Dorothy R. Santos

Dorothy R. Santos is a Filipina American scholar examining the intersections of biocolonialism, artificial intelligence, and trans justice. Her work investigates how technological systems and biological extraction are entangled with questions of identity, sovereignty, and care - creating new frameworks for understanding power in the digital age.

Santos is a Just Tech Fellow at the Social Science Research Council, a position recognizing her contributions to understanding technology's role in social systems. She is associated with the School for Poetic Computation (SFPC), where she engages with communities exploring the politics and aesthetics of code and technology. Currently, she leads the Infrastructure of Feeling research project (2024-2026), which investigates the emotional and material dimensions of how we live within technological systems.

As a speaker, Santos brings a rigorous, grounded perspective that moves beyond abstraction to examine concrete relationships between extraction, innovation, and justice. Her work matters because it refuses to separate questions about AI development from histories of colonialism and bioprospecting, nor does it treat trans justice as secondary to tech discourse. Audiences engage with her analysis of how infrastructure shapes what we feel, what we know, and whose bodies and lands are rendered available for use. She offers frameworks for thinking critically about the systems we inhabit and depend upon.