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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.