A[sian] I[ntelligence]: Asian-inflected issues pertaining to the imagination and implementation of generative AI

Mark B. N. Hansen is the James B. Duke Professor in and Chair of the Program in Literature at Duke University. Hansen is the author of Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing (2000); New Philosophy for New Media (2004); Bodies in Code (2006); and Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media (2015). He has recently completed a co-edited volume on the legacy of Bernard Stiegler as well as a short volume on media entitled Phenomenotechnical Togetherness. 

Jennifer Cho is Senior Lecturer in the Asian American Studies program at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she teaches courses in literature, film, gender and sexuality studies, and foodways. She is currently working on a book titled Perilous Grief: Asian American Women's Mourning and World Making (Ohio State University Press), and other work has appeared in Feminist Theory, Women's Studies Quarterly, MELUS, and Meridians. 

Yuan Shu is professor of English, American Studies, and Comparative Literature, and director of the Asian Studies Program and Comparative Literature Program at Texas Tech University. He has published over twenty articles in journals such as Cultural Critique and Modern Fiction Studies and co-edited two books and three special journal issues. His monograph, Negotiating the Technological Empire: Technology, Racial Formation, and Transpacific Chinese American Life Writing, is under contract. 

Shana Ye is an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies Institutes at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Queer Chimerica: A Speculative Auto/Ethnography of the Cool Child (2024) and her work appears on peer-reviewed journals Transgender Studies Quarterly, Feminist Studies, Gender, Place & Culture, Feminist Media Studies, and in several edited volumes. Her current research includes queer materiel culture, feminist technology studies, and AI and death, aging and eldercare. 

Qiaoyu Cai is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersections of philosophy of computation, critical media studies, global science fiction studies, and the digital humanities. His current research focuses on the interconnected themes of modernity, sovereignty, and technology in the contemporary era of planetary-scale computation. He is a TIAS Society of Fellow at Tsinghua University and received his PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

XU Jie (Jocelyn) is a PhD candidate in History at the University of York (AHRC‑funded) and a non-residential scholar with the USC Shoah Foundation. Her research uses public and women’s history to examine how knowledge about “comfort women”—women forced into sexual slavery during the Asia-Pacific War—is produced. She reframes the topic from historical conflict to gender-based violence and has published in Women’s History Review and Museum Management and Curatorship.

Jinying Li is an assistant professor in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She is the author of Anime’s Knowledge Cultures (U. of Minnesota Press, 2024). Her forthcoming book, Walled Media, Mediating Walls, centers on the wall as a critical dispositif to explore the relations between environmental enclosure and digital mediation. Her next project, The Molecular Artificial, reframes the debates on AI by studying synthesis as the material and conceptual history of image generation. 

Carlos Rojas is professor of modern Chinese cultural studies at Duke University. 

Jianing Tang is a researcher and curator specializing in cross-cultural aesthetics and Asian religions. She holds an MRes in Art Theory and Philosophy from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and has co-curated major exhibitions including The Trace of Civilization: The Great Art of Dunhuang, China’s largest Dunhuang Buddhism exhibition, and Refocusing on the Medium: The Rise of East Asian Video Art, the first to bring together key video artists from across Asia.

Rebecca Ning Lee is a Ph.D. student in Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interest focuses on contemporary Chinese and Sinophone literature, film, and art, with a particular interest in media studies, history of science and technology, and digital humanities. Her current research project examines the production and circulation of Sinophobia within the Sinosphere. She also serves as an editorial assistant for the academic journal Taiwan Lit and the Global Sinosphere.

Wenxian Zhang is a PhD candidate in East Asian Languages and Cultures at USC. Her interests lies in borderlands, ethnicity, tourism, Sinophone cinema and media, and digital labor. She is conducting fieldwork for her interdisciplinary dissertation, Borderland Extraction, which theorizes how literary, cinematic, and algorithmic forms of extraction shapes Sinophone borderlands and beyond. She holds an MA in Critical Asian Humanities from Duke University and a BA in Literature from Peking University

Alexa Alice Joubin is a leading voice on AI, social justice, and higher education. She is Professor of English, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Theatre, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures at George Washington University where she directs the Digital Humanities Institute. She is a faculty of the Trustworthy AI Initiative and an affiliate at the NSF's Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society. She was named the inaugural Public Interest Technology Scholar.

Richard Jean So is Rhodes Chair in Digital Humanities and Associate Professor of English at Duke University. He specializes in the use of computational and AI methods to study culture, and develops projects to improve AI systems through humanistic theory. With Hoyt Long (Chicago), he runs the Cultural Intelligence Lab, and his new book Fast Culture, Slow Justice: BLM, Platforms and the Story that Couldn't Last is forthcoming from Columbia UP.