HRC Conversation: How Do We Think the Future?

Join us for the opening conversation of the HRC’s new “Critical Futures” theme: How do we think the future? The conversation will explore how the humanities and arts equip us to imagine and build alternative futures. How do the humanities and arts help us think beyond both pessimism and naive optimism? What becomes possible when we bring different perspectives into conversation? And how do we move from vision to action?

Featuring Judith Brunton (Religion), Luis Campos (History), and Eve Dunbar (English & Creative Writing), moderated by Max Scholl (English & Anthropology ’27).

Free lunch!

AI Art & Ethics: Three Events
Nouf Aljowaysir | Kai-Luen Liang | Fred Ritchin

Join us for a day of events connecting AI art and ethics. The accelerated flow of AI into everyday life raises important questions about our shared futures with technological tools that are not so easily held accountable. Explore these questions and more through an artist talk & guided exhibition visit, a beginner-friendly real-time video collage workshop, and a lecture on the ethics and credibility of AI-generated imagery.

Cosponsored by the Humanities Research Center’s Critical Futures grant program, Program in Science and Technology Studies, Media Studies, and the Moody Center for the Arts.

*Aljowaysir, Liang, and Ritchin will also be featured as panelists in a conversation moderated by Rodrigo Ferreira, Assistant Teaching Professor, Computer Science, Rice University, at the Moody Center for the Arts’ Imaging after Photography Symposium on Friday, March 6th. More info & registration here: https://moody.rice.edu/events/imaging-after-photography-symposium


Session 1: Nouf Aljowaysir
Artist Talk & Guided Exhibition Visit: “Salaf (Ancestors)”
10:50am–12:05pm
Moody Center for the Arts
Advance registration required. Waitlist available.

Session 2: Kai-Luen Liang
Workshop: “Glitching Archives”
12:00–1:00pm
Library/Seminar 326, Sarofim Hall
Advance registration required. Waitlist available.

Session 3: Fred Ritchin
Lecture: “The Ethical Image in the Age of AI”
4:00–6:00pm
Anderson Biological Laboratories 131

A Wide Net of Solidarity: Antiracism and Anti-Imperialism from the Americas to the Globe

In this lecture, Mahler examines a network of mostly Latin American and Latinx radical activists and artists in the 1920s-30s called the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (Liga Antimperialista de las Américas, LADLA). Founded in 1925 in Mexico City by a group of multinational activists, LADLA brought together trade unions, agrarian organizations, and artist groups across fourteen chapters in the Americas, with highest activity in the Greater Caribbean and United States. Within two years, LADLA activists joined the League Against Imperialism, formed at the 1927 Brussels Congress, where they met with US Black activists and anticolonial leaders from Africa and Asia. Through combining the study of archival sources with literary and artistic works, this lecture explores LADLA’s role in fostering Black, Indigenous, and immigrant-led resistance movements while positioning these struggles within a broader hemispheric and global struggle against the racialized accumulation of capital. By unearthing LADLA’s multiracial analysis of capitalist exploitation as well as its emphasis on mutual solidarity across difference, this talk considers the insights LADLA provides for social movements fighting racial and economic injustice today.

RSVP: https://form.jotform.com/260484723144052

The Department of Art History invites you to the second installment in the 2026 Katherine Tsanoff Brown Lecture Series with William E. Wallace, Distinguished Professor of Art History at Washington University, St. Louis. 

In an age where artificial intelligence can write term papers, drive cars and determine medical procedures, what role is there for ethical deliberation and decision making? What are the costs of AI? What does the future of teaching look like? Far from relegating the humanities and arts to the sidelines, the age of AI is a time when the disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas of inquiry in the School of Humanities and Arts at Rice are needed most.

The Allure of Empire: How Transpacific Progressivism Delayed the Decolonization of Asia

Dream the Size of Freedom: How African Liberation Mobilized New Left Internationalism

Soviet Medicine in Cold War Iran: The Case of Blood Transfusion from Cadavers