Graduate Student

Dana Karout is an interdisciplinary researcher and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she is a PhD candidate in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Dana's work focuses on the pedagogical and theoretical implications of contemporary generative AI, exploring what our interactions with each other and tools such as ChatGPT reveal about our culture. She has written on generative AI as a mirror and as a "partner in unknowing," in publications such as Wired...

Russell Ladson is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley.

His research interrogates the metaphysical presuppositions that structure form, intelligence, and negation. Working within the fractures that link ancient ontology, Kant and Hegel, and contemporary formations of intelligence and computation, he asks what remains when thought no longer believes in its own coherence.

Before coming to Berkeley, he earned dual master’s degrees from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in Interactive...

My research is centered in the intersection between the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of technology, and their ontological and political implications. I am interested in exploring the relationship between the ecological and the political, the place of technics in ecology and evolution, and the limits of cybernetics in the understanding of life. My thinking is influenced by biologists of the Eco-evo-devo field (Ecological, evolutionary, and developmental biology), who describe evolution not through exclusively genetic means, but through a variety of phenomena...