Author of Powered by Smart: A Prehistory of Everyday AI (NYU Press, March 2026) Sarah Murray reveals an alternative feminist pathway that seeded hospitable ideas about AI by showing how smartness was a techno-cultural ideal long before the digital age. Professor Murray will be in conversation with Professor Rahul Mukherjee.

Cosponsored by Penn's Center on Digital Culture and Society; Department of Cinema & Media Studies; Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies; and Price Lab for Digital Humanities.

Sarah Murray is an associate professor in Film, TV, Media, and the Digital Studies Institute at the  University of Michigan. She researches how technologies and technological practices are offered as care, recognition, and longevity for some, and harm and bias for others. She writes about consumer tech, startups, everyday AI, and how media participate in discourses of death, data afterlives, and longevity. She is published in International Journal of Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Histories, and Critical Studies in Media Communication. With Jeremy Wade Morris, she is coauthor of Appified: Culture in the Age of Apps (2018).

Rahul Mukherjee is Wolf Associate Professor of Television and New Media, and Graduate Chair of the Department of Cinema & Media Studies at University of Pennsylvania. His work focuses on logistical dimensions and environmental impact of media infrastructures and platforms. Rahul is the author of Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty (DUP, 2020) and Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution (MIT Press, Spring 2026). He has co-edited journal special issues on super apps and megacorps, and is on the editorial advisory board of Platforms & Society and Journal of Environmental Media.