ABOUT MY WORK
My research focuses on how communities that have historically been excluded from spaces of technical production locate ways to shape the trajectory of artificial intelligence (AI) models. Situated at the intersection of language, technology, and labor, my work seeks to pose new questions about AI:
- What do we miss when we only think about AI and labor through the lens of replaceability?
- How do workers find ways to shape the trajectory of AI systems, even under conditions of marginalization, exploitation, and surveillance?
- How can we expand notions of tech justice by thinking about the relationship between language and ethics?
My scholarship engages these questions through a focus on the experiences and perspectives of workers carrying out technical and linguistic labor at the so-called peripheries of the AI industry. Grounded in ethnographic research in Jordan, my research investigates AI model-making as a site where differently situated workers—such as engineers, linguists, data labelers, and designers—strategically craft new conceptions of Arabic in ways that reimagine the relations between language, technology, and labor.
