AI and the Politics of Extraction Panel

Dr. Carol Liao is an Associate Professor at Allard Law and the Distinguished Fellow of the Peter P. Dhillon Centre for Business Ethics at the UBC Sauder School of Business. Her research focuses on corporate law and sustainability, climate governance, and social justice. She is the Co-Director of the UBC Centre for Climate Justice and the Chair and Principal Co-Investigator of the Canada Climate Law Initiative, dedicated to advancing director knowledge on the latest in climate risks and fiduciary obligations.

Naomi Klein is the Co-Director of the Centre for Climate Justice and an Associate Professor of Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia. Her research and teaching take place at the intersection of crisis and political transformation. She looks at the ways that large-scale shocks – from economic crises to ecological disasters to terror attacks – act as catalysts and accelerators for broad-based social change. At UBC, her primary focus is on how the climate emergency can and must act as a catalyst for bold, justice-based transformation in our bio-region and beyond, with particular attention to the intersections between climate justice and Indigenous land rights; the gendered and racialized labour of care; and the rights of migrants.

Stephanie Dick is Assistant Professor of Communication at Simon Fraser University. She is an historian of science and technology, focused on how mathematics, computing, and artificial intelligence shape knowledge, labour, and power in the twentieth century. Her first book, Making Up Minds: Computing and Proof in the Postwar United States, explores attempts to automate mathematical intelligence in the twentieth century and the theories of mind that informed these efforts. Her second large research project explores the history of policing and police uses of technology, especially the establishment of the first centralized law enforcement databanks in the 1960s, the political and technological construction of ‘criminality’ within them. She is editor, with Janet Abbate, of Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society.

Wendy H. Wong is a Professor of Political Science and Principal’s Research Chair at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan (located on Sylix Okanagan Nation Territory). She is the author of the 2024 Balsillier Prize for Public Policy-winning book We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age, published by MIT Press. She has written two other award-winning books, Internal Affairs and The Authority Trap (with Sarah S. Stroup), both published by Cornell University Press. She has penned dozens of peer-reviewed articles and chapters, and has appeared in outlets such as the CBC, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, and The Conversation. She has been awarded grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, among other granting agencies.

Hamish van der Ven is an Assistant Professor of Sustainable Business Management of Natural Resources in the Department of Wood Science. His research focuses on sustainable supply chain governance and the impacts of online activism on business behaviour. Prior to joining UBC, he held positions at McGill University and Yale University.