People & Contact
People
‘Speculative Machines and Us: Intuition, AI, and the Making of Computational Cultures’ is an ongoing research project led by Carolyn Pedwell, Professor in Digital Media in the School of Arts at Lancaster University.
Carolyn is a cultural and media theorist with an international reputation for her work on affect and artificial intelligence; digital media and culture; habits and social change; the politics of empathy; and feminist, queer, critical race and decolonial studies.
She is the author of three monographs: Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation (McGill-Queens UP, 2021); Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave, 2014); and Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice: The Rhetorics of Comparison (Routledge, 2010).
Carolyn is also the co-editor (with Gregory J. Seigworth) of The Affect Theory Reader 2: Worldings, Tensions, Futures (Duke UP, 2023). Her monograph in progress is Speculative Machines and Us: Intuition, AI, and the Making of Computational Cultures.
Carolyn’s current research is focused on socio-political, cultural, and affective histories and futures of AI and digital computing. Her British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2024-2025), ‘Speculative Machines and Us: Intuition, AI and the Making of Computational Cultures’, developed an affective post-war genealogy of human-machine relations in Britain and North America oriented around shifting conceptualisations of intuition, with reference to “artificial intuition”.
Her Leverhulme Fellowship, ‘Digital Media and the Human: The Social Life of Software, AI and Algorithms’ (2020-2021), explored how digital and computational media are transforming “the human”.
Contact
If you would like to learn more about the project or discuss possibilities for collaboration, please contact Professor Carolyn Pedwell via email: c.e.pedwell@lancaster.ac.uk.