
Leah Brooks-Hall (they/she) graduated from the UNT Women's and Gender Studies program in 2020. Leah wrote the first thesis to be successfully composed and defended in the UNT WGST program, bringing together women of color feminism, decoloniality, and new materialism to weave a critical analysis of the relationship between humans and robots in the films Her and Ex Machina. Currently, they are completing a second master's degree at UNT in Communication Studies with a focus on rhetoric. Leah is invested in exploring critical cultural questions that destabilize the constructed boundary between (non)human and human; interrogate the symbiotic relationship between human and machine; and examine how techno-human relations participate in queer worldmaking projects. Leah's current research endeavor engages queer phenomenology to analyze how artificial intelligence (AI) is productively remaking the landscape of techno-human intimacy and sexuality through digitally mediated technologies such as the AI companion app, Replika.