Department of Geography and Sustainability Colloquium Series

The Geography & Sustainability Colloquium showcases innovative research and ideas from distinguished scholars and professionals working across geography, sustainability, environmental studies, and related fields. Open to students, faculty, and the broader community, the series provides a forum for learning, discussion, and collaboration on today's most important challenges. Title: Generative Domestic: Confronting Care Work in the Age of AI Abstract: Across Silicon Valley, tech startups train robots to do the dishes, fold laundry, and make the bed. At the same time, tech billionaire Sam Altman celebrates the ways in which AI might stand in for the tedious labor of parenting. OpenAI tells us that motherhood might be made easier with the help of GPT-6. In this exploratory talk I confront the social reproductive labor questions subsumed behind the hype of this particular strand of tech optimism. In all of these examples, persists a desire that care work, as part and parcel to social reproduction, might be offloaded to autonomous bots for those with the wealth to pay for it. Whether you view this labor as a burden (what Lenin calls “domestic slavery” or what Angela Davis characterizes as repetitive, invisible, and uncreative housework), or an essential aspect of what feminist geographers call “life’s work” that broadens to education, healthcare, elder care, and beyond, I argue that the desire for AI to displace such work should be understood within a longer history that foregrounds Black women’s domestic labors, the logics of chattel slavery, and eugenics-driven scientific management. I hope to lay a framework for thinking across these seemingly disconnected themes, developing into what I’m calling the “generative domestic” by tracing the plantation logics undergirding generative AI to the desires for domestic bots to “free” people through optimized life-work. These technologies are always dependent on invisible and low-wage labor and in their making forge a totalizing surveillance of life and work. Yet, because this life work is so precious, so central to survival, provisioning and resisting racial capitalist relations, I speculate on the domestic also as a pivotal site of struggle and refusal. Date: Thursday, October 15, 2026Time: 4:05 PM - 5:20 PMLocation: WAB M309 We hope you will join us for what promises to be a timely discussion.