LSTS Researcher Anastasia Karagianni to Present "Verifemmication" Framework for AI Act Risk Assessment at McGill University and Host CRAFT Session at ACM FAccT 2026

We are delighted to announce that LSTS doctoral researcher Anastasia Karagianni will be undertaking a short visiting research stay at McGill University.

In the context of this stay, she will deliver a seminar, hosted by Rahimi’s Lab, titled :

“Verifemmication”: An evaluative framework for risk assessment under the AI Act standardisation process. 

🗓️ Event Details

• Date: June 23, 2026
• Time: 3:30 p.m. (EDT)
• Location: MILA (6650 Saint-Urbain Street), Auditorium 2 (2nd Floor)
• Format: Hybrid (In-person and Zoom)

• Registration: The seminar is open to the public, but registration is required. Please scan the QR code included in the poster to register.

   

📝 Seminar Abstract

The EU Artificial Intelligence Act addresses non-discrimination in high-risk AI primarily through Article 10(5) data governance obligations, risk management, and the use of fairness metrics within harmonized standards. In reproductive healthcare, however, these procedural mechanisms may fail to capture harms such as epistemic injustice, obstetric violence, and structurally mediated discrimination embedded in historical clinical datasets and gendered medical norms.

“Verifemmication” offers a socio-legal framework for evaluating high-risk AI beyond formal compliance, asking whose knowledge defines risk, whose safety is prioritized, and whose experiences remain invisible. Applied to systems such as VBAC calculators and cesarean risk predictors, it shows how technically compliant tools can still reproduce coercion, constrain autonomy, and obscure intersectional harms. The framework supports reforms including Epistemic Impact Assessments, participatory standardization, expanded understandings of non-discrimination, and rights-based post-market monitoring.

Following her seminar at McGill, Anastasia will also be organizing an interactive CRAFT Session at the ACM FAccT 2026 conference titled:

Algo-rhythms: embodied resistance to algorithmic pain suffering in reproductive healthcare

🗓️ Event Details

• Date: Saturday, June 27, 2026
• Time: 15:30 to 17:30 EDT
• Information and registration on this event available here!
   

📝 Workshop Abstract

This interactive workshop explores how law, medicine, and AI technology co-produce choreographies of control over the birthing body. Drawing on feminist epistemologies, medical sociology, and dance praxis, it argues that the movement from a social to a medical model of women’s health (Bryers & van Teijlingen 2010) has been succeeded by a new algorithmic model, one that translates embodied experience into codified data rhythms. These “algo-rhythms” regulate whose movements, voices, and sensations are legible within obstetric care. This work uses dance as both metaphor and method (Mulcahy 2021): as metaphor, it frames the clinical encounter as a legal-technological choreography that scripts women’s bodies through risk protocols and predictive analytics; as method, it employs choreographic inquiry to reimagine embodied testimony and resistance to these systems. Building on feminist STS insights (Amir 2023), it shows how algorithmic infrastructures dismiss women’s pain by privileging quantifiable data over lived rhythm and relational movement. Through the lens of dance law, the poster argues that regulation operates not only through statutes and algorithms but through rhythm, the pacing, timing, and sequencing of institutional responses to suffering. Re-tuning these rhythms, it proposes, demands a legal-ethical shift toward embodied listening and algorithmic accountability, so that data systems move with rather than against women’s pain.