Event
The AI Con – Dr. Alex Hanna with Dr. M Murphy
Date
Time
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Location
Jackman Humanities Institute 170 Saint George Street JHB100B Toronto, ON M5S 1V8
Date: Thursday, June 18th, 2026 Time: 7:00 – 8:30 PM Location: Jackman Humanities Institute 170 Saint George Street JHB100B Toronto, ON M5S 1V8
Dr. Alex Hanna is a writer and sociologist of technology, labor, and politics.
She is the Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). Her work examines how new computational technologies–such as AI and machine learning–exacerbate racial, gender, and class inequality through their data practices and effects on labor. She also works in the area of social movements, focusing on the dynamics of anti-racist campus protest in the US and Canada. She holds a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics and a BA in Sociology from Purdue University, and an MS and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
With Emily M. Bender, Dr. Hanna is the co-author of The AI Con (Harper, 2025), a book about AI and the hype around it. They also run the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 series, playfully and wickedly tearing apart AI hype on their livestream and podcast. She has published widely in top-tier venues across the social sciences, including the journals Socius, Sociological Science, Mobilization, American Behavioral Scientist, and Big Data & Society, and top-tier computer science conferences such as CSCW, FAccT, and NeurIPS.
M. Murphy is a technoscience studies scholar who theorizes and researches about environmental justice; reproductive justice; Indigenous science and technology studies; infrastructures and data studies; racial capitalism; and the Great Lakes. Murphy is the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Science and Technology Studies and Environmental Data Justice and are jointly appointed to the School of Environment. They are also Co-Director of the Technoscience Research Unit, which is a home for social justice, Indigenous, and decolonial approaches to Science and Technology Studies, as well as a Indigenous Environmental Data Justice lab. Their current research focuseson the relationships between pollution, chemicals, colonialism, data, and altered life on the Great Lakes. They are a lead PI at the Acceleration Consortium where they direct a lab on Indigenous science and Ethical Substance. They are the author of three books, The Economization of Life, Seizing the Means of Reproduction, and Sick Building Syndrome and the Politics of Uncertainty, as well as the forthcoming co-written Fear of a Dead White Planet, all with Duke University Press. They are Red River Métis from Winnipeg.