The Center is delighted to welcome Dr. Hina Shaikh as a new Assistant professor and faculty colleague. Dr. Shaikh has a background in Gender and Ethnic Studies and an interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI), data science, and feminism. She expressed her excitement for her new position because of the opportunity to build relationships with her community and provide resources from UF for the community. “The people that I work with deserve to be at the center of knowledge being made about these technologies because they’re often the objects of surveillance, and they deserve to be the subjects… I love thinking about surveillance not just from the state but also from the context of people in refugee camps or people who are asylum seeking and how that transforms completely, the idea of what technology is by the people who are the object of it and interacting with it.”
While reminiscing on her time at FAU Honors College for her undergraduate degree in Ethnic Studies, Dr. Shaikh remembered the influence that her women’s studies courses had on her life and career: “I didn’t really care about school at all or doing well or anything until I took my first women’s studies class. It was in that class that I finally understood how everything I, my family, and my communities go through always intersects with power.” After receiving a BA in Political Science and Women’s Studies, Dr. Shaikh completed her M.A. in Women’s Studies in the Center at UF. She then completed an M.A. and Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego. She also received training in coding and a Certificate in Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
Dr. Shaikh is excited to incorporate technology with the humanities in her classroom. She wants to reimagine systems of power associated with AI, generally reserved for the elite, to serve the community, beginning with establishing a Data Feminism Lab. “It’s fascinating to me to think about the lab. And for me, of course, I think about it as student-centered and community-centered; a space where people can have access to technologies. We can think through how to solve problems that affect people’s daily lives in ways that AI is often not considered. AI is not considered a Community Technology, but I want it to be.” Dr. Shaikh is currently working on academic and journalistic publications utilizing these community-centered principles of data analysis. She encourages everyone reading this to join her in collaboratively building a Data Feminism Lab on campus!