Welcome to the blog site for Critical AI, a new interdisciplinary journal based at Rutgers University’s Center for Cultural Analysis, affiliated with the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science and the Rutgers Artificial Intelligence and Data Science (RAD) Collaboratory, and published with Duke University Press. Critical AI began as an interdisciplinary initiative at Rutgers University, organized and led by a steering committee. The blog hosted on this site includes research, reviews, and commentary by interdisciplinary scholars in a wide range of AI-adjacent fields, as well as posts by faculty and students affiliated with the Critical AI @ Rutgers initiative, and “sneak previews” from forthcoming content in Critical AI. We also archive posts on, and videos from, our online and hybrid events, including our October 2025 workshops on “Troubleshooting” AI, our May 2025 Design Justice AI Global Humanities Post-Institute, our July 2024 Design Justice AI Global Humanities Institute at the University of Pretoria, our September 2024 librarian-facing symposium on Research in the Era of Generative AI, our October 2023 public symposium Critical AI Literacy in a Time of Chatbots, and our 2021 NEH-sponsored workshops with the Australian National University.
A web platform indebted to the Design Justice Network’s inspiring principles, Design Justice Labs publishes peer-reviewed open-access resources that help teachers to navigate generative AI in the classroom and students to encounter new technologies from the stance of researchers rather than users.
If you are interested in submitting content for peer review in Critical AI, please carefully review our submission requirements and explore recent issues of the journal.
The latest issue of Critical AI is out and accessible online! Read Critical AI 3.2 online during the limited free access period, and encourage your library to subscribe.
We are working to update our living document on TEACHING CRITICAL AI LITERACIES for the Spring 2026 semester. Click here to view and download CRITICAL AI LITERACIES: A GUIDE FOR STUDENTS.
For questions and to share ideas, please email us at criticalai@sas.rutgers.edu.
You can also follow us on Bluesky at @criticalai-journal.bsky.social.
Though rooted in critical methods from the humanities, social sciences, and arts, Critical AI works with technologists, scientists, economists, policy makers, health professionals, teachers, community organizers, legislators, lawyers, and entrepreneurs who share the understanding of interdisciplinary research as a powerful tool for building and implementing accountable technology in the public interest. Open to ideas born of new interdisciplinary alliances; design justice principles; antiracist, decolonial, and democratic political practices; community-centered collaborations; experimental pedagogies; and public outreach, Critical AI functions as a space for the production of knowledge, research endeavors, teaching ideas, and public humanities that bears on the ongoing history of machine technologies and their place in the world. Critical AI is legible to scholars across disciplines as well as to interested readers outside the academy. At the broadest level, its mission is to widen circles of scholarship across disciplines and national borders, encourage informed citizens, and activate a democratic culture through which the research, implementation, and evaluation of digital technologies is undertaken in dialogue with scholars, students, citizens, communities, policy makers, and the public at large.