Desai and Colleagues Receive Grant to Explore Democracy, Academic Freedom and AI at SBU

When sociologist Manisha Desai talks about artificial intelligence, she doesn't start with algorithms. She starts with power.

"Technologies reproduce the inequalities of the society in which they're created," she said in an interview. For Desai, executive director of Stony Brook's Center for Changing Systems of Power and Empowerment Trust Endowed Professor of Global Citizenship, AI is simply the newest arena where old hierarchies - gendered, racial, colonial and economic - are being rewritten into code.

This long-standing critical lens is at the heart of the $300,000 grant on The Practice of Democracy and Academic Freedom, which Desai recently received alongside Michael Rubenstein (professor, the Humanities Institute, College of Arts and Sciences), Abena Asare (associate professor, Africana Studies, CAS), and Robert Chase (associate professor, Department of History, CAS). The grant, which supports research on historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments, will support a multi-year project at Stony Brook, beginning with a symposium.

Through the grant, rather than focusing only on AI and the future of learning, as many initiatives do, Desai and her collaborators will focus on how AI practices shape the practice of democracy and academic freedom at institutions.

The first year of the grant will be a planning year, involving inviting speakers, designing workshops and building space for faculty, staff and students to think together. The project will also support hands-on workshops on AI in classrooms, administration, and scholarship.

"As a public university, our job has to be more critical than simply accepting AI because it's there and becoming ubiquitous," Desai said. "We don't have to go with the flow."

Read the full story by Ankita Nagpal on the AI Innovation Institute website.