Please join us for this international seminar, which inaugurates the new academic year and has been co-organised by the Digital Society Research Group in the School of History, Politics and Philosophy and the Postfoundational Futures Research Group in the School of Education.

The seminar will feature a panel of three papers, with the abstracts provided below:

Paper #1- Reimagining the ChatGPT5 Upgrade Through a Queer and Post-Digital Intimacies Lens

Amelia Johns, DISC Visiting Fellow and an Associate Professor in the School of Communication, Faculty of Design and Society at UTS, Sidney, Australia

In this paper I use a queer and post-digital intimacies lens (Evans & Ringrose, 2025; McGlotten, 2013) to reimagine ChatGPT and other GenAI conversational agents beyond current dystopian/utopian discourses that regard humanity as either being at risk or liberated by AI. This paper will engage with a messier reality, paying attention to the everyday, intimate relationships users form with ChatGPT and other Conversational AI: as a friend who doesn’t judge and has time to listen, a guide able to answer questions on relationship and health-related topics, and a stand in therapist while users are in-between-sessions. In other words, as a source of emotional care and support. We explore these themes through a close reading of user-responses to Open AI’s controversial update of its ChatGPT 4o model to Chat GPT5, triggering a backlash in OpenAI forums, Tik Tok and subreddit communities, with users expressing grief and distress that their “best friend” had turned “cold”. The scale of the backlash was such that OpenAI quickly made the legacy model available for pro-tier users until finally the more “friendly” model was retired in April 2026. I will argue that this “off label” (Duguay, 2017) use of conversational AI is challenging normative concepts of intimacy, introducing sites of tension and possibility that are indicative of queer engagements with emerging technologies. 

Bio: Amelia Johns is a DISC Visiting Fellow and an Associate Professor in the School of Communication, Faculty of Design and Society at UTS. Her research engages with young people’s civic and cultural connections formed through social and digital media and addresses the challenge of digital safety and misinformation. 

Paper #2- Bodies that “glitch”: Binary AI systems and Queer Resistances

Onur Kilic is a DISC Visiting Fellow and a postdoctoral reseacher at Umea University, Sweden

AI systems such as facial analysis and mocap often rely on labelled datasets to classify bodies into rigid categories, frequently reproducing cisnormative, racial capitalist, and ableist assumptions. The use of bodily data in automated systems has intensified forms of undesirable identification, such as AI-driven surveillance, reducing bodies into identity markers to be (mis)detected. In this talk, engaging with Legacy Russell’s “glitch feminism,” I explore the affective role of bodies in glitching and resisting AI systems’ classificatory regimes and the role of queer resistance as a speculative force.

Bio: Onur Kilic is a DISC Visiting Fellow and a postdoctoral researcher at Umea University, Sweden, focusing on queer and decolonial perspectives on AI within Humlab.

Paper #3- Community-led approaches to making fairer digital futures: Researcher-in-residence as creative feminist methodology

Rebecca Coleman (University of Bristol), Carolyn Hassan (Knowle West Media Centre) and Martha King (Knowle West Media Centre)

Co-creation methodologies have proliferated across the arts, humanities and social sciences over recent decades as researchers, universities, funders, industry and policymakers seek to make research matter beyond the academy, sometimes with different priorities. However, such principles have long been central to feminist and other minoritarian practices attentive to questions of power, politics and ethics and invested in making better worlds. In this article, we argue that, understood as a creative feminist methodology, the Researcher in Residence (RiR) has much potential for exploring and supporting the imagination and building of fairer digital futures. We explore a RiR between a university researcher (Coleman) and arts centre and charity (Knowle West Media Centre) on developing community-led digital future-making. We suggest that future-making is an everyday practice, including how communities negotiate existing and make new technologies, but that it can be difficult to imagine and create futures that deviate from seemingly inevitable, corporate trajectories. We argue that a collaborative, creative, feminist RiR can produce a sensibility and approach that intervenes in business as usual and supports community-led digital future-making. In particular, we focus on how it can support experimentation which opens up seemingly closed practices while grounding them in particular situations, interests and desires. 

Bio: Rebecca Coleman is Professor in the Bristol Digital Futures Institute (BDFI), ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures (CenSoF) and School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol. She was the first Researcher in Residence at Knowle West Media Centre, an arts centre and charity, in 2023-2025.