Bringing global histories of gender, race, and citizenship to the AI age

Working at nonprofits dedicated to international development, education, and health led Rachel Jean-Baptiste to a career in academia. While helping write a grant to secure government funding for development work in Haiti, where she was born, Jean-Baptiste consulted academic sources and noticed how they failed to reflect Haiti’s complexity and vitality. 

That experience drove her to become an academic researcher focused on more accurately capturing the details that shape the big picture.

“Part of what we do in academia is knowledge production, and that trickles down into textbooks and articles and has the potential to influence policymakers practitioners, and others who influence what is happening on the ground,” said Jean-Baptiste, who earned a doctorate in history at Stanford and is now a historian of French-speaking Africa and the Atlantic Ocean world. In 2023, she joined the faculty in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences as the Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden Family Professor of Feminist and Gender Studies and professor of history and of African and African American Studies. She has served as the faculty director of the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FGSS) since fall 2023.

Jean-Baptiste’s research bridges history and gender/sexuality and race/ethnicity studies. Her clear-eyed framing of key debates in and between these fields reveals a lot about her approach as a scholar, teacher, and faculty administrator.

“As L.P. Hartley wrote, ‘the past is a foreign country’; that’s also how I see it as a historian,” she said. “You go in and try to figure out the language, the ways of being and thought: Every time you’re creating a Rosetta Stone. For terms and concepts like gender and race, my definitions adhere to how a particular society is thinking about these issues, as opposed to my sense in the present.” 

Diving deeper into historical lives

The scholarly shorthand that race, class, and gender are a neat tripod on which identities are built doesn’t account for the nuances Jean-Baptiste wants to capture. She investigates the concept of intimacy—interactions, exchanges, or feelings that have to do with a sense of closeness or proximity. This involves matters of emotional, physical, or sexual engagement—or moments that people may consider private or personal. Her research charts the ways in which intimate matters shape individuals’ life courses, how they come into public view and debate, and how individuals, societies, institutions and governments try to harness and regulate them. The friction can drive historical change, Jean-Baptiste said. 

Jean-Baptiste’s most recent book Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood, and Citizenship (Cambridge University Press, 2023) won the David H. Pinkney Prize for the most distinguished book of the year on French history and The Martin A. Klein Prize for the most distinguished book of the year on African history published in English.The book explores race, childhood, family, and citizenship by analyzing the varied ways in which descendants of African mothers and European fathers in the period of French colonial rule in West and Equatorial Africa articulated multiracial identities and tried to gain recognition as part of African and European societies.

“I would like to reorient scholarship to consider race in Africa, rather than just race and Africa,” Jean-Baptiste said, “and showcase the ways in which Africans and Africa shape global history.

Since becoming faculty director of FGSS, Jean-Baptiste has taught Introduction to Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies three times, engaging a new generation of students to think critically and ask questions about how gender and sexuality take shape in different ways in various times and places. Those differences are a motivating force for Jean-Baptiste.

“It can’t be a kind of dogmatic this is it,” she explained. “You have to think about the different contexts in which, let’s say, ‘women’ around the world are thinking about what gender looks like for them and how they want to live their lives.”

To illustrate this idea, her syllabus for the course pairs readings about abortion rights and reproductive health in the United States and Germany with a reading about how women in South Korea found space within the Protestant church to challenge their status as wives and mothers. Students can identify different models of agency in each situation. 

Calling for gender literacy

Looking forward, Jean-Baptiste wants to make space for gender literacy in the way we live now. 

“Gender literacy is a competency, a skill, a tool that can be used to make meaningful interventions in all areas of life,” she said. “I think every single student at Stanford, whatever their major, should have this competency and skill.” 

Jean-Baptiste would like to integrate gender literacy as a key competency across varied fields of study. Among engineers, for example, gender literacy could improve product design and resulting products and systems. Her vision aligns with that of Stanford’s medical humanities minor, which includes coursework to help healthcare providers investigate how gender impacts health and illness, and, as a result, provide better care.

With artificial intelligence affecting more spheres of life, Jean-Baptiste is especially keen for Stanford to become a leader in ensuring that the large datasets used to train the AI sources we increasingly interact with capture the complexity of gender and sexuality and diminish bias. 

“In the interventions and debates that have taken place on the ethical guardrails for AI and data science around issues of power and difference, some other universities have made inroads on race,” Jean-Baptiste said. “Not enough work is being done to ensure that AI doesn’t neglect or flatten the complexities of gender, but Stanford is well situated to play a leadership role, with some high-quality research already underway.” 

To spark thinking and discovery for students, Jean-Baptiste and Cynthia Bailey, senior lecturer in computer science, are planning to co-teach a COLLEGE course next spring called Gender and Race in the Making of Global Tech Innovation.