“What is AI made of?” and other unplugged, critical AI literacy activities 

Heidi Reed

In the spirit of digital sobriety and Luddite praxis, this session provides examples of digital device free activities I used in an "AI Ethics Unplugged" faculty workshop and have also used in my classroom. Though they are designed to be low-tech, you can also adapt them for online learning. 

Naming the Feeling Rules of AI Hype, Interrupting the Inevitability Narrative 

Andrea (an-dree-uh) Baer, PhD

Drawing from critical hype studies and building on previous work on the feeling rules of Generative AI (social expectations about how to feel and emote about AI), I examine hype as a rhetorical tool of power that works to shape narratives, beliefs, and emotions, reinforcing a currently dominant AI inevitability narrative and amplifying certain voices while muffling others. I argue that deepening our understandings of hype as a tool of power and a shaper of affect, and recognizing the increased role of “critical washing” (Suarez et al., 2025) in AI hype, can help us reclaim greater individual and collective agency to engage in critical conversations and decision making about AI technologies in and outside education.

Transparency and Privacy Issues of AI Hiring Agents

Dr. Rakibul Hasan

Based on a recent study, discuss the transparency, procedural justice, and privacy issues arising from the use of AI in job candidate evaluation.

Algorithmic Electability: Generative AI, LGBTQ Candidates, and the Reproduction of Political Bias

Zachary Baum

This session examines whether generative AI systems reproduce, mitigate, or transform biases toward LGBTQ political candidates. Drawing on original experimental evidence, it explores how AI-generated assessments of candidate electability may shape democratic representation and political gatekeeping.

Imagining and Making Just Technological Futures

Isabella (Isa-bell-ah) Bruno (Br-oo-no)

Tech hype works by making one future feel inevitable. In this workshop, participants use design fiction — speculative artifacts like fake memos, newsletters, and policy documents — to inhabit and articulate the democratic, ethical, and just technological futures that the Civics of Technology project is working toward.

Who Owns the Future? A Lesson for Middle School Students

Elizabeth Bacon

From Star Trek to Avatar to Project Hail Mary, popular fiction is full of competing visions of humanity’s future. These stories often showcase fantastical technologies that promise to transform the way we live, but they also embed our assumptions about identity and social structure, shaping our conception of what is possible or even inevitable. This lesson invites middle school students to question the assumptions underlying various popular visions of the future, analyzing the role technology plays in promoting these visions, and to take back the narrative by imagining their own best future.

Brains over Bots: AI’s Impact on Cognition

Vinnie Wengert

We will explore how using artificial intelligence can impact the cognitive processes that are the foundation for flexible, goal-directed behaviors (otherwise known as executive function) and how intentionally building up and deploying executive function strategies can make students better and safer AI users.

What States Tell Teachers About AI

Cody Dalton

This presentation examines official K-12 artificial intelligence guidance issued by state education departments across the United States. It asks what these documents tell teachers about AI, what risks they emphasize, and what civic questions remain underdeveloped when states frame AI mainly as a tool for classroom use.

Support for who? Examining AI Governance in Minnesota K-12 Districts

Seeun (Tina) Jeon

This session presents a content analysis of AI policies across thirty Minnesota K-12 school districts, examining how tech industry hype—from workforce readiness to 21st century skills—is reshaping the governance of teaching and learning. Beneath the hype, teachers are under full responsibility for managing AI in their classrooms while being systematically excluded from the governance structures that determine how AI enters schools.

Voices from the Caregiver Resistance to EdTech

Charles Logan

Alexandra Thrall

Lila Byock

Kelly Clancy

Chad Hamilton

Join three caregivers challenging edtech in K-12 education as we reflect on their everyday practices, discuss what it feels like to engage in this labor, and learn from one another in the struggle to redefine when, why, and to what ends technology is used in schools.

Ghosts in the Archive: The Burden of Representation

Amy Allen

David Hicks

Generative AI can create persuasive historical voices and images that blur the boundaries between evidence, imagination, and memory. Drawing on the concept of the algorithmic palimpsest, this session examines the ethical challenges of historical representation and the democratic consequences of AI-generated pasts.

Slow Information Practices: Countering the Manufactured Sense of Urgency for Quick Answers

Andrea (an-dree-uh) Baer, PhD

Mandi Goodsett (man-dee good-set)

As educators teaching research and information literacy, how do we respond to sociotechnical developments in a culture in which speed and commercial interests are often prioritized over public good, critical thinking, and good research practices like sourcing? Drawing from principles of the slow movement and slow teaching, the presenters share a conception of “slow information literacy” that challenges the privileging of speed, quick answers, and currently hyped digital technologies (like generative AI) and that instead fosters more reflective, intentional, and critical engagement with information and with the online environments in which people encounter, share, and produce information.

Cultivating A11y-ship Among Preservice Teachers

Dr. Natalie L. Shaheen

Dr. Shaheen will share open educational resources the A11y in Sci team created to cultivate a11y-ship for disabled students among preservice teachers, and offer suggestions about how teacher educators could use them.

Intention Meets Practice

Dr. Aaron R. Gierhart

This session highlights how preservice teachers engaged in public-facing work—such as producing group podcasts and contributing to a published student journal—while critically examining AI and educational technology and navigating the gap between intention and practice.

Artful Deception: One University's Roll-Out of a (Failed) AI Tool

Dr. Sue Kasun (Caw-sun)

Dr. Erin Anderson

Three unwitting AI-early adapter faculty in good faith applied to adopt a new university AI tool in their classes. However, the university came up short on the tool's promise. Fallout from the university pilot is explored in this session. 

Using a Minimal Computing Framework to Re-Imagine EdTech

Lee Skallerup Bessette

The workshop will present the concept of minimal computing and then invite participants in groups to come up with a minimal computing EdTech solution. Participants will leave with a new framework for thinking about EdTech specifically and technology more generally.

Between a Digital Scylla and Charybdis 

Ellie Dimopoulos

Privacy is a community practice, not a skill issue. This session introduces fifteen conversation cards for students, faculty, and patrons alike: small, repeatable conversations that build real skill and confidence over time.

Your Feeds, Your Algorithms

Wes Fryer, Ph.D. 

Tech oligarchs increasingly control what news reaches us and shape what we believe, but open-web standards, federated social platforms, and citizen-built tools give ordinary educators the power to take that control back. This session showcases four open-source projects and a practical action plan for “reclaiming your news feeds,” connecting with trusted voices, and modeling digital resistance for students.

From Isolation to Impact: NYC Teacher PLN's Journey to Critical AI Advocacy

Shira (SHEE-ruh) Moskovitz

Jeanne Salchli

Alberto Ng

Antonette Nicholas

Join NYC educators from a year-long fellowship as we share how a sustained Professional Learning Network empowered them to move past tech craze and become critical AI advocates. Participants will leave with a collaborative model for building community, alongside practical lesson plans and frameworks to teach critical AI literacy through technoethical audits, policy proposals, and equity-focused student work.

Postdigital backlash and degrowth: comparisons and lessons

Kate Molloy

Eamon Costello

James Brunton

Clare Thomson

In this session, the authors will examine the digital backlash and digital degrowth movements, and outline their approach for a 'degrowth pragmatism' approach to forge a path forward, rejecting harmful binaries and increased inequalities. 

Grappling with the AI apocalypse

Beatrice (be-a-tris) Dias (die-us)

Tinukwa (tin-ook-wa) Boulder (bold-er)

Michelle (mi-shell) King (king)

Etymologically, the word apocalypse traces back to apokálypsis, meaning an uncovering or revelation. We play with this language to grapple with what an AI apocalypse reveals about the logics encoded into its infrastructure, through examining what we give up in an AI-mediated world.

Optimizing the Scholar: The Platformization of Research

Dr. Bruna Damiana Heinsfeld

This session examines how AI-powered research platforms market scholarship through discourses of efficiency, optimization, and productivity. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, the presentation explores how these platforms reframe understandings of academic labor, knowledge production, and the role of the researcher within increasingly technocapitalist educational systems.

The Obsolete User: Designing for Humans After the Algorithm

Brandi Nichols

Inspired by The Twilight Zone’s “The Obsolete Man,” this presentation examines how modern AI systems increasingly treat people as predictable inputs rather than active participants in digital society. Through the lenses of privacy, security, and product design, the session explores how we might build technology that preserves human agency instead of optimizing it away.

Critical Technology Origin Stories

Danielle Peck

Where, when, and how did we come to critical technology consciousness? Explore the possibilities of sharing our stories of developing critical perspectives on technology. 

An Imagination Battle: Reclaiming imagination as critical praxis

Dani Dilkes

This session asks what futures are rendered possible and desirable and what possible futures are lost through dominant sociotechnical imaginaries. Participants will be invited to reflect and speculate on what alternative futures become possible when we approach imagination as critical praxis for world-making. 

Critical GenAI Literacy, Ethics, and Justice: Curriculum Development and Professional Learning

Dr. Jennifer Elemen

In this session we explore an AI justice focused civic engagement supplemental curriculum resource, connecting student-facing curriculum with professional learning resources for educators and education leaders. Participants delve into, collaborate on, and adapt practical resources for critical Gen AI literacy, ethics, and justice co-design.

Building an AI-critical classroom culture

Charles Wotton

AI chat / LLMs have no purpose in higher-ed classrooms other than cheating, but there's no point in blaming students. They have been bombarded by propaganda for years now. In this interactive talk we'll explore how we can encourage our students to think critically about AI without immediately resorting to what Jeff Moro calls “cop shit”.

A Sociotechnical Vision for Ethical, Responsible, and Critical PK-12 Computing Education

Rafi Santo

Jean Ryoo

Michael Lachney

David Phelps

How do we help K12 students push back on the idea that tech is inevitable? In this session, we offer a framework for PK12 computing education that focuses on helping students bust technomyths (through sociotechnical realities), explore impacts (what they are, how they come about, and what to do about them), and become agents of change through practices of critical inquiry, resistance and refusal, ethical design, and hopeful reimagining. 

Should This Exist? Technoskeptical Design for XR Teacher Training

Erin Anderson

Technoskeptical design combines equityXdesign's anti-racist design process with technoskepticism's critical interrogation of technology, having pre-service teachers build the conditions for ethical design before they start building with the XR technology. The result: teacher candidates who design XR learning experiences for their peers sharpen both their pedagogical practice and their ability to ask the field's most important question: should this technology exist in education at all?

Learning from Engineering Education to Design for Critical AI literacy

Ayush Gupta (Dr. Ayesha)

In this talk, I connect research on how engineering students reason about structural and cultural harms from technology or whether and how they entangle technology design with systems of oppression such as racism and sexism to the teaching and learning of AI from critical perspectives. Drawing on experiences of teaching and research on critical AI literacy in India, I also argue for participatory research towards incorporating casteism as a lens for critical technology design and literacy.

Zines, Collage, & Analog Craft: Nurturing Resistance Communities & Classrooms with Hands-on Creativity

Dr. Katie Conrad

Melanie Dusseau

Join members of the Library of Babel Group for an interactive talk about old school craft as an antidote to the unethical automation of both teaching and practicing art. Analog craft builds connections with others and brings joy to experiential pedagogy in all academic disciplines. We believe that cultivating hope(punk) amid the tide of slop and bots is essential for the survival of the creative soul. Most importantly: art is the carrier pigeon of The Resistance that will survive the digital world’s eventual ruin. We’ll provide an overview of the subversive history of zines and collage poetry and the rise of technocritical zines like LOOMING, our experience bringing a zine-making collage workshop to a welcoming edtech conference in Ireland, as well as a hands-on activity and lively conversation. Come make something with us!