Arisi Marta (she/her)

Current work

I am currently studying different topics, where I see governance by data (Johns 2021) and the production of knowledge as crucial common denominators. Recently, I have been working on a paper on open-source investigations and surveillance in the context of migration and digital humanitarianism. I also keep cultivating my interest for voices from the creative and cultural sector, especially as they reflect on the impact of Generative AI.

More broadly, in my research, I wish to understand how forms of harms, vulnerability and precarity are reinforced or produced with datafication, and how different technological futures can be made possible. While the primary contours of my work have been set by my background in intellectual property and personal data protection law (the main subjects I teach), I find that disciplinary lines are especially blurred in techno-legal encounters, with important, unexpected sites of law-making. And indeed, science and technology studies and especially history of technology and critical data studies have a special place in how I look at things.

Doctoral project (2022-ongoing)

My doctoral project at Sciences Po Law School is a genealogical enquiry on ‘openness’ in relation to what is generally referred to as ‘Artificial intelligence’. As I attempt to understand what AI openness may be, I try to historicise and materialise the openness practices at play in the complex context of AI research and development (including dominant industry players, but also academia and civil society). I especially examine the conjunctures with different ‘open’ projects and movements in the digital realm.

In this project, I am ultimately interested in how openness may be a key ingredient of projects for social justice, and how it can be meaningful part of alternative imaginaries of AI. I therefore take a critical angle on openness, one that decouples it from solutionist approaches, and that tries to be aware of its promises and potential for co-optation in the current context of digital capitalism. In this work I do not only want to focus on how openness in relation to AI is differently understood, but to tackle the claim that openness could benefit all – its universality – vis-à-vis the structural inequalities, power asymmetries and politics that inform these systems.