Current
Projects
My work sits at the intersection of Black studies, media theory, and critical technology studies. Across two book projects and a broader research initiative, I trace the continuous history of labor and resource extraction that connects the colonial plantation to the contemporary data center — and ask what it means for the self, for consent, and for ownership when AI can replicate a person without their knowledge or permission.
Undead Labor: Capitalism’s Zombie Workers
This book traces the zombie from its origins in Haitian colonial slavery — where it named the terror of being reduced to pure instrument, of working beyond exhaustion for an enslaver, where even death did not offer escape — through its transformation into a figure of consumption and automation in contemporary culture. The zombie offers an antecedent and a vocabulary for understanding contemporary machine learning systems in which human labor persists while the laborer is rendered invisible: training data assembled from uncompensated effort, content moderation performed by remote workers in the Global South, warehouse logistics that treat workers as disposable.
The book argues that the undead is not merely a metaphor but a historical category — one that names a recurring logic of capitalist extraction in which the line between the living and the dead, the human and the instrument, is strategically blurred. Reading zombie films, labor theory, Black studies, and contemporary AI discourse together, Undead Labor provides the conceptual tools necessary for understanding how digital capitalism inherits and intensifies older forms of dispossession.
Digital Doppelgänger: The Second Life of Living Labor
This project examines what happens to the self, to consent, and to ownership when AI can replicate a version of a person without their knowledge or permission. Voice clones, deepfakes, behavioral models, and large language models fine-tuned on an individual’s output all produce a digital double that extracts value from living labor while severing its connection to the laborer. The doppelgänger is an old figure of uncanny anxiety; this project asks what it means when the double is no longer imaginary but industrial.
Drawing on Black studies (Robinson, Hartman, Spillers, McKittrick, Wynter, Glissant), media and technology studies (Chun, Parks, Starosielski, Benjamin, Brock), and psychoanalytic theory, the project synthesizes these traditions into frameworks adequate to the specific challenges posed by generative AI — frameworks that can inform policy, shape design, and reach publics beyond the academy.
Plantation to Platform
Scholars in Black studies have long examined how racial capitalism reduces persons to units of extractable value, how technologies of quantification and surveillance emerge from the plantation and the slave ship, and how categories that structure modern political economy — property, personhood, labor, ownership — were forged in the crucible of Atlantic slavery. This body of scholarship is not simply adjacent to contemporary research in artificial intelligence; it is essential to it. Yet the discourse within the industry, as well as AI ethics and governance, suffers from a profound historical amnesia, treating AI as unprecedented and thereby obscuring how its core logics repeat and intensify patterns first developed centuries ago. The Plantation to Platform initiative brings Black studies into direct conversation with the discourses informing AI, tracing a continuous history of labor and resource extraction from the colonial plantation to the contemporary data center, and develops ideas and theoretical frameworks necessary to understanding, building, and deploying AI systems that are historically informed, culturally accountable, and globally equitable.
The initiative’s name captures its core thesis: that the techniques of abstraction, quantification, and extraction that define artificial intelligence today are not innovations but intensifications of logics inaugurated on the plantation and in the colony — the imagined fungibility of the human being, the reproduction of labor-power independent of the laborer’s will, the capture of human capacities to generate value accrued only for the benefit of the few. By naming this continuity explicitly, the initiative positions itself at the forefront of efforts to understand AI not as a rupture but as a continuation of longer histories of dispossession, and to develop policies and frameworks of governance adequate to that understanding.
Matter of Intelligence
Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School · 2025–2027
The Vera List Center’s 2025–2027 focus theme examines questions of intelligence — where it resides, what forms it takes, and how it has been defined and weaponized — across species, places, and time. The theme situates the urgency of AI within longer histories of knowledge and power, attending to how intelligence has been used to reproduce hierarchies of race, class, and ability, and what other forms of intelligence, rooted in communal and experiential knowledge, might offer in their place.
Visit the Vera List Center ↗Lab for AI, Ethics, & Creative Labor
Parsons School of Design, The New School
The Lab for AI, Ethics, & Creative Labor was founded on the conviction that creative workers should have a say in how AI technologies that affect them are made and deployed — not as subjects of study, but as people with expertise, instincts, and a point of view that no model has yet learned to replicate. Situating AI ethics within its political, social, and affective contexts, the lab brings together researchers, designers, and practitioners to shape how AI is developed and governed.
Visit the Lab ↗
Undead Labor 