Contact Information
Biography
Golden M. Owens teaches and researches representations of race and gender, artificial intelligence, haunting, popular culture, and racialized sounds and voices. Her current book project, tentatively titled Digital Maids in Domestic Spaces, examines intelligent virtual assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Anthropic's Claude, and OpenAI's ChatGPT, contending that these aides evoke and are haunted by Black women domestic servants--both enslaved and free--in the United States. The project analyzes 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!, the Journal for Cinema and Media Studies, and Flow. She has recently discussed her work on the Ways of Knowing podcast and on ASALH TV. Her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, Northwestern University's Office of Fellowships, The Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, and The Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities.
Research
Selected Research
- Owens, Golden M. “Lana, Alexa, & ChatGPT: AI Surveillance and Too Hot to Handle Golden M. Owens / University of Washington – Flow.” Flow 32, no. 2 (2026). https://www.flowjournal.org/2026/03/surveillance-too-hot-to-handle/.
- Owens, Golden. “Robotic Slaves and Where to Find Them: Racial(ized) Servitude in The Jetsons.” Flow 32, no. 1 (2025). https://www.flowjournal.org/2025/10/robotic-slaves-and-where-to-find-them-racialized-servitude-in-the-jetsonsgolden-m-owens-university-of-washington/.
- Owens, Golden. “Book Review | Not My Type: Automating Sexual Racism by Apryl Williams (Stanford University Press, 2024).” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 11, no. 1 (2025): 1. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v11i1.44403.
- Owens, Golden M. “From Maid to Machine: Her, Hegemony, and the Twenty-First-Century Mammy.” The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 64, no. 5 (2025). https://doi.org/10.3998/jcms.18261332.0064.513.
- Owens, Golden. “‘Hey Google, Talk Like Issa’: Black Voiced Digital Assistants and the Reshaping of Racial Labor.” Sounding Out!, June 5, 2023. https://soundstudiesblog.com/2023/06/05/google-talk-like-issa-black-voiced-digital-assistants-and-the-reshaping-of-racial-labor/.