Matters of Explanation. Feminist and New Materialist Reorientations of Explainability in AI
The talk will explore how notions of explainability and understanding in explainable AI (XAI) and its design can be re-thought with feminist and new materialist perspectives. Drawing on these bodies of thought as well as on tangible, embodied interactions design approaches in computing, I propose an emergent and process-oriented approach to understanding and explainability in XAI design. Goda Klumbytė will present two examples that help illustrate this: an artwork, created as part of collaborative research that engages affective and felt modalities of AI, and a paper prototype of a pinball machine built during a workshop that explored tangible explainability for large language models. These examples demonstrate that materiality and embodiment are important agents in the emergence of explainability and understanding and invite to consider ethical explanation design as a material practice of care. This lecture will take place on Wednesday, November 19th, from 02:00 PM to 04:00 in MB4/165. Organized as part of the RUSTlab lecture series, the event is a collaboration between INF and A02 of our CRC 1567 and RUSTlab.
Goda Klumbytė is a post-doctoral researcher at the Participatory IT Design department at the University of Kassel. Her research engages feminist new materialism, posthumanism, human-computer interaction and algorithmic systems design. In her doctoral dissertation, which was awarded a Dissertation Prize 2024 of the German Sociological Association, she investigated epistemic premises of machine learning as a knowledge production tool and proposed innovative ways to work with intersectional feminist and new materialist epistemologies towards more contextualized and accountable machine learning systems design. Goda Klumbytė co-edited books Posthuman Convergences: Transdisciplinary Methods and Practices (with Emily Jones and Rosi Braidotti, Edinburgh University Press, 2025) and More Posthuman Glossary (with Rosi Braidotti and Emily Jones, Bloomsbury, 2022), as well as special issues in journals Matter on New Materialist Informatics (with Claude Draude, 2022) and Computational Culture on Bayesian perspectives and feminist and pluriversal knowledges (with Juni Schindler and Matthew Fuller, 2025).
The lecture is also part of the RUSTlab Lectures at the RUSTLab of the Ruhr University Bochum.
Bildnachweis: Anni Spratt (2018): https://unsplash.com/de/fotos/ein-abstraktes-gemalde-mit-orangen-und-blauen-farben-0ZPSX_mQ3xI
