Eliminating gender studies courses helps to ensure that universities and other institutions will continue to protect men who benefit from the abuse of women and girls, either directly or through their connections to those who exploit girls and women for profit.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Yep. In terms of modern wonders childhood vaccines are like one million moon landings and parenthood made me appreciate the miracle of experiencing them as a rote task involving a beige drs office and a Bluey branded band-aid.
This semester I decided to take a break from institutional working groups, workshops, etc on AI and this thread does a better job than I could have articulating why all these different “opportunities” felt empty and disciplining instead of useful. They are addressing the wrong problem.
Or better yet: make GenAI about an assault on civics. Because if you are selling a product that necessarily attempts to con one person into believing they are engaging with another person when they are not, you’re not just ruining education. You’re dismantling society’s foundations in social trust.
So the next time someone tries to draw you into a conversation about that piece they saw on 60 Minutes or read in the NYT about how educators are coping with/ combatting/whatever students using GenAI, don’t accept that framing. Make it about the industry that is impoverishing their education.
It is a waste of educators’ labor to worry about policing students’ work or jury rigging AI-proof assignments.There are desultory ways of going about responding to such papers. But that doesn’t mean acquiescence. That means working towards and demanding structural changes at our institutions.
The NSF Bio Anthro Program DDRIG, Cultural Anthrpology DDRIG, and Archaeology DDRIG have all been archived (as of yesterday afternoon). Please speak with your grad students and plan accordingly. To say I am angry and depressed about this is an understatement.
Have you ever asked students to keep a research journal or a research log as a step toward the completion of an essay? I'd love to see what the assignment looked like.
bsky.app/profile/hill... 100%. Part of why these scripts are really hard to name and openly discuss
…existing narratives about “democracy”, “reason,“ and social relations that are extremely powerful in mainstream American life. /6
The smear works precisely because this deep cultural script (“different kinship systems = mark of civilizational progress = ability to be governing individual”) is so so deeply baked into American folk theories of progress and political activity. It’s not ignorance. It’s weaponization of…5/
So this manufactured controversy paints ZM as fundamentally unable to appropriately govern (“dishonest”) etc because not yet fully civilized, as marked by a supposedly non-modern kinship system 4/
(Including those internal and external others still stuck in “kinship” like women and the not yet civilized) 3/
to mobilize a deep cultural script that political life in the “civilized world” supplants “traditional” kinship systems, replacing unthinking traditional norms with rational individuals who can contest in the public sphere and legitimately govern 2/
I’d go further (waves from anthro of kinship and politics): this isn’t just a matter of muddled terms. It’s a bad faith, deliberate xenophobic effort 1/…
Oh and: in spite of paying for course packets w my own research funds, pretty sure a number of students are still outsourcing reading and thinking to LLMs—they just are doing other stuff too that minimally involves relations w others and their own brains.
It feels like I have to either abandon the research part of my job (with serious impacts) to teach well or accept that teaching is going to be kind of a sad grind where we all LARP college poorly.
Thank you for sharing, this really hits a lot of nails on the head. I implemented a bunch of these changes this semester (possible due to fancy uni/low teaching load) and it’s been really working for students and also is completely unsustainable for me in terms of time.
Mostly I feel like I need training in pedagogy of advanced literacy to help students develop the critical reading skills they now rarely get in HS but desperately need to navigate AI slop-verse. Alas our CTL is full AI booster and such training is unavailable. /end
And we move really slowly—one article per week (accommodates in class writing time plus robust discussion of connections to other readings). It’s different; it’s a lot of work but feels like worthy work (vs playing AI cop, which felt awful) /3
…of where students (mostly sophomores) are at. Had to explain the table of contents of the course packets for my; regular in class writing reveals big vocabulary gaps and issues with reading for voice /2
Doing this now—made course packets for my students, most writing is in class, requiring they buy hard copies of the one required book (inexpensive and widely available used online). It feels really good and also has been revealing …/1
Accepting this as an argument means accepting that, as an educator, your primary commitment is not to educating your students, or to propagating knowledge of your subject, but to finding and securing new markets for products in whose success your employers (or their bosses) have some kind of stake.
Generative AI, in both form and content, and whether looked on favourably or critically, seems to embody a collective hopelessness about the prospect of human learning and creativity, if not human knowledge altogether. It’s as if climate change had fans.
further thoughts on this: the idea of ‘prompt engineering’ as a ‘skill’ that requires a mix of technical and linguistic ‘skills’ has been around for a while and doesn’t seem to disappear. what i’m interested in is not whether it’s a well-defined skill (probably not) or ‘valuable’ (probably not) but
Harvard redid its whole homepage to push back against the administration’s demands. I mean, this is just a website but I think it’s kind of a great PR move: www.harvard.edu
Curtailing people’s ability to read widely and carefully, to locate, assess, and compare different sources for themselves, and to write in their own voice about what they find and what it means, is arguably more effective than censorship. It is also one of the most obvious effects of generative AI.
I also think the basic claim "humans are adaptive weirdos and liberal technocracy isn't necessarily the end stage of history" is increasingly counter-cultural, worth bearing in mind when parsing debates about the text.
In class we just read sections of the introduction because it does a good job explaining how most efforts to grasp something deep about "human nature" are products of historically contingent contemporary concerns and offers a crash course in Hobbes v Rousseau.
Oh man, I really don't know. My sense is that a lot of the debate came from folks not knowing what genre of text the book was supposed to be (which, fair enough). I read it as political theory, which shifts how I think about the role of evidence, if that makes sense.
