Date and time: Thursday 12 February 2026, 13:00-14:00 CET
Speaker: Nazanin Andalibi, University of Michigan
Title: Emotion AI: Utopian Promises, Dystopian Realities
Where: Digital Futures hub, Osquars Backe 5, floor 2 at KTH main campus OR Zoom
Directions: https://www.digitalfutures.kth.se/contact/how-to-get-here/
OR
Host: Kristina Höök, khook@kth.se
Bio: Nazanin Andalibi is an Associate Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan (UM), where she also serves as affiliate faculty with the Digital Studies Institute and the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing. Her award-winning research appears in leading venues including ACM CHI, CSCW, and TOCHI. She has received $1.16 million in funding from the National Science Foundation, including a prestigious NSF CAREER award. The policy and practical impact of her work is reflected in its citation in numerous policy documents, her invited remarks at the Federal Trade Commission, and her keynote address at Reddit’s ModSummit. She also serves on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction and contributes regularly to conference organizing committees.
A critical social computing and human–computer interaction (HCI) scholar, Andalibi studies how marginality is experienced, enacted, and shaped through sociotechnical systems such as artificial intelligence and social media. A central strand of her work investigates the privacy, ethical, justice, and policy implications of emotion AI in high-stakes contexts, including workplaces, hiring processes, social media, and health care. Her research demonstrates how emotion AI amplifies existing inequities, creates new forms of harm, and disproportionately burdens marginalized communities—deepening identity-based vulnerabilities and reinforcing the very structural challenges its proponents claim it will solve.
Andalibi is a Scholar-in-Residence at Digital Futures, hosted by Kia Höök.
Abstract: Emotion AI, a branch of affective computing, promises to algorithmically detect, infer, or predict people’s emotions, moods, and mental states. These systems are rapidly spreading, from entertainment and consumer technologies to education, healthcare, and the workplace—despite an absence of regulation in the United States and weak regulatory efforts in the European Union. Drawing on a series of empirical studies with diverse social groups as well as critical analyses of emotion-AI technologies, scholarly narratives, and patents, this talk examines how emotion AI amplifies existing inequities and produces new forms of harm. Rather than promoting well-being, fairness, or improved conditions, emotion AI disproportionately burdens marginalized communities, deepens identity-based vulnerabilities, and exacerbates the very structural challenges its proponents claim it will remedy.
I argue that emotion AI is not merely a technical innovation; it is a sociotechnical project rooted in power, profit, governance, and the regulation of emotional life. Its deployment relies on pervasive surveillance, coerced emotional labor, and the systematic absence of meaningful consent within unequal power relations. I conclude by discussing why emotion data must be recognized and treated as highly sensitive in research, practice, and policy; why technical fixes cannot resolve the core harms of emotion AI; and what more just alternatives might look like for workers and other data subjects navigating increasingly, and often dubiously, “emotion-aware” sociotechnical environments.
