Building Critical Thinking About AI
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Agency and Its Implications for Human Responsibility
Seminar
October 30, 2026, 4:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. (Singapore time)
Elisabeth Peyroux, CNRS Research Director, Associate Researcher at IRASEC and Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute (ARI) of the National University of Singapore (NUS), will participate in this webinar as part of the “Critical Social AI webinar series,” alongside Bahia Guellai (CNRS@CREATE). They will present interdisciplinary reflections on the challenges of redefining human agency and responsibility from their respective disciplinary perspectives.
This webinar series is organized by a working group at the National University of Singapore (NUS) that brings together researchers and professionals who critically analyze how AI is gradually being integrated into various aspects of social and professional life.
The concept of agency has been at the core of many recent epistemological shifts in the social sciences. Due to the rapid spread of AI, researchers across various disciplines are working to describe the role of non-human entities in shaping representations, perceptions, actions, and new types of interactions within everyday digitally mediated environments. Recently, some scholars are questioning whether human agency itself needs to be rethought. The question therefore arises : how should we investigate agency in human-AI interaction across different tools such as agentic systems, LLM chatbots, drones, and AI sensory systems ? In this CritSocAI webinar, two social science scholars will give an overview of contemporary epistemological shifts in geography, urban studies and developmental psychology, and assess some of the research methods that can be employed to study how interacting with AI agents influences human perceptions and reshapes cognitive categories.
14 October 2026
