AI and Feminism: Foundations of a Critical Dialogue on Gender, Power, and Technology

Learning Objectives

• Define key terms and historical developments in both feminist theory (e.g., waves of feminism, intersectionality) and AI (e.g., machine learning, deep learning).
• Explore how feminist critiques and critical theories can be applied to ethical challenges in AI.
• Investigate how biases related to race, gender, and other identities are embedded in data and algorithms.
• Engage with case studies to identify how algorithms, such as facial recognition systems, perpetuate or challenge social hierarchies.
• Reflect on the ethical development of AI through a feminist lens.
• Identify actionable steps for applying feminist principles to AI research and development.

Key Course Features

• Comprehensive Curriculum: Covering everything from the fundamentals of feminism and AI to intersectionality, ethics, and bias.
• Expert Instruction: Led by experts in the fields of feminism and AI, this course will deliver lectures on feminism, AI, and intersectionality.
• Collaborative Environment: Discuss lecture topics and case studies alongside like-minded peers in a supportive and dynamic learning environment, fostering creativity and innovation.
• Reflective Session: Create a personal reflection based on course content and share ideas with your peers.

Who Should Attend?

This course is designed for Feminist students, Eng. And Comp. Sciences student and researchers, Students interested in AI and Feminism, data scientists, enterprise and NGO employees interested in the topic.

Please note that you do not need to have a background in feminism or AI to successfully complete this course.

Dr. Christo El Morr

Christo El Morr, PhD, is a Professor of Health Informatics and the Director of the Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at York University. He is also a Research Scientist at North York General Hospital, Toronto. Additionally, he serves as the Health Informatics Certificate Coordinator and is a former Graduate Program Director and Undergraduate Program Director at the School of Health Policy and Management at York University.

His research aligns with an Equity Informatics perspective, covering areas such as Equity AI (e.g., patient readmission, disability advocacy), Patient-Centered Virtual Care (e.g., chronic disease management, mental health), Global Health Promotion for equity (e.g., equitable health promotion), and Human Rights Monitoring (e.g., disability rights, Gender-Based Violence).
As a theologian and poet, his broader intellectual contribution to social justice focuses on defending the human person against alienation, whether through infringements on human freedom or dignity in the face of irrational powers and exploitation. His work encompasses the fight for freedom from oppression (e.g., analysis of exclusive identities, communion and solidarity, freedom, liberation of reason), freedom from exploitation (e.g., analysis of illusions of freedom, political and religious exploitation), and the freedom to celebrate life (e.g., poetry).

Dr. Maleknaz Nayebi

Maleknaz Nayebi is an Associate Professor at York University in Toronto, where she leads a research lab focused on automated techniques that bridge the requirements gap—enhancing software development practices and deepening our understanding of user needs. She completed her PhD at the University of Calgary, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto, before joining York as faculty in 2018.

Her research, particularly impactful in healthcare, is published in top-tier venues and has been supported by multiple funding agencies. In recognition of her contributions to software engineering, Nayebi received the prestigious IEEE TCSE Award at the 2023 Requirements Engineering Conference. She was also invited by NSERC to serve on the Computer Science Evaluation Group—a distinction reserved for select researchers across Canada.

Currently, she serves as the Application Chair for the NSERC Discovery Evaluation Group (1507 – Computer Science) and as Associate Director of CIFAL York. Her leadership extends to several interdisciplinary initiatives: she is a board member of the York Centre for Feminist Research (CFR), the Centre for Innovation in Computing at Lassonde (IC@L), and Y-EMERGE (York Emergency Mitigation, Engagement, Response, and Governance Institute), and an active member of Connected Minds and York’s Center of AI for Society. To date, Nayebi has secured 16 research grants as a principal investigator or co-investigator.

Dr. Bianca Beauchemin

Bianca Beauchemin is an Assistant Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University. She recently was the 2022-2023 recipient of the postdoctoral fellowship in Black Feminist Thought at Queen’s University. She was also awarded the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) doctoral fellowship while completing her PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in Gender Studies. She has published a book review of Brittney C. Cooper’s Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women in Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography. She has also recently published the article "Opaque Aesthetics of Freedom: Romaine la Prophètesse, the Haitian Revolution, and Black Diasporic Possibilities” for the Journal of Canadian Studies. She is also working on her book manuscript Arousing Freedoms: Re-Imagining the Haitian Revolution through Sensuous Marronage, where she re-narrates the Haitian Revolution through Black feminist and Black queer epistemologies and methodologies. Disrupting the authority of the colonial archive and of prevalent masculinist framings of insurgency discourses, she explores the ways in which embodiment, labour, sensuousness, spirituality, marronage, resistance and alternative sexualities and genders, re-imagine the edicts of freedom and Black liberation.

Dr. Habiba Rahman

Habiba Rahman is a PhD candidate in Critical Disability Studies at York University. Before immigrating to Canada, she worked as a lecturer in English literature in Bangladesh. In Canada, she has also worked as a Disability Support Worker (DSW). These diverse experiences inform her research and ongoing commitment to social justice. Her current work critically examines how structural inequalities—particularly around race, disability, and labor—are reproduced and intensified by artificial intelligence systems. Drawing from both academic frameworks and lived experience, Habiba explores how AI reinforces existing power structures, especially in the lives of racialized and disabled workers.

Sabine Fernandes

Sabine Fernandes is a PhD student in Critical Disability Studies at York University’s School of Health Policy & Management. With a transnational background in care work, their research interests include cross-movement solidarity in disability care organizing, popular care work political education, the political economy of human rights, and critical access studies. They work in the intersections of disability and migrant justice.