“We are Because of AI?”: An Interpretive Study of Adolescents‘ Identity Formation in Relation to Artificial Intelligence Guidance and Ubuntu

AN INTERPRETIVE STUDY OF ADOLESCENTS’ IDENTITY FORMATION IN RELATION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE GUIDANCE AND UBUNTU

Towards understanding identity as a queer and political performance: an analytical framework applied in the context of computer science education

Decades of research critique science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education for maintaining inequalities through its learning content and culture. The notion of (science) identity has increasingly been used to approach this research, understanding and critiquing how the learning content and culture are socially produced and reproduced in education. With the present work, we develop identity as a tool to capture how social structures are also subverted and reconfigured, thereby offering alternative relations and meanings. We develop and illustrate the use of an analytical framework to conceptualise identity as queer and political performance. This framework for analysing identity and processes of identification utilises Morton’s (2016) work on alternative analytical logics and the discourse theoryk by Laclau and Mouffe (1985/2001). We illustrate the use of the analytical framework, focusing on the role of the discipline and the object and subject of learning, analysing data collected in computer science education. Interrogating the identity performances of a celebrated teacher in a programming course, we show how binary understandings of the computer and gender are undermined in the classroom. The teacher performs as both subject and object in an affective relationship to the computer, hence undermining masculine accounts of the discipline as one of gaining dominance and control over the machine.

The Polemics of Ethical AI Usage in Higher Education: A Case Study Investigating the Axiological Expectations Mismatch

It is argued that AI-related integrity disputes are better understood as conflicts between competing values than as individual moral failings, and implications for policy design, assessment reform, and faculty development are discussed.

Ethical Implications of AI-Generated Content in Academic Publishing: Challenges and Perspectives in the Tunisian Higher Education Context

Tunisian higher education is operating in something close to a policy vacuum on AI-assisted writing, and it is essential to formulate codes of ethics that incorporate the notion of so-called AI literacy into the educational process of teaching research methods and academic writing.

AI, technofascism, and the unmaking of higher education. An interview with Stefan Popenici

In this interview, Stefan Popenici – one of the most prominent critical voices on artificial intelligence in higher education, and author of Artificial Intelligence and Learning Futures (2022) and Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2026) – argues that universities are living through a ‘psychotic episode’: a break with reality that leaves them cheering for technologies designed by financial elites and funded by the military. Tracing GenAI’s origins from an Epstein-funded symposium and the Pentagon’s chequebook to the eugenic roots of Silicon Valley’s culture, Popenici contends that AI is the political project of ‘technofascist’ billionaires rather than a neutral educational tool. He defends his analogy between AI and the lead poisoning of the Roman Empire – pervasive, invisible and cognitively corrosive – dissects the collapse of academic credibility exemplified by a recent AI-generated opinion piece that urged students to do their own work, and portrays the ‘AI-teacher’ as an instrument of indoctrination rather than a mere substitute for human educators. Refusing the ritual language of ‘opportunities and risks’, he explains his decision to write entirely without AI as a political act of resistance to abrutisation and dehumanisation – a stance the interviewers probe in a friendly disagreement over critical AI literacy. The interview closes on an unexpectedly hopeful note: graduates booing AI evangelists at commencement ceremonies signal an emerging resistance, and books – habent sua fata libelli – have their own fate. 

“Young Scholar[s] on the Beat”: Multimodal Composition as a Form of Critical AI Literacy Pedagogy

“AI literacy” includes both technical competencies and critical engagement with social and ethical dimensions of AI, but literacy approaches are underrepresented in how we conceptualize and teach its core components. In this paper, we focus on youth multimodal composition as a form of AI literacy pedagogy, analyzing the video products and written reflections of 22 11th grade students who composed video public service announcements about AI ethics issues of their choosing. In our findings, we report on trends in student video content, including (1) the overwhelmingly negative portrayals of AI, especially related to school‐based surveillance and punitive treatment relating to AI; (2) the complex interdependence of human and machine responsibility for harm; and (3) the persistence of students' messages of hope in the face of their cynical representations. Next, we show how students (1) experienced composition as joyful, creative collaboration and (2) connected composition and AI literacy learning. We discuss the implications of these findings for critical AI literacy pedagogy, offering suggestions for future practice and highlighting areas for further development and pedagogical innovation.