CUSAS Seminar with Dr. Sophia Goodfriend (University of Cambridge and Harvard University)

CUSAS Seminar with Dr. Sophia Goodfriend (University of Cambridge and Harvard University)Ethnographic Approaches to ‘AI’ and Violence: Notes from Palestine and Israel

Commentators increasingly describe our political moment as one of “techno-fascism,” marked by deepening alliances between technology firms and ultranationalist politicians prosecuting wars at home and abroad. What can ethnography offer this present political moment? This talk illustrates the value of anthropological research on algorithms, artificial intelligence, and violence today. Drawing on long-term fieldwork across Israel and Palestine, I treat the region as a generative site for theorizing the entanglements between a globalized AI industry and contemporary war. Through a series of case studies, I show how ethnography can make visible the labor, ideologies, and forms of exploitation undergirding innovations in machine learning, though often hidden from view. I conclude by reflecting on challenges posed to anthropologists confronting surveillance, war, and authoritarianism in their fieldwork.

Dr. Sophia Goodfriend is an anthropologist whose research examines the impact of automation on military conflict. Her first academic book project is an ethnographic account of how Artificial Intelligence (AI) has impacted what it means to wage and live with war in Israel and Palestine. Alongside her academic work, Dr. Goodfriend works as a writer and investigative researcher for Airwars. Her popular writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, the Boston Review, the Baffler, 972 Magazine, and Jewish Currents, among other publications. Dr. Goodfriend received her PhD in cultural anthropology from Duke University, an MA in social sciences from the University of Chicago, and was previously a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative.