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).

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. CST 

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 TBD” 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  

“Defying Failure: The Narratives of (Mis-)Trust in AI in India’s Emerging DEFAI Landscape.” Vinay Brandon, University of Minnesota   

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

Session IV: Institutional Power 

Moderator: Ekaterina Babintseva

“Data Harm in Governmental (Ac)counting System.” 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 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).

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   

“Artificial Intelligence 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. CST

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: Voice Biometrics and the Politics of Listening.” Juana Calina Becerra Sandoval, Harvard University  

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

“Transforming Medicine for Computer Intelligence: Expert System, Traditional Chinese Medicine and Medical Expertise in the 1970s and 1980s China.” 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 the 1980s Artificial Intelligence Around Extra-Evidential Judging.” 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