« Consent and consultation against settler colonialism: Priscylla Joca, Rebeca Macias Gimenez, ‘Learning about Democracy through Disputes over the Meaning of Indigenous Consent and Consultation’, Democratic Theory, 2026
Dilapidated settler structures: Madeleine J. S. Léger, Vicious Dilapidation: On Crumbling Settler Places in the Maritimes, PhD dissertation, Georgetown University, 2026 »

AI targets Indigenous peoples: M. S. Khan, Y. El-Lahib, A. Al Ashoor, ‘AI and Medical Colonialism: Complicities, Tensions, and Contradictions’, in C. El Morr, A. Saab, E. Salem Sokhn (eds), AI for Epidemic Preparedness, Springer, 2026, pp. 483-498

17Sep26

Abstract: In this chapter, we interrogate how artificial intelligence (AI) systems have been used as a tool to facilitate medical colonialism in global health contexts. While often framed as a neutral tool in health and medical care, we disrupt conceptualizations of AI as separate from contemporary issues of colonial and imperial control. Drawing on critical scholarship, we disrupt claims of AI as solely contributing to the betterment of communities by situating it within its contemporary applications that intensify medical colonialism. Particularly, we conceptualize AI as part of a broad technological infrastructure that utilizes health data in processes of datafication and automation as tools of surveillance, experimentation, and subjugation in contexts such as Canada, Gaza, and New Zealand/Aotearoa. In doing so, we point to the ways in which AI development and deployment are part and parcel of the current Western colonial and imperial project that seeks to dominate the Global South. Specifically, we demonstrate how health priorities are used to justify and facilitate the normalization of violence against individuals and communities using mechanisms such as Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS) or constructing a Genocidal Surveillant Assemblage (GSA). To set a decolonial agenda for global health, the chapter asserts that medical practitioners and health care institutions must challenge the techno-specificities of their field, thereby contending with the realities of AI in extracting and exploiting patient data. We use data sovereignty as a framework to move forward and unsettle the ways in which the ownership, access, and use of patient data or data collected from communities more broadly may transform issues of data collection and governance. Ultimately, this discussion calls into question the role and functions of AI as part of health care technologies and practices that are intensifying coloniality at large.


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