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Critical Cultural AI-Studies: Towards a New Interdisciplinary Paradigm for the Humanities and Social Sciences
by
Sun, Sep 27, 2026
1 PM – 2 PM (GMT+3)
The Sullivan Lounge
AUC Avenue, P.O. Box 74, New Cairo, 11835, Egypt
Details
HUSS Research Seminar Series
Critical Cultural AI-Studies: Towards a New Interdisciplinary Paradigm for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Artificial intelligence-driven cultural transformations are reshaping communication, meaning-making, social organization, knowledge production, traditions, norms and societies’ orientation within historical time. More fundamentally, the integration of artificial intelligence into everyday life is reconfiguring attention and individuation, altering the value of personal experience, our access to and the status of the self.
As our grasp of our humanity is at stake, these transformations require our most lucid and nuanced thinking: A conceptual attentiveness reckoning with the fact that no single discipline can, in isolation, contextualize, document, analyze and critically assess this emerging reality. Critical Cultural AI-Studies is therefore needed as an interdisciplinary research paradigm and epistemic responsibility, if the humanities and social sciences do not want to run the risk of failing to comprehend the defining cultural event of our age.
Speakers
Alessandro Topa
Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy
The American University in Cairo
Alessandro Topa obtained his MA (Lógos and Praxis. The Structure of Practical Knowledge in Plato’s Early Dialogues, 1998) and his PhD (Since Thought Needs a Body. The Problem of a Metaphysical Deduction of the Categories in Kant and Peirce, 2006) from the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Germany, where he studied philosophy, communication research and comparative literature. In 2023, he completed his Habilitation (Living Reason. The Normative Foundations of Peirce’s Semiotic Logic) and earned his venia legendi in philosophy from Otto-Friedrich University in Bamberg, Germany.
Topa joined the Department of Philosophy at The American University in Cairo (AUC) in 2009. He served as graduate program director from 2015 to 2019 and has been chair of the department since 2023.
He is a member of the Kant Society, the German Society for Philosophy, the German Society for Semiotics, the International Herbart Society and the Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought.