Karachi, Pakistan — September 2025 — Dr. Curtis Runstedler, researcher and academic affiliate of the Interchange Forum for Reflecting on Intelligent Systems (SRF IRIS) at the University of Stuttgart, visited the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) Karachi to present a lecture. The event, featured in the Spring 2025 Newsletter (Vol. 5, Issue 2) from the School of Economics and Social Sciences (SESS), highlighted a growing engagement between global research communities and Pakistan’s leading business university.
In his talk, Dr. Runstedler applied a posthuman feminist critique to contemporary fiction depicting sexualized dolls and robots to interrogate the commodification of artificial sexual companions and discuss how they perpetuate cultural misogyny, reinforce gender inequality, and simulate artificial intimacy. The resulting journal article, which he co-authored with Sercan Hamza Bağlama (Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University in Çanakkale, Türkiye), is currently under review with English Studies.
Dr. Runstedler’s work situates narrative alongside technological critique, unpacking how characters and readers negotiate trust and distrust in non-human agents and what this reveals about broader cultural attitudes toward AI. Such perspectives are increasingly relevant as institutions and societies worldwide grapple with integrating intelligent technologies into daily life and governance.
Organized by IBA’s SESS community, the lecture offered students and faculty a platform to engage with interdisciplinary insights into technology and society, complementing the school’s mission to foster global thinking and analytical depth across economic, social, and technological domains. While the newsletter highlighted the visit as part of SESS’s ongoing academic enrichment activities, Dr. Runstedler’s presentation also underscored the value of international academic exchange in enriching local discourse on emerging global challenges.
Dr. Runstedler holds a research position in the Department of English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Stuttgart and contributes to SRF IRIS’s broader efforts to connect critical reflection with intelligent systems research. His scholarly work interrogates how stories shape our assumptions about machines, agency, and human-technology relations — a theme that resonated with the IBA audience and sparked robust discussion among participants. His second monograph, titled Negotiating Dis/Trust in AI Fiction and the result of his IRIS and Habilitation research, is currently under review with Routledge’s Studies in Speculative Fiction series.
| Kontakt |
|---|