Jennifer Buchan is a doctoral student in the Communication Arts and Sciences department where she studies rhetorics of control and gender, especially those marked by commitments to whiteness and patriarchy. Jen's dissertation, entitled “Evitable AI: Rhetorical Speculation in the Futures of Artificial Intelligence” develops a theory of rhetorical speculation, or a theory of how speculation about humanity’s future(s) produces, shapes, and constrains public imagination and deliberation. Specifically, this dissertation assesses political, popular, and scientific discourse about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) as an archive of rhetorical speculation as they connect through common appeals to the myth of AI inevitability. “Evitable AI” understands speculation about the future of “thinking machines” as neither new nor idle but, instead, as historically repeating, strategic discourse that captures public imagination about what may be possible in and for AI and human futures.