Critical Perspectives on "AI" in Education

Join us for a conversation with Dr. Lucy Suchman, professor emerita of Lancaster University (Sociology). Dr. Suchman's work includes Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Action (Second Edition, Cambridge, 2012), and she is a member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC). Her recent work explores the "limits of datafication and the zones of ignorance that reliance on data creates about everything that can’t be computed."

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Join us for a conversation with Audrey Watters, author of Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning (MIT Press, 2021). Watters writes on education and technology and her website can be found here. She is a recipient of the Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship from Columbia University School of Journalism, and her writings can also be found at her blogs: "Hack Education" here, and "Second Breakfast" here.

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Join us for a conversation with Brian Merchant, author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone (2017, Little, Brown) and Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion against Big Tech (2023, Little, Brown). He is also a founder of VICE’s speculative fiction outlet Terraform, (find an anthology of these writings here), as well as being reporter in residence at the AI Now Institute. Find his most recent work in his newsletter, Blood in the Machine.

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Join us for a conversation with Drs. Martha Lincoln (Anthropology) and Martha Kenney (Women and Gender Studies), both of San Francisco State University. Find their recent co-authored article examining the implications of the uncritical adoption of generative AI in higher education: "Let Them Eat Large Language Models: Artificial Intelligence and Austerity in the Neoliberal University," and find a story they co-authored for the San Francisco Chronicle here at this link. 

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Join us for a conversation with Dr. Surekha Davies, author of Humans: A Monstrous History (UC Press, 2025). From the UC Press website: "With rich, evocative storytelling that braids together ancient gods and generative AI, Frankenstein's monster and E.T., Humans: A Monstrous History shows how monster-making is about control: It defines who gets to count as normal." Dr. Davies is a historian, speaker, and monster consultant. In addition to Humans, she is the author of Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters, which won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history from the Journal of the History of Ideas and the Roland H. Bainton Prize in History and Theology. A former British Library Map Library curator and history professor, she has held fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library, the Library of Congress, and elsewhere. She has a BA and an M.Phil. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge and a PhD from the University of London. 

Her essays include: op-eds in the LA Times, most recently last week; an essay in Smithsonian Magazine about an early 16th-century Portuguese painting that featured monsters with African, Indigenous Caribbean, and intersex features; “Can the Archive Make a Monster of a Historian?”, a meditation in Contingent Magazine on the story behind my two books; and “Monstrification” in Aeon, showing how for centuries people have defined individuals and groups as monsters in order to push them out of the category of human. She writes a free newsletter, Notes from a Science Historian.

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Join us for a conversation with Dr. Adam Becker, author of More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity (Hachette, 2025). He also wrote What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics (Hachette, 2018), which the New York Times Book Review called, "A thorough, illuminating exploration of the most consequential controversy raging in modern science."

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