Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at the Center for Artificial Intelligence in São Paulo, I propose a methodological intervention that takes indigenous epistemologies seriously. I explore how approaching AI through relational cosmologies can reconfigure what critical engagement with AI means.

Paper long abstract

In my contribution, I want to draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the Center for Artificial Intelligence (C4AI) in São Paulo to propose a methodological and theoretical intervention within Critical AI Studies. While much critical work on AI focuses on demystifying technical systems or exposing regimes of extraction and governance, I argue that criticality must also take seriously epistemologies from the Souths as sources of conceptual reorientation. Based on interviews and observations among AI researchers in Brazil, I explore how AI is encountered not as a stable technological object, but as something that must be situated within broader ontologies of life, responsibility, and futurity.

Building on Brazilian indigenous thought, particularly the work of Ailton Krenak, I want to experiment with approaching AI through relational cosmologies that do not sharply separate human, non-human, and technological actors. Such perspectives resonate with posthuman and new materialist paradigms yet emerge from distinct historical and ethical trajectories shaped by colonial violence and environmental devastation. I aim to explore what happens when AI is conceptually inserted into indigenous frameworks of relationality and care. This move could simultaneously destabilize dominant imaginaries of AI and reconfigure what it means to engage critically with it. The contribution thus advances an ethnographically grounded attempt to rethink AI Studies from Brazil by testing how indigenous epistemologies can transform the very terms of critique.