MOSAICS Symposium Schedule

Thursday, October 15, 2026

Paper sessions are 15-minutes long and include 45 minutes of live audience Q&A with the speaker(s). All start and end times are CST.

9:00 a.m. - 9:10 a.m. 

Open Remarks, Land Acknowledgement - Jeffrey Yost, Director, Charles Babbage Institute 

9:10 a.m. - 10:40 a.m. 

Keynote Session I

Moderator: Anita Say Chan

Paper one title 

Paper two title

10:45 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.

Session I: Attention and Resistance 

Moderator: Sareeta Amrute 

“Attention, Alignment and Other Feminist Concerns.” Lauren Klein, Emery University; Derya Akbaba, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden; Miriah Meyer, Linkoping University and Maria Antoniak, University of Colorado, Boulder 

“Computer People for Peace and Useful Histories of Data Backlash.” Mar Hicks, University of Virginia 

Title: TBA. Cassius Adair, The New School 

12:45 p.m. - 2:15 p.m.       

Session II: Labor Subversion

Moderator: Gerardo Con Diaz

 “Human Labor Behind AI: From Ghost Workers to Platformized Experts.”  Sayamsiddha, The New School 

“Beyond Bias: Computerized Racecraft and the History of Algorithmic Job-Matching.” Jason Ludwig, University of California, Santa Barbara  

“Platform Parasites: Using AI to Debug Nomadic Extraction.” Hector Beltran, Massachusetts Institute of Technology  

2:20 p.m. - 3:50 p.m.       

Session III: Narrative Matters

Moderator: Jeffrey Yost

“Making IT Proper: A Critical Pre-History of Artificial Intelligence in the People’s Republic of China.” Bo An, Lingnan University  

“Liquidating Language: Generative AI and the Technical Conditions of Thought.” Pierre Schwarzer, New York University  

"Defiant Protocols: Trust, Reputation, and Controversy in India’s Agentic Finance Landscape." Vinay Brandon, University of Minnesota   

4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.

Session IV: Institutional Power 

Moderator: Ekaterina Babintseva

““Delete First, Verify Later”: New Ways of (Ac)counting in Government Databases and Weaponization of Fear." Sananda Sahoo, University of Western Ontario  

“From Administrative Automation to Institutional Stewardship: Reimagining Ai in the Research Office.” Mayank Kejriwal, University of Southern California

"Pretrained: The American University and the Making of AI." Avery Wiscomb, Virginia Tech University; and Steven Gotzler, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 

Friday, October 16, 2026  

Paper sessions are 15-minutes long and include 45 minutes of live audience Q&A with the speaker(s). All start and end times are CST.

9:00 a.m. - 9:05 a.m. 

Open Remarks - Jeffrey Yost, Director, Charles Babbage Institute 

Session V: Public Concerns

Moderator: Anita Chan

“Constituting AI, Re-constituting Society.” Margarita Boenig-Liptsin, ETH, Zurich   

"“People Machines”: AI and the Making of the Public." Fergus Linley-Mota, Simon Fraser University  

Care Over Code: AI Harms and Collective (In)Justice.” Laine McCrory, New York University  

10:45 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.

Session VI: Coded Cognition

Moderator: Ekaterina Babintseva

“Tokens Without Concepts: Leibniz and the Calculable Characters of Large Language Models.” Jiantong Liao, Johns Hopkins University   

“The Memory/Intelligence Divide: A Manual/Intellectual, Raced, and Classed Hierarchy.” Yoehan Oh, Yale University   

“Antinomies of Russian Formalism: For and Against the Automation of Language.” Yufei Qi, New York University   

12:45 p.m. - 2:15 p.m.        

Session VII: Computing and the Body

Moderator: Gerardo Con Diaz

“Faith in Computers: The Making of Voice Biometrics." Juana Calina Becerra Sandoval, Harvard University  

“Simulated Sadness: AI Psychodiagnostics, Synthetic Data, and Disability Politics.” Jeff Nagy and Tiff Regaudie, York University

"From Cybernetics TCM to AI-TCM: How the Medical Expert Systems Paved the Way to Artificial Intelligence in Traditional Chinese Medicine." Hanzhang (John) Ye, University of Minnesota 

2:20 p.m. - 3:50 p.m.

Session VIII: Fallibility and Disagreement

Moderator: Sareeta Amrute

"Subjectivity as a solution to human fallibility: political knowledge, machine learning efficacy, and the reorientation of 1980s artificial intelligence around extra-evidential judging, 1978-1994." Aaron Mendon-Plasek, Purdue University  

“Counting Worlds Otherwise: AI, Data Ontologies, and Colonial Logics in Global Science Fiction Cinema.” Özgür Çalışkan, Anadolu University

“Mapping the AI Debate: Beyond Binary Tribes and Flattened Landscapes.” Ashlee Mirizio and Nathan Ensmenger, Indiana University  

4:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Keynote Session II

Moderator: Ekaterina Babintseva