Short Abstract

The development and deployment of AI produce both corporeal and immaterial harms—abuse, extreme speech, surveillance and even lethal physical violence. This panel shows how AI expands within specific contexts of use and institutional spaces, enabling various forms of violence and exclusion.

Long Abstract

The epistemological, material, and historical configurations of power that shape the development and deployment of artificial intelligence technologies (AI) produce both corporeal and immaterial harms—from abuse and extreme speech to regimes of surveillance, and in some cases, lethal physical violence. AI not only perpetuates harms through biased training data, but it is empowering a new phase of war, invasion and killings through automated attacks, target killings and sensor-to-shooter machine learning infrastructures (Goodfriend 2025). Generative AI is increasingly enlisted for disinformation campaigns and war propaganda, even as conversational AI models become available for common users to elicit incendiary content with tactful prompting (Udupa 2024; Canals 2023). Governments have instituted invasive data-driven systems of surveillance, aimed at immigrants, political dissenters and citizens more broadly (Nikunen and Valtonen 2024). AI chatbots that offer “companionship” are also used for abusive gendered relationships (Barassi, forthcoming). At the same time, AI technologies build upon extractive labour, data and environmental relations which particularly affect global Souths (Ricaurte 2022; Shakir, Png and Isaac 2020). The epistemologies that undergird corporate AI ignore pluriversal values, designing the model upon the paradigm of instrumental rationality (Mhlambi 2020). This panel critically explores how AI has been used in warfare, border regime and in practices of extreme speech and deception, even as it reflects and perpetuates longer patterns of epistemic, labor and environmental injustice. Rather than simply claiming that AI as a technology is oppressive, the panel shows through a rich compilation of ethnographic inquiries across the globe, how AI expands within specific institutional spaces, value regimes, and contexts of adoption, enabling various forms of violence and exclusion. The panel will also explore efforts to challenge and rewrite AI through decolonial, anti-capitalist, feminist struggles and the resonances of radical futurities.

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