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Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS)

 

Biography

Apolline Taillandier is a postdoctoral research associate at POLIS and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, and at the Center for Science and Thought at the University of Bonn. Apolline studied political theory at Sciences Po in Paris before joining the Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies, where she wrote her dissertation under the supervision of Prof. Jenny Andersson. During her PhD, she studied the history of contemporary transhumanism as articulating a set of projects about liberalism’s future. She was a Fulbright student researcher at the University of California, Berkeley Sociology Department in 2018 and a Cambridge Sciences Po visiting student in POLIS in 2019.

In her postdoctoral research, she investigates the historical role of feminist thought and activism in the critique of computer technology and the remaking of artificial intelligence as a scientific project from the 1980s onwards. In the context of rising concerns about the discriminatory and stratifying effects of AI, she studies the transnational circulation of ethics and gender justice norms and their reinterpretation and appropriation by scientists and industry actors, focusing on European and U.S. American sites of technical AI research.

Research

Contemporary history of postwar political theory and liberalism, politics of the future, intellectual and material histories of technology, feminist approaches to science and technology

Publications

Key publications: 

‘Lectures et langages du transhumanisme’, Raisons Politiques, 74, no. 2, Special Issue on ‘Political theories of transhumanism’ (June 2019), 73-81. DOI: 10.3917/rai.074.0073

‘From Boundless Expansion to Existential Threat: Transhumanists and Posthuman Imaginaries’, in Jenny Andersson and Sandra Kemp (eds.), Futures, (Oxford University Press, 2020), 333-348, forthcoming.

Research Assistant
Politics and International Studies (POLIS)