Dr Eleanor Drage

Dr Eleanor Drage is a Senior Research Fellow on the €3.8m Desirable Digitalisation project, for which she is creating playbooks, games and tools to help AI ethics designers and project managers be responsive to AI Ethics. She is also helping companies across Europe respond to the EU AI act. Eleanor is a researcher at the University of Cambridge Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, and specialises in feminist ideas to make artificial intelligence safer for everyone. Eleanor was previously a Christina Gaw Research Associate on the Gender and Technology Research Project, where she helped resolve AI ethics issues at a major technology multinational using feminist and anti-racist theory. She has presented findings to a range of audiences including the United Nations, NatWest, The Open Data Institute (ODI), the AI World Congress and the Institute of Science & Technology. Her work on AI-powered hiring tools has been covered by media outlets like the BBC, BBC Today, Forbes, the Register, and the Daily Mail, among other outlets. As part of this work, Eleanor led a team of computer science students in developing a tool that demonstrates the problematic logics behind AI-powered hiring tools that claim to deduce personality from someone’s face. She is the co-host of The Good Robot Podcast, where she interviews top scholars and technologists about AI ethics, has appeared on popular shows such as The Guilty Feminist, and is a TikToker for All The Citizens' data rights channel. She holds an International Dual PhD from the University of Bologna and the University of Granada, where she was an Early-Stage Researcher for the EU Horizon 2020 ETN-ITN-Marie Curie project “GRACE” (Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe). As part of this project Eleanor helped develop a software application that transmitted intersectional feminist ideas and methodologies to the general public. Her current research, which has been published in top journals such as Philosophy and Technology, investigates how humanity defines and constitutes itself both through socio-cultural processes such as race and gender and through its connection with computational networks and digital systems. She is the co-editor of the collection Feminist AI with Oxford University Press. Her other projects can be found at www.eleanordrage.com

Email Address: ed575@cam.ac.uk

Selected Works

•“‘Bugs’, ‘Broken Binaries’, and Malware: Investigating Gender and the Human in Science Fiction’s Depictions of Technological Malfunction”, Investigating Cultures of Gender Equality, Routledge GRACE Series, Volume 3. (Nov/2021).

•“Performative Assemblages: Race, Gender, and Technology in Science Fiction”, Performing Cultures of Gender Equality, Routledge GRACE Series Volume 2, edited by Emilia M. Durán-Almarza and Isabel Carrera- Suárez, Routledge. (Nov/2021).

•“Making Ends Meet in a Superintelligent Slum: Artificial Intelligence and Economic Precarity in Nicoletta Vallorani’s Il Cuore Finto di DR”, Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research (FAFNIR). (Jun/2020).

 •“A Geocritical Exploration of ‘Racial’ and Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Science Fiction”. Women’s Voices and Genealogies in Literary Studies in English. Cambridge Scholars, 2019, pp. 180-192.

 •“Science, Myth, and Spirits: Re-inventions of Science Fiction by Women of Colour Writers, Between Africa, Europe and the Caribbean”. Studies on Home and Community Science, vol. 11, no. 2, 2018, pp. 77-85.

 •“A Virtual Ever-After: Utopia, Race, and Gender in Black Mirror's ‘San Junipero’”. Black Mirror and Critical Media Theory, edited by Angela M. Cirucci and Barry Vacker, Lexington Books, 2018, pp. 27-39.

 •“The Challenge of Invisible Cities: a Calvinian Adventure through Literature and Contemporary Art”, by Bertrand Westphal. (Post)Colonial Passages: Incursions and Excursions across the Literatures and Cultures in English, edited by Silvia Albertazzi et al., Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018, pp. 6-21.

•“In the Hard Times, (and the Good): Solidarities Beyond Race and Gender in Critical Utopian and Dystopian Women’s Science Fiction.” deGenere: Small Islands? Transnational Solidarity in Contemporary Literature and Arts, no. 3, 2017, pp. 34-47.