This course is a radical excavation of how artificial intelligence functions as a weapon of empire, capital, and carceral power. We examine the violent entanglements of AI with biopolitical control and engineered systems of domination — systems that surveil, categorize, and criminalize the global majority under the false banners of innovation, progress, and neutrality. Grounded in decolonial, Black feminist, Indigenous, queer, and abolitionist thought, this course exposes AI not as an impartial tool, but as a racialized and militarized infrastructure built to extend the legacies of settler colonialism, slavery, and eugenics.
Through frameworks of necropolitics, racial capitalism, and surveillance abolition, we will interrogate how predictive policing, biometric surveillance, algorithmic governance, and data extraction are deployed to manage, punish, and disappear marginalized communities. We will analyze how AI consolidates power within the prison-industrial and military-industrial complexes—targeting Black, Indigenous, queer, disabled, undocumented, and impoverished bodies while presenting itself as objective and efficient.
Rather than framing these harms as accidental, we treat them as the logical outcomes of technologies designed within—and for—systems of racial and imperial domination. This course is not neutral. It is a call to dismantle oppressive AI systems and to build liberatory, collective, and just technological futures.
The success of this course depends entirely on our shared commitment to collective un/re/learning, radical solidarity, and a refusal to settle for anything less than total liberation.
These charts are built from real, citable data — run the analysis yourself using the GitHub links below. Hover over chart elements for details.
The foundational framework for this course. Mbembe's necropolitics — the sovereign power to decide who may live and who must die — is applied directly to every AI system examined. Read the original 2003 essay first: DOI 10.2307/3250559 (JSTOR open access).
*All other required materials provided via PDF or Canvas links.
During this course, we will address topics that compel us to discuss some of the most violent atrocities humans have inflicted upon other humans and planet. That includes:
| Assignments | Deliverables | Points | Due |
|---|---|---|---|
| Low Stakes | Reading Response | 100 | Wednesday midnight every week |
| Low Stakes | Scaffolding Assignments | 100 | Wednesday midnight every week |
| Low Stakes | Mid-Semester Research Presentation | 100 | Each student once a semester |
| 1st Major / Low Stakes | Project Proposal | 50 | Check course calendar |
| 2nd Major Assignment | Topic Analysis | 100 | Check course calendar |
| 3rd Major Assignment | Final Project & Class Presentation | 150 | Check course calendar |
| Total Points | 500 | ||
THE SYLLABUS IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE. · Ada Omvlak/Chronza. Pologne. Collectif Kefija.
This assignment invites you to choose a site of struggle where AI, data, or technology functions as a tool of domination. Your proposal will frame a semester-long investigation into how technological systems enact violence, reinforce oppression, and sustain racial capitalism, colonialism, and carceral power.
This is not a neutral exercise. It is an act of refusal and reimagining. Your topic will reflect a commitment to abolitionist, decolonial, and anti-oppressive thought, preparing you for deeper analysis in Assignments 2 and 3.
Select a specific system, technology, or practice where AI or data-driven tools are used to surveil, classify, control, or harm. Examples (but not limited to):
Briefly explain:
Articulate the political, ethical, and existential stakes. Connect your topic to course themes:
Pose 2–3 critical questions to guide your inquiry. These should be analytical and politically engaged. Examples:
Describe what materials or methods you might use to investigate this topic. These could include:
Note: Your proposal sets the tone for your work this semester. Choose a topic you care about deeply—one that fuels your curiosity, critique, and commitment to building liberatory futures.
Let your inquiry be radical, your analysis be sharp, and your imagination be unbound.
We are not here to fix oppressive systems. We are here to dismantle them.
This is a radical rhetorical excavation. You will analyze how power speaks through and around technology—how violence is made to sound reasonable, how control is framed as care, and how resistance breaks through dominant narratives. Your task is to unmask the political work done by texts, visuals, and designs that shape our technological world.
This analysis directly prepares you for your final project, where you will move from critique to intervention.
Select 2–3 materials linked to your semester topic that reveal how rhetoric operates in the service of—or against—systems of oppression. These can be (not limited to):
All materials should be treated as non-neutral artifacts carrying ideological force.
This is the core of your paper. Examine how each text works rhetorically. Consider:
Step back. Synthesize what your analysis reveals about:
MLA or APA style. Not included in page count.
Remember: You are analyzing texts of power—some wield it, some resist it. Your job is to expose how language, image, and design are never innocent. They build worlds. Your critique is a step toward dismantling oppressive ones and imagining those that are liberatory.
Analyze with rigor. Write with purpose. Intervene with courage.
This is your culminating intervention—the moment where analysis transforms into action. Building on your semester-long investigation of AI, power, and oppression, you will now propose, create, or enact an abolitionist alternative.
Your project must move beyond critique toward liberatory imagination, grounded in anti-racist, decolonial, and abolitionist frameworks.
This is not the end of our learning. It is the beginning of our praxis. Build with intention. Imagine without limits. Interrupt what must be destroyed. Create what must live. Intervene for liberation.
Source: Federal contracts — Digital Destroyers bigtechsellswar.com · Amazon DoD 38% · Google DoD 61% · Microsoft DoD 40%
How does artificial intelligence entrench existing systems of power—racial capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, ableism, and settler colonialism—under the guise of neutrality and innovation? What forms of systemic violence does it automate, legitimize, or obscure?
In what ways are algorithmic systems—predictive policing, biometric surveillance, risk scoring—actively complicit in expanding the prison-industrial and military-industrial complexes? How do they refine the logics of captivity, war, and occupation?
How does the extraction and commodification of data—through digital profiling, surveillance capitalism, and data colonialism—undermine autonomy, erode collective power, and reproduce colonial domination? What is our role, as scholars, in either sustaining or refusing this system?
What radical pathways exist for resisting and dismantling AI infrastructures of domination? How might we imagine and co-create technologies in service of collective liberation, rather than control? What does abolitionist, decolonial, and life-affirming AI look like—if it is possible at all?
Every student must watch all of these before Week 4. Each runs under 30 minutes except where noted. Approach them as primary sources — treat what the experts say about their own systems as evidence.
These are the actual companies and platforms. Open them. Read their marketing copy. Then compare it to the investigative reporting and academic research. That gap is the course.
Two Weekly Tasks Due Every Wednesday Midnight (Unless Mentioned Otherwise): Scaffolding Assignment & Reading Response · Three Major Assignments: Check Canvas for Due Dates
Note: Some links in the assigned materials may take you to the WSU library. Only WSU credentials will allow access to those materials.
Let's take a look at this crucial work cursorily for our first day's conversation.
Nothing is due this week.