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Short abstract

A creative intervention that embeds critical AI literacy and ethics into postgraduate research methods training. Through reflective exercises such as data flow mapping and speculative futures research design, it examines assumption of neutrality, expertise and technosolutionist attitudes.

Long abstract

This creative intervention aims at embedding critical AI literacy and AI ethics into a research method training context. Research students across levels currently turn to AI tools in order to automate aspects of the entirety of the research process, from undergrads who dive deep into research design when they tackle a dissertation, or more researchers are lured by the ease of automation. As higher education policies focus on adoption (AI as set of tools) and plagiarism (AI as cheating), there is less time and energy spent in understanding the critical issues that underlie AI use, its ethics and epistemological implications. This intervention addresses the need to enhance awareness of AI as an actor in the production of knowledge, and to develop literacy about the ideological, political and economic stakes of AI infrastructure globally. It consists of a pilot lasting for one term in a postgrad setting (MA in Strategic Communication) in a course on applied research methods. The critical AI exercises are reflective and structured around milestones, while the collection of data concern three pillars: assumptions of neutrality, perceptions of expertise, and attitudes of technosolutionism. The exercises include a mapping of data flows and a speculative futures research design (where participants create a future research pipeline scenario with and without use of AI). The aim is to create an AI ethics and critical skills toolkit that can be adapted more widely in research training across disciplines. In the EEAST session, my focus will be on introducing this replicable framework.

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This talk presents ArtScience methods — creative experiments with extended reality, installations, and interactive storytelling — from artist residencies in science and technology research. They foster critical literacies by closing the gap between human senses and data through play and agency.

Long abstract

As knowledge production in emerging tech-intensive futures becomes increasingly mediated by AI and large-scale data infrastructures, both researchers and publics experience growing experimental distance — a gap between technological systems, their data, and our senses that limits engagement, agency, and critical reflection.

This presentation examines artistic methods as interventions that can help close this gap and foster critical literacies about emerging technological futures. Through ArtScience collaborations embedded within research environments, artists and scientists co-create experiential settings — including extended reality (XR) artworks, immersive installations, and interactive storytelling — that translate abstract phenomena and technologies into sensory encounters. These experiments enable participants to explore complex systems through play, spatial reasoning, and embodied engagement.

Drawing on case studies from residencies integrated through the ARTlab Nottingham and projects including the Cosmic Titans exhibition and the generative-AI initiative Beyond Resonance, I present interventions in which artists work within physics and technology contexts to make otherwise intangible phenomena tangible — such as the vast scales of the universe, the first seconds after the Big Bang, or emerging quantum and AI technologies. In immersive environments experienced by around 100,000 people, participants can adopt more-than-human perspectives to explore and navigate complex data and technological systems.

Evidence suggests immersive engagement enhances understanding, pattern recognition, agency, and sense-making. It can stretch perspectives, reveal limitations, and improve system design. The talk reflects on benefits, challenges, and limitations of immersive ArtScience collaborations as methods for cultivating critical literacies about emerging tech-intensive futures. XR environments will be demonstrated if the format allows.

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Short abstract

I propose a short discussion of artworks and creative projects that explore ecologies of digital materiality through participatory art practice and illustrate how these artworks could contribute towards radical pedagogies in computer science education.

Long abstract

I am a practice based Phd student at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton) and educator at University Arts London, where we have a research group engaging with the entangled relations between computation and the climate crisis called 'Critical Climate Computing'.

My recent work is focused on developing critical mineral literacies through participatory art practice and combining energy politics with land art and walking practices. Since 2022, I have been conducting ‘Rare Earth Walks’ - guided artist-led walks exploring cultural narratives around critical minerals that consider geological media and digital materiality through non-human narratives. I have delivered educational workshops for KS1 and KS2 aged young people developing digital literacy through ecological and environmental practice and ask how these artistic methodologies might contribute towards transformative pedagogies in emergent models of experimental computer science education.

This proposal intersects with a number of relevant fields across art, activism & education such as 'Permacomputing' a design philosophy for re-thinking computing that mirrors how permaculture has shaped industrial agriculture and 'Ecomedia' - a field of digital humanities that produces curricula for prioritising the inherent environmental materiality of media in education. What could be gained by applying principles of Forestry School education with critical computing projects that teach computational literacy through the political action of environmental and social justice movements? Can transformative pedagogies from the arts foster empowerment, agency & action for young people navigating the polycrisis caused by big tech & extractive capitalism?

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Short abstract

With Music AI as the case study, our critical interdisciplinary AI course invited computing students to move beyond techno-solutionist framings. Drawing on teaching and student experiences, we reflect on the challenges and what they mean for developing critical interdisciplinary pedagogies.

Long abstract

Calls to educate computing students “in the public interest” have often taken the form of incorporating Ethics and Responsibility courses across computer science degrees, with particular attention to AI. While welcome, these efforts can remain framed within assumptions inherited from technical disciplines, in which interventions are limited to technical fixes, overlooking the need to interrogate AI systems as sociotechnical assemblages resulting from the mutual mediations between society, culture and technology.

In this paper we reflect on our approach to developing and teaching a critical interdisciplinary AI course focused on the cultural ramifications of Music AI. The eight-week course was taught by researchers from anthropology, science and technology studies, music studies, creative practice and computing (among other disciplines) who are themselves researching critical approaches to Music AI. The course introduces students to a range of perspectives on Music AI and encourages them to develop greater reflexivity about their technical work, its promise and its limits. The aim is to teach them how to articulate complex sociotechnical problems, broadening their scope beyond technical concerns, and on this basis, empowering them to eventually build different and better systems.

We reflect on how the course has worked in practice, drawing both on our experience delivering it and the students’ we interviewed. We discuss what was challenging, focusing on communication across disciplines and on navigating tensions between the pedagogical methods of the social sciences and humanities and those of STEM. We conclude by presenting provocations to induce a critical interdisciplinary transformation in higher education.

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Short abstract

Based on the approach of socio-technical imaginaries as situated and performative narratives, this paper presents the visions of the future that bachelor students have been asked to write for a participatory research program dedicated to narratives and agency in the ecological transformation.

Long abstract

Visions and promises of tech-intensive futures are means to colonize the imaginary and pave the way to emerging technoscientific industries (Brown 2001 ; Joly 2010 ; Jasanoff and Kim 2015 ; Audétat et al. 2015). Indeed, visions promoted by stakeholders do narrow down and mask the plurality of socio-technical imaginaries that envision environmental transformations and technology in society. But what are the actual adherence to, and affects associated with, the various socio-technical imaginaries, including the contemporary and often extreme technosolutionism? One of the first goals of the four year STRIVE project of the University of Lausanne is to study the representations of sociotechnical imaginaries of bachelor students with the letter from the future method (Sools 2020). Students of different disciplines are asked to imagine themselves in 25 years and write a letter to their self in the present time, express emotions, aspirations and concerns. The findings show narratives that reflect heterogeneous, nuanced, and affectively diverse representations of the future that challenge assumptions about Western deterministic sociotechnical imaginary (Durosier et al., 2026). The knowledge gathered with the letters from the future is going to be used to design participatory exercises based on future thinking methods, to be held in the tech managers and the educational milieus, as means to foster critical literacy about technoscientific promises and encourage participants to avoid passive attitudes toward the (their) future. The researchers of the STRIVE program are keen to learn and exchange about workshopping techniques in order to design the next phases of their project.

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Short abstract

This presentation showcases collaborative zine-making from the pliegos.net project as practices of critical literacy about AI and platform power. Participatory workshops combine analog publishing with experimental tools for zine pagination and PDF obfuscation to resist automated content extraction

Long abstract

Recent activist and investigative zines addressing AI-powered surveillance and border enforcement circulate both as printed artifacts and as digital files (https://www.aimustdie.info/; https://www.404media.co/icezine/), while in some contexts zines themselves have been treated as incriminating materials in repression cases (https://freedes.net/). These situations reveal a paradox: even small-scale analog media practices are entangled with infrastructures shaped by / for platform monopolies, automated content extraction and expanding surveillance regimes. At the same time, their material circulation creates forms of communicative opacity that can partially evade algorithmic monitoring, recalling historical underground networks like Soviet 'samizdat'.

This contribution discusses a set of zines and publishing experiments developed within the pliegos.net project (Senabre Hidalgo & Espelt, 2025), examining how collaborative zine-making can function as a form of critical literacy about / against tech-intensive futures. Rather than approaching zines primarily as historical artifacts of subcultural media, our presentation focuses on their contemporary re-emergence as participatory practices through which communities reflect on, question and respond to technological systems and narratives of (digital) inevitability.

The showcased materials emerge from participatory action research conducted through collaborative zine-making workshops combining analog co-writing, on-site printing and immediate physical distribution. The presentation also reflects on emerging threats to zine circulation, introducing ongoing experiments with open-source tools for zine pagination and PDF obfuscation designed to complicate automated content extraction and enable digital files to “jump back” into physical circulation.

Ref: Senabre Hidalgo, E., & Espelt, R. (2025). Chapbooks against the machine: analog co-writing and publishing as a collective geography of AI refusal. cultural geographies, https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740251355281

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Short abstract

We present the structure, techniques, and results of three variations of our use of a critical AI literacy methodology, a guided autoethnographic DIY toolkit where students produce field diaries analyzing their relationships with genAI, generating deep reflection, critique, and future imaginaries.

Long abstract

In recent years, genAI systems have emerged as key, intimate actors in the granular processes of interaction in which socio-cultural relations are shaped, individuals are constituted as subjects and meaning-making activities and identity-formation processes emerge. This has brought considerable new attention to the importance of critical literacies about genAI and emerging machinic capabilities within complex ecosystems of interdependent human and non-human activities (Markham and Pronzato, 2023; Pangrazio, 2026).

However, in this scenario, sustained literacy is difficult to achieve: individuals confront computational systems that are extremely difficult to comprehend, with interfaces designed to encourage continuous use and illusion of control (Pronzato and Markham, 2023), while Big Tech’s enormous power and persuasive narratives normalise techno-determinist futures as inevitable (Markham, 2021).

We present three applications of Markham’s 2012 guided autoethnographic methodology: a three-day, a two-week, and a 21-day version, where facilitators train students to study their own relations with AI. Beyond focusing on how they or other students define, use, and feel about GenAI currently, they consider how current trends are influencing the future of higher education. This guided autoethnography method ー grounded in interpretative and narrative inquiry, critical pedagogy, technofeminism, and critical theory ー is useful for understanding student’s experiences, but more, fosters self-reflexivity, critical examination of how AI seeps into everyday life, and activates critical consciousness that is deeply personal, foundational to strengthening critical AI literacies. The project involves IULM University, Queensland University of Technology, and Utrecht University, and is part of the work of the Futures+ Literacies+ Methods Lab (FLL).

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Short abstract

From self-reflection using a radical, queer, anti-colonial tarot deck to speculative fiction using progressive storytelling analyzed by GenAI, this contribution presents an ongoing creative experiment in teaching gender, race, and information to undergraduates studying informatics.

Long abstract

This contribution presents an ongoing creative experiment in cultivating sustained critical literacies about technology, information systems, and algorithmic futures within an undergraduate informatics course on gender, race, and information. The course employs unconventional methods to help students critically examine how information technologies reflect and reproduce power relations around race, gender, and ability.

Students begin by engaging with their own histories and particularities through “Tech Confessional” narratives and engaging with the art of the Next World Tarot to inspire self-reflection. Next World Tarot (Road, 2020) is a radical, queer, anti-colonial deck that illustrates a journey about owning truths, finding connections with bodies that may have been lost through trauma or societal brainwashing, smashing systematic oppression, taking accountability, facing challenges, and ushering in alternative futures. These exercises inspire self-reflection and help students critically engage with their assumptions about technological progress. Later, students create speculative fiction using progressive storytelling techniques, then analyze their own narratives using GenAI tools as both objects and subjects of inquiry.

This approach considers critical literacies in relation to infrastructures of imagination (Benjamin, 2024; Potts & Facer, 2025). What learning activities enable students to uncover/unsettle assumptions, encounter diverse perspectives, and desire collective visions for transformation? The presentation reflects on successes, failures, and ongoing challenges, particularly around resistance to datafication of education.

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Short abstract

The card game „Monsters, Miracles, and Metaphors“ invites players to reflect on how dominant narratives and metaphors shape our understanding and discourse around AI.

Long abstract

Metaphors are a crucial component of human sense-making, especially when it comes to emerging phenomena. Recently, there has been considerable scholarly interest in the metaphors used to describe AI. The spectrum of metaphors ranges from utopian to dystopian, from allegoric to immaterial, from light-hearted to heavy hitting. 

 Considering the crucial role these metaphors play in delineating the possibilities of AI for our technological futures, it is paramount to continuously examine which narratives emerge, which ones get pushed by whom and which ones get adopted.

In this talk we discuss the potential of card games as a pedagogical device for critical engagement with discourse. Historically, playing cards started out as luxury items – an amusement reserved to the elites. As printing technologies evolved, card decks became available to a broader public and quickly were adapted as a way to play, to transform, to subvert the hierarchical structure that the cards represented.

 Building on these subversive histories, we illustrated and designed a set of playing cards that collects the dominant narratives around AI and contrasts them with a few we conjured up ourselves.

 Modelled after the game quartett, „Monsters, Miracles, and Metaphors“ offers three different modes of play. The game invites the players to confront narratives around AI, to ask how fantastical or far-fetched the depictions are and what they might foretell about our futures. The presentation reflects on the development process and on our experiences facilitating game-based workshops, and discusses the possibilities and limitations of this method.