Dr Amy Gaeta, LCFI
Biographical Information
Dr. Amy Gaeta is a Research Associate at the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. She uses feminist theory and critical disability studies to analyze the emotional, aesthetic, and political dimensions of human-tech relations, especially those concerning drones and AI systems. She largely examines 21st-century American transnational fiction, poetry, and visual culture to identify aesthetics and narratives of human-technology relations at work in these cultural objects and how the wider infrastructures of militarization, surveillance, and securitization shape these relations and narratives. Gaeta brings together these questions, analytics, and objects of study to ask how semi-autonomous technologies impact the formation of subjecthood and ideas of humanness. Her work has appeared in First Monday, the Journal of Visual Culture, OneZero, Culture, Theory, & Critique, and more.
Gaeta is part of the UKRI-funded project Droned Life organized by the Center for Drones and Culture at CFI. Prior to joining the project, Gaeta was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She earned her PhD in English and Visual Cultures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as well.
She is strongly committed to the aims of disability justice, many of which inform her work as a researcher, advocate, and poet. She has contributed to numerous pedagogical, community-based, and artistic projects that aim to promote the strengthening of disability culture and anti-ableism.
Amy would be pleased to advise students interested in similar topics and questions.
Research Interests
Drone Studies, AI Ethics, Critical Disability Studies, Feminist Science and Technology Studies, Queer Theory, Surveillance Studies, Visual Cultures Studies, and 21st American Transnational Literatures and Cultures.
Selected Publications
“A Disability Theory of Anti-Surveillance Tactics,” Pietho, forthcoming 2024.
“Cripveillance: Passivity, Ambivalence and Drone Vision in Laura Poitras’ AstroNoise,” RACAR, forthcoming 2024.
Co-editor, “Militarization and Pleasure,” Special Issue of Culture, Theory, and Critique, 2024.
“The Drone’s Other Target: Drone Hobbyists’ Loving Reliance on Self-Surveillance” in Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, & Ecology (eds. Beryl Pong & Michael Richardson), Open Humanities Press, 2024.
“Diagnostic Advertisements: How Social Media Algorithms Diagnose and Prescribe Users” First Monday, 2023.
“Staying Feral” in Becoming Feral (eds. Josh Armstrong, Alexandra Lakind, Chessa Adsit-Morris, & Rebekka Saeter), Objet-a Creative Studio, 2021
Co-author, “Inquisitive Survival: Burning Questions from the Necro-scene.” Journal of Visual Culture & Harun Farocki Institute, 2020.