The Middle East Librarians Association’s Social Justice Committee would like to invite you to an upcoming lecture in our series, titled “The Social Roots of AI”
Date: September 23, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM EST
Register here: https://rebrand.ly/k6xdjk1
Our guest speaker, Dr. Mona Sloane is an Assistant Professor of Data Science and Media Studies at the University of Virginia, where she directs the Sloane Lab and co-leads the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab. A sociologist studying the intersection of predictive technology and society, she is the author of Predicted: How AI Is Restructuring Social Life and host of the Co-Opting AI series. Recognized in the “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics Hall of Fame,” she has spearheaded major public interest initiatives like the A BETTER TECH convention, which reached over 12,000 people. Dr. Sloane holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and leads research on AI governance, public interest technology, and algorithmic auditing. This talk argues that AI is best understood as a new type of social infrastructure that embeds prediction as a guiding principle of social organization. Rather than treating AI’s impacts as downstream effects of engineering design, it traces how AI systems arise from, and in turn reorganize, social practices, institutional logics, and professional authority. It outlines the contours of a sociology of AI that centers qualitative inquiry, institutional analysis, and public engagement to make visible the social arrangements that sustain the prediction paradigm and to reopen space for collective deliberation about alternative futures and forms of innovation.
Your participation means a great deal, helps support the important work of this committee, and sustains the continuation of this lecture series, please share this invitation with interested faculty, colleagues, and students.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Thank you,
On behalf of MELA SJC