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Paper short abstract

What are the parameters of teaching and learning about GenAI, engaging AIpocalyptic imaginaries? How can we understand parahuman intelligence with ethnographic, pedagogic, and speculative methods to critically use and/or refuse "artificial" intelligence across planetary and localized contexts?

Paper long abstract

Refusal of hegemonic terms of life (Thomas 2024) embodied by big-tech GenAI (generative artificial intelligence) systems–serving the military-industrial complex (Dharmaraj 2024)–as political, strategic action must be taught and learned. What are the parameters of teaching and learning about GenAI as para-matter, engaging AIpocalyptic imaginaries (Mascareño 2024)? Pedagogies of refusal cannot be conflated with only learning how to say "no" (Eggert, Hagen, Turner 2025) or proactive resistance against (Mcgranahan 2016) hegemonic AI formations (Ricaurte 2022) that recursively inscribe themselves. Such framings risk reproducing the a priori supremacy of machine learning that privilege the epistemic processes of extractivist datafication, algorithmisation and automation vis-à-vis other possibilities of epistemic, relational, and datapolitical formations that we frame here as parahuman intelligence. Urban intelligence cannot be confined to the understanding of efficiency-based applications or critique-only approaches. This collaborative paper reflects on a capacious notion of intelligence by attuning to socioenvironmental entanglements in cities as conspirational spaces where humans learn to intra-act (Barad 2007) with non-humans, atmospheric affordances, ancestral techniques, machines and data infrastructures as parahuman forms. How can we understand parahuman intelligence across planetary and localized contexts? How might ethnographic refusal (Ortner 1984) become a method for pedagogic, speculative and collaborative engaging with and/or refusing androcentric intelligence? Amidst a global shift to the far right, tech oligarchs (Cohen 2025) and rapid socio-techno-environmental degradation, accelerated by the current AI hype (Mühlhoff 2025) it is crucial to address the discursive hegemony of intelligence around the "artificial" and move towards counter-hegemonic parahuman pedagogies.