AI Futures Hub
The AI Futures Hub in the Department of English introduces students to critical humanistic perspectives on AI. The goal is to cultivate and maintain a community and shared purpose vis-a-vis critical approaches to AI grounded in humanistic expertise and orientations. The Hub will highlight our colleagues’ pedagogical contributions to critical humanistic approaches to AI.
The AI Race by Gloria Mendoza
Meet the Team
Jennifer Rhee, Ph.D.
Co-Lead
Jennifer Rhee is an associate professor in the Department of English and the Media, Art, and Text Ph.D. Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. She’s written about robotics and artificial intelligence in technology, visual and performance art, literature, and film in her book The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). She’s been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship for 2019 to 2020 to support her book project on digital counting technologies, race, and art. Her scholarship and teaching are in the areas of speculative fiction studies, literature and science, feminist science and technology studies, critical AI studies, and ecocritical media studies.
Caddie Alford, Ph.D.
Co-Lead
Caddie Alford is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing in the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, and affiliate faculty in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. Her research can broadly be described as critical inquiries into the power that Big Tech yields and the socio-political consequences of their products and logics. She is the author of Entitled Opinions: Doxa After Digitality (Alabama 2024), co-editor of the forthcoming collection Rhetoric Before and Beyond Post-Truth (Pittsburgh 2026), and she's currently working on a book about how rhetoric can help diagnose and rectify the effects of technofascism. She currently serves as Associate Co-Editor of Special Issues for Rhetoric Society Quarterly.