Michael Randall Barnes

My main research is in social philosophy of language and applied ethics (mostly of technology), and addresses issues like online hate, content moderation, and the emerging norms of social media. I also work on topics in AI ethics more broadly, especially issues of automation, work, and surveillance. Currently, I am Assistant Research Professor in the ND-IBM Technology Ethics Lab, which is part of the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good at the University of Notre Dame. In Fall 2025 I will join the University of Oslo as Associate Professor of Philosophy. Before Notre Dame I was a Research Fellow at the Australian National University, where I was affiliated with the Machine Intelligence Normative Theory (MINT) Lab and the Humanizing Machine Intelligence (HMI) project. My PhD is from Georgetown University, where my dissertation, 'Subordinating Speech and the Construction of Social Hierarchies,' was supervised by Quill Kukla, Alisa Carse, Madison Powers, and Lynne Tirrell.