FELICIA JING

POLITICAL THEORY + AI RESEARCHER

Department of Political Science, 
Johns Hopkins University 

Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 
IBM Research


I am a PhD Candidate in political theory at Johns Hopkins University. Since 2022, I have also concurrently worked as a full-time researcher at IBM Research. There, I interact daily with algorithmic systems, observe their design and development, and conduct AI audits using methods from the humanities. 

My research seeks to restage dominant histories of computing as histories of political struggle. In my dissertation project, titled AI and Revolutionary Desire, I locate untimely algorithms across the history of political and economic thought, especially in the technological imaginations of utopian political projects and competing discourses on central planning. The first chapter is forthcoming in Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon.

In addition to my dissertation research, I also have 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. Moreover, as part of my work at IBM, I publish empirical research in information science and human-computer interaction venues like ACM FAccT and CSCW. 

From 2024-2026, my research will be supported by grants from the Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

THEORY

ARTICLES






  • Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon 
  • (forthcoming sept 2025)
Algorithm
    
This essay makes the case for why ‘algorithm’ is and has always been a fundamentally political concept by tracing its use as an origin story for the founding of a “science” of computation.  


  • Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience
  • (forthcoming march 2026)

 ‘Good Tech’ and Technologies of Elite Capture
    An article on the phenomena of “good tech” in the AI industry as a peculiar alliance where entrepreneurs and venture capital conspire toward making globalization “feel good.” Co-authored with Juana C. Becerra.

  • Social Text
  • (accepted to special issue)

 On Emplotment: Phantom Islands, Synthetic Data, and the Coloniality of Algorithmic Space.

An essay that stages the rise of synthetic data as a colonial recursion of logistical technologies of loss prevention, as an reactive adaptation to organized political struggle along the data production pipeline. Co-authored with Juana C. Becerra and Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal.






EMPIRICAL 

ARTICLES + PROCEEDINGS


    



  • ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency  (2023)
 Towards Labor Transparency in Situated Computational Systems Impact Research
    A framework for documenting divisions of labor within participatory research, design, and data practices. Co-authored with Sara E. Berger and Juana C. Becerra.  *Finalist for Most Impactful Research Paper of 2023, Responsible AI Institute. 
  

  • ACM Conerence on Computer Supported Work and Social Computing  (2024)
 Designing for Agonism: 12 Workers’ Perspectives on Contesting Technology Futures
    Findings from pilot studies of practical methods and tools for non-expert participation AI research, design, and development.  Co-authored with 11 others.



  • ACM Journal of Responsible Innovation  (2025)
 Opportunities and Challenges of Multidisciplinary Algorithmic Impact Assessments.
     Methodological insights from the experimental use of multidisplinary, multi-modal methods in AI assessments, evaluations, and audits. Co-authored with Juana C. Becerra, Adriana Alvarado Garcia, Sara E. Berger, Heloisa Candello, and Caitlin Lustig.

DISSERTATION 

ABSTRACT






  • (defense expected May 2026)
AI and Revolutionary Desire: Futurity and Political Thought through the Technological Imagination
    
My dissertation project begins from the premise that ‘the algorithm’ is a collective speculation toward utopia. More than a set of technoscientific practices, material infrastructures, or forces of production, the algorithm is also a collection of desires that has mediated political imagination since at least the socialist calculation debates. Tracing an unconventional genealogy of the concept, I depart from typical narrations of its history as a progression of scientific inventions from the 1950s-present. I instead center a technological imaginary of the 1910-40s, one forged between socialists and neoliberals to answer the question of central planning. That the promise of AI rings so hollow today, I suggest, owes to our inheritance of the political unconscious of these debates. The concept of the algorithm was forged within a fundamentally elite discourse, one that imagined utopia as a rational economic order (whether realized by technocratic management or by spontaneous coordination) that will always disqualify popular and proletarian modes of economic planning. In this way, I reframe the history of computing as a history of political struggle.