The AI industry rests on a harmful, neo-colonial extractive supply chain, from mines in the global south to data centres in the global north, yet contemporary AI development processes, including large-scale data centres in settler-colonial states are legitimised in public discourse as technological ‘progression’. This narrative reinforces colonial, patriarchal and environmental exploitation. Relatively little interdisciplinary research centres the lived experiences of communities affected by AI datacentres, as well as the relationships between those communities and their environment. Focusing on the construction of AI data centres in Indigenous territories in Nevada, USA, this project will build on Davies’ (2022) analysis of ‘slow harm’ and research on epistemic violence and environmental justice through a new emancipatory theoretical framework, ‘Interkincentrism’. Combining intersectional relationality, Spivak’s (1988) analysis on ‘subaltern’ silencing, and Indigenous Kincentrism (Blair and Walsh, 2026), the framework allows for deeper explorations of epistemic violence surrounding contemporary AI development, and anthropocentric harm. It analyses the ‘slow harm’, lived experiences, and resistance of ‘subaltern’ communities and their environment, which it views in relation to one another.
Globally, Indigenous women are leading resistance to gendered ecological harm, however, in the contemporary context of AI ‘ethics’, their lived experiences are intentionally ignored by Western governments and corporations who capitalise on these processes (Davies, 2022). This epistemic violence is inextricably linked to, and reinforces slow violence (Davies, 2022) This project seeks to redress these omissions by promoting a deeper understanding of women’s experiences and their strategies of resistance through its integration of Indigenous and feminist epistemologies.
‘Interkincentrism’ combines core aspects of intersectionality with Indigenous understandings of kincentrism. Relationality is used to understand the interconnectedness between women’s suffering, and a kincentric lens analyses the mutually dependent relationship between humans and the environment surrounding them. As an emancipatory framework, interkincentrism understands both nature and women as active, ‘subaltern’ subjects who have experienced harm, and constitutes an analytical tool to connect and reclaim voices that have been historically dismissed by governments and corporations with anthropocentric goals.
My previous research (Blair and Walsh, 2026), utilised interkincentrism to demonstrate how ‘subaltern’ women and their environments are relationally and doubly subjugated by anthropocentric harm, through shared infertility, trauma and epistemic violence in discourse that delegitimised and subjugated both as active agents. It is now imperative that this interdisciplinary area be researched in the context of contemporary AI development.
Recent publications:
Blair, F & Walsh, T 2026, ‘Mother/nature: An intersectional analysis of the patriarchal nature of anthropocentric practices and discourses surrounding nuclear testing and industrial pollution’, Feminist Encounters, vol. 10, no. 2, 7. https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/18754
