Feminist Research Ethics and Student Privacy in the Age of AI

Abstract

This article examines university researchers’ capture of student images on US college campuses for training facial recognition technology, and situates this project within universities’ broader historical alignment with militarism and racial injustice. It argues that feminist STS ethics provides a framework for not only challenging the ways that university research inquiry actively contributes to oppressive power structures, but also for reimagining university research ethics for a greater engagement with questions of justice. The article identifies the limitations of dominant institutional ethics and privacy rights discourses for centering justice considerations, and instead outlines an intersectional feminist approach to university research ethics that reimagines the relationship between research processes, power, and social impacts.