Mark Graham is Professor of Internet Geography at the University of Oxford. For seventeen years, he has studied the working conditions of data and platform workers, with a focus on Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. He directs Fairwork, an action-research project that combines public benchmarking with on-the-ground engagement to push for better standards in the platform economy. Since 2018, Fairwork has assessed more than 700 companies across 40 countries and helped drive hundreds of pro-worker changes affecting millions of jobs. Graham’s latest book, Feeding the Machine, examines the human labour that powers artificial intelligence
Departmental Seminar Series Trinity Term 2026
Theme: The Uneven Grounds of Artificial Intelligence: Provocations for Anthropology on Extraction, Knowledge Production and Labour
3pm, Fridays of Weeks 1-6, Lecture Room at 64 Banbury Road
Convened by Thomas Cousins, Ann Kelly, Alpa Shah
This seminar series at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, asks how artificial intelligence, and especially large language models, might be reconfiguring knowledge, labour, institutions, systems of value and the social itself. Rather than treating models as merely technical artefacts, the seminar approaches them as infrastructures and moral technologies embedded in global markets circuits of data, labour, and capital, institutional practices, corporate strategies and public imaginaries. Across six seminars we seek conceptual provocation along with empirical and historical enquiry to learn from anthropologists and scholars from related disciplines working on understanding the social life of AI. Our hope is to nurture a space in which we can think through the relationship between anthropology and AI.
Everyone is welcome!
Key questions and stakes
We aim to grapple with a set of critical questions opened up by the growing entanglement of AI with scholarly, political, and everyday worlds. One set of concerns centres on epistemics and authorship: how machine-generated language unsettles conventions of truth, creativity, originality, and authority across scholarship, journalism and public discourse. Another examines political economy and infrastructure—how corporate architectures, data supply chains and the often-invisible labour underwriting AI systems that consolidate particular forms of power while reproducing entrenched geographic and social inequalities.
We also seek to consider what AI implies for personhood, social relations, and the conditions of human flourishing. As machine systems mediate practices of care, creativity, governance and self-making, they invite renewed attention to what constitutes a “good life” and how wellbeing is imagined and distributed, and what forms of extraction become operative in remaking the horizon of progress and the (ever-uneven) terrains of advancement. Taken together, these questions invite a wider anthropological provocation: how AI reshapes not only institutional and epistemic terrains but the very terms through which humanity, justice, sociality and futurity are imagined, transformed and created.
We hope the seminars will help us think through questions of ethics, pedagogy and scholarly practice: what values should guide research and teaching that make use of generative systems; how craft, method and intellectual integrity can be protected; and how such tools reorder the very conditions under which description, interpretation, judgment, and enquiry unfold. These shifts prompt a re-examination of anthropological method itself: whether we need to new ways to study social life when digital systems increasingly mediate interaction, representation and knowledge production, or whether in fact time honoured methods at the heart of ethnography are shown to be more vital than ever.
