Tech and resistance #1
Two talks by Robert Ovetz, Lindsay Weinberg and Rachel Moylan.
Resisting AI in the Gig Academy
Robert Ovetz & Lindsay Weinberg
Both within and beyond higher education, AI is actively augmenting work in ways that undermine worker power, rendering it more monitored, disciplined, piecemeal, and precarious. This talk will analyze how academic workers are organizing against AI. It will argue for the importance of a collective politics of refusal, given the ways AI-enabled tools are being imposed to deskill, monitor, and exploit educators. Additionally, this talk will examine the role of AI in the 2023 SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes and draws on newly available contract databases to explore how academic workers can learn from struggles in other sectors.
Robert Ovetz, Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at San José State University. He is the author and editor of four books, including We the Elites (Pluto, 2022), and the forthcoming Rebels for the System: NGOs and Capitalism to be published in 2025 by Haymarket Press. Robert writes regularly for Dollars & Sense magazine.
Lindsay Weinberg, Ph.D. is a Clinical Associate Professor in the John Martinson Honors College. Her research and teaching are at the intersection of science and technology studies, media studies, and feminist studies, with a focus on the social and ethical implications of digital technology. She is the author of Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age (John Hopkins University Press, 2024) and a member of the American Association of University Professors Committee on Artificial Intelligence and the Academic Professions.
Creating ‘Zones of Indistinction’ Through Educational Research
Rachel Moylan
Capitalist platform ecosystems have become authoritative forces in schools, prescribing ways of doing, being, and thinking for teachers and their students. Within such totalizing digital systems, even educators who find ways to critique platformization may struggle to imagine alternatives. What, then, can be done? How can we reimagine digital ecosystems in schools when our capacities for thinking and acting have become so constrained by the very systems we wish to dismantle? Drawing on the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2007), this session describes an educational research methodology that aims to create ‘zones of indistinction’ in which the power of the digital order can be temporarily deactivated through deliberate and playful misuse. This methodology was developed through research with teachers in a secondary school in British Columbia, Canada. As the research unfolded, calcified notions of educational limits began to break down, opening space to imagine new possibilities. Such an approach holds promise for rethinking digital technologies in education by living ‘with the paradox that results when opposing forces—rule and exception—can occupy our thoughts and demand no resolution’ (Phelan & Hansen, 2021, p. 18).
Rachel Moylan is a Ph.D. candidate and Public Scholar in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Her research critically analyzes the roles and effects of digital technologies in education with the aim of identifying opportunities for and methods of resistance and reimagination. Rachel also holds a Master of Arts from New York University and a Master of Information from Dalhousie University, and has worked as a secondary school teacher in New York City; Austin, Texas; Manokotak, Alaska; and Budapest, Hungary.