Faculty

Profile

Felicia is a political theorist by training. She works on the history computing with a focus on the politics of AI. From 2022-2025, she was a scholar in residence at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center at IBM Research. 

At The New School, Felicia teaches "Hardware Fundamentals: Materialist Approaches to Computational Machinery," a half- critical humanities, half- hands-on lab course that leads students in the disassembly of a computer component every week alongside a major theoretical text from the materialist tradition. 

Her first book project, titled AI and Revolutionary Desire, seeks to restage dominant histories of computing as histories of political struggle. Her work locates untimely algorithms across the history of political and economic thought, from the imagined technical basis of socialist central planning to visions of market intelligence. The first chapter of this project is forthcoming in Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon. 

In addition to this work, she also has two accepted articles: one in Social Text on the colonial studies of the platform and the other in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience on workplace AI and emerging strategies of accumulation in the tech industry. Her empirical research has also appeared in information science and human-computer interaction venues like ACM FAccT and ACM CSCW. 

Degrees Held

Ph.D. Political Science (Political Theory), Johns Hopkins University, 2019-present

B.A. Philosophy, Reed College

Recent Publications

• “Algorithm” in Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon. forthcoming
• “‘Good Tech’ and Technologies of Elite Capture” in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 12 (1), 2026. (with Juana C. Becerra)
• “On Emplotment: Phantom Islands, Synthetic Data and the Colonial Politics of Algorithmic Space.” in Social Text, accepted to special issue. (with Juana C. Becerra and Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal)
• “Rethinking AI Safety,” in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 2025. (with Juana C. Becerra) 
•  ”Towards Labor Transparency in Situated Computational Systems Impact Research” in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 2023. (with Sara E. Berger and Juana C. Becerra) 

For a complete list of Felicia's empirical research in HCI, see her ACM Digital Library Profile (below)

Research Interests

science and technology studies (STS), political theory, history of political and economic thought, revolutionary politics, politics of AI, utopia and utopianism 

Portfolio

CV

Personal Website

ACM Digital Library

Johns Hopkins Department Website