Women and Non-Binary Persons in the study of Religion and AI

I was pretty disappointed recently to see a special issue of a well known journal on religion and robots that involved zero non-male scholars out of eight contributors. I don’t know if people were approached and they just weren’t available, sometimes that is possible.

But there have been so many guides to avoiding this since I returned to academia in 2010. Attempts to try and enable the creators of conferences, special editions, and edited volumes think through their decision making processes even at the beginning of these projects. There have been initiatives and manifestos from male scholars who want to dedicate themselves to having the best people involved, every time. There were even parodies, like Congratulations, You Have an All Male Panel! which, sadly, seems to have stopped being active in 2020 (perhaps, like most of us, the pandemic made other things take a back seat and the founders couldn’t get back to it, so no judgement!).

But a lot of these efforts are quite old now. And still… it keeps happening.

So, at least for religion and AI, I thought I would make a list of women and non-binary persons in Religion and AI (with various fields and methodologies) and update it as often as I can. Suggestions and corrections are more than welcome!

These are just the first names I could think of, people I have worked with, plus some that came from checking initiatives such as AI and Faith where I am an advisory member, and previous American Academy of Religion conference catalogues listings. And that didn’t take me all that much time to do…

My postdoc, Kristina Eiviler, has also added some names now 🙂

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