Golden Owens / University of Washington

Golden M. Owens explores and teaches about representations of race and gender, artificial intelligence, haunting, popular culture, and racialized sounds and voices. Her first book project examines intelligent virtual assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, contending that these aides evoke and are haunted by Black women slaves, servants, and houseworkers in the United States. The project demonstrates this haunting through analyzing popular 20th and 21st-century media depictions of Black female domestic workers, robotic and/or artificially intelligent servants/helpers, labor-saving products and devices, and contemporary virtual aides.

Dr. Owens' work appears in Sounding Out! and the Journal for Cinema and Media Studies. Her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, and UW’s Simpson Center.