Dr. Brenna Clarke Gray: Every Technology Was Somebody’s Choice

Virtual event

Everyone who signs up via eventbrite will also be emailed the zoom link 3 days before the event, again 1 day before the event, and 15 minutes before the event. You need to register on eventbrite for the zoom link.

Every Technology Was Somebody’s Choice: Resisting Inevitability Discourse and Recognizing Power in the Generative AI “Revolution”

After over a year of ChatGPT’s domination of teaching and learning conversations, it’s common to hear an emergent discourse of inevitability: it is here, and we must deal with it. But technologies are not inevitabilities. Every institutionally-sanctioned digital technology is the outcome of a procurement process, one that weighed moral and ethical concerns against efficiencies and costs. And sometimes, so too are the technologies we select on our own and for ourselves, choices we make after a conscious or unconscious weighing of what matters to us. This is true even of the bad tech. This is true even when we pretend we didn’t know, couldn’t know.

In this talk, we will explore who benefits from discourses of inevitability in the technosolutionist landscape, surface a framework for making our own decisions about choosing to engage with generative AI technologies like ChatGPT, and discuss strategies for resistance and refusal, where appropriate.

Dr. Brenna Clarke Gray is a critical educational technologist working as a practitioner/researcher and theorist. She is also an academic podcaster. Her focus is on the ethical, accessible, and care-informed use of digital tools in education.

This event is also part of the 6th Season of Disrupting Disruptions: the Feminist and Accessible Publishing and Communications Technologies Speaker and Workshop Series (https://www.feministandaccessiblepublishingandtechnology.com), organized by Dr. Alex Ketchum. Our series was made possible thanks to our sponsors: SSHRC, Digital Citizen Research, the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (IGSF), the DIGS Lab, Milieux, Initiative for Indigenous Futures, ReQEF, and more (see our website!)

There is no fee required to attend this event. It will be professionally live captioned.

You can watch other past events at: https://www.feministandaccessiblepublishingandtechnology.com/p/videos.html