Highlighting Indigenous Research at Queen’s: Voices of Indigenous Research Column – The Queen’s Journal
February 13, 2026
Michael G. Sherbert: Understanding artificial intelligence through indigenous relational ways of knowing
Michael G. Sherbert is a postdoctoral fellow at Queen’s University whose research repositions Artificial Intelligence (AI) through Indigenous relational epistemologies. Across his work in AI, religion and culture, technology, disability, and Indigenous thought, he argues that AI isn’t a neutral technology. Rather, it reflects an underlying ideology that shapes ideas about humanity, progress, ethics, power, and the future.
His recent book, Deconstructing Transhumanism: A Religion Without Religion (Sherbert, 2025a), examines how transhumanism presents itself as secular while inheriting religious narratives of salvation, mastery, and human perfection. In a related article, he explores these ideas through a Derridean lens, analyzing techno-fetishism and techno-idolatry in transhumanist thought (Sherbert, 2025b).
