Through Crisis to Co-Creation: Integrating AI into Humanities Education
TL;DR
It is argued that if the humanities are to remain vital, they must experiment with integrative pedagogical framings informed by multiliteracies and critical pedagogy, and position AI as a medium through which shared inquiry and creative-critical work can be reoriented.
Abstract
In the context of what Chad Wellmon has termed the “permanent crisis” of the humanities, the rise of generative AI within contemporary media cultures calls for a reconsideration of humanistic education and its purposes. Rather than treating AI as a threat to established pedagogical norms, this article approaches it as a force that makes newly palpable the mediated and relational conditions under which authorship and interpretation have always unfolded. It argues that if the humanities are to remain vital, they must experiment with integrative pedagogical framings informed by multiliteracies and critical pedagogy. Such approaches position AI as a medium through which shared inquiry and creative-critical work can be reoriented. By incorporating AI into analytical and artistic practice under conditions of constraint and reflection, educators can invite students to grapple with automated systems while strengthening capacities for accountable judgment exercised in dialogue with others within more-than-human ecologies of meaning. From this vantage point, AI appears as a charged site of negotiation that presses the humanities to clarify what they do, for whom, and under what conditions they might continue to matter.