality and intersections (race, class, caste, gender, disability), cultural meanings, infrastructures, landscapes, work, users, human and machine interaction, reappropriations, and resistances.
DAY 1 – THURSDAY 15 OCTOBER 2026
09:00 CDT (14:00 UTC) — OPENING REMARKS AND LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Jeffrey Yost – Director, Charles Babbage Institute
09:10 CDT (14:10 UTC) — KEYNOTE SESSION I
Janet Vertesi – Princeton University – ‘”The Project of AI” and its Decoys: Observing a Political Economy in the Making’
Tiara Roxanne – Disruption Network Lab
Moderator: Anita Say Chan – University of Illinois
10:45 CDT (15:45 UTC) — SESSION I: ATTENTION AND RESISTANCE
Lauren Klein (Emory University), Derya Akbaba (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), Miriah Meyer (Linköping University) and Maria Antoniak (University of Colorado Boulder) – ‘Attention, Alignment and Other Feminist Concerns’
Mar Hicks – University of Virginia – ‘Computer People for Peace and Useful Histories of Data Backlash’
Cassius Adair – The New School
Moderator: Sareeta Amrute – The New School for Social Research
12:45 CDT (17:45 UTC) — SESSION II: LABOR SUBVERSION
Sayamsiddha – The New School – ‘Human Labor Behind AI: From Ghost Workers to Platformized Experts’
Jason Ludwig – University of California, Santa Barbara – ‘Beyond Bias: Computerized Racecraft and the History of Algorithmic Job-Matching’
Héctor Beltrán – Massachusetts Institute of Technology – ‘Platform Parasites: Using AI to Debug Nomadic Extraction’
Moderator: Gerardo Con Diaz – University of California, Davis
14:20 CDT (19:20 UTC) — SESSION III: NARRATIVE MATTERS
Bo An – Lingnan University – ‘Making IT Proper: A Critical Pre-History of Artificial Intelligence in the People’s Republic of China’
Pierre Schwarzer – New York University – ‘Liquidating Language: Generative AI and the Technical Conditions of Thought’
Vinay Brandon – University of Minnesota – ‘Defiant Protocols: Trust, Reputation, and Controversy in India’s Agentic Finance Landscape’
Moderator: Jeffrey Yost – University of Minnesota
16:00 CDT (21:00 UTC) — SESSION IV: INSTITUTIONAL POWER
Sananda Sahoo – University of Western Ontario – ‘Data Harm in Governmental (Ac)counting System’
Mayank Kejriwal – University of Southern California – ‘From Administrative Automation to Institutional Stewardship: Reimagining AI in the Research Office’
Avery Wiscomb (Virginia Tech) and Steven Gotzler (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) – ‘Pretrained: The University and the Making of AI’
Moderator: Ekaterina Babintseva – Carnegie Mellon University
DAY 2 – FRIDAY 16 OCTOBER 2026
09:00 CDT (14:00 UTC) — OPENING REMARKS
Jeffrey Yost – Director, Charles Babbage Institute
09:05 CDT (14:05 UTC) — SESSION V: PUBLIC CONCERNS
Margarita Boenig-Liptsin – ETH Zürich – ‘Constituting AI, Re-constituting Society’
Fergus Linley-Mota – Simon Fraser University – ‘Artificial Intelligence and the Making of “the Public”‘
Laine McCrory – New York University – ‘Care Over Code: AI Harms and Collective (In)Justice’
Moderator: Anita Say Chan – University of Illinois
10:45 CDT (15:45 UTC) — SESSION VI: CODED COGNITION
Jiantong Liao – Johns Hopkins University – ‘Tokens Without Concepts: Leibniz and the Calculable Characters of Large Language Models’
Yoehan Oh – Yale University – ‘The Memory/Intelligence Divide: A Manual/Intellectual, Raced, and Classed Hierarchy’
Yufei Qi – New York University – ‘Antinomies of Russian Formalism: For and Against the Automation of Language’
Moderator: Ekaterina Babintseva – Carnegie Mellon University
12:45 CDT (17:45 UTC) — SESSION VII: COMPUTING AND THE BODY
Juana Calina Becerra Sandoval – Harvard University – ‘Faith in Computers: Voice Biometrics and the Politics of Listening’
Jeff Nagy and Tiff Regaudie – York University – ‘Simulated Sadness: AI Psychodiagnostics, Synthetic Data, and Disability Politics’
Hanzhang (John) Ye – University of Minnesota – ‘Transforming Medicine for Computer Intelligence: Expert System, Traditional Chinese Medicine and Medical Expertise in the 1970s and 1980s China’
Moderator: Gerardo Con Diaz – University of California, Davis
14:20 CDT (19:20 UTC) — SESSION VIII: FALLIBILITY AND DISAGREEMENT
Aaron Mendon-Plasek – Purdue University – ‘Subjectivity as a Solution to Human Fallibility: Political Knowledge, Machine Learning, Efficacy, and the Reorientation of the 1980s Artificial Intelligence Around Extra-Evidential Judging’
Özgür Çalışkan – Anadolu University – ‘Counting Worlds Otherwise: AI, Data Ontologies, and Colonial Logics in Global Science Fiction Cinema’
Ashlee Mirizio and Nathan Ensmenger – Indiana University – ‘Mapping the AI Debate: Beyond Binary Tribes and Flattened Landscapes’
Moderator: Sareeta Amrute – The New School for Social Research
16:00 CDT (21:00 UTC) — KEYNOTE SESSION II
Paula Chakravartty – New York University – ‘Palestine as Paradigm: AI and the Colonial Present’
Roderic Nicholaus Crooks – University of California, Irvine – ‘Access Is Capture: How Edtech Reproduces Racial Inequality’
Moderator: Ekaterina Babintseva – Carnegie Mellon University
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