Call for Chapters
The Handbook of Critical Studies of Artificial Intelligence and Education
An edited volume to be published by Edward Elgar Publishing in 2025
Editors: Wayne Holmes and Caroline Pelletier (University College London)
The idea behind the Handbook
While Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Education (teaching and learning with AI, or AIED) is an established field of research, going back around 50 years, the use of AI in education is in its formative stages: it is still unsettled and unsettling, being contested and stabilised by a diverse set of actors, from policymakers to start-ups and VCs, education institutions to research funders, parents, students and employers. For many, AI promises to make education more efficient, personalised and engaging. For others, AI is re-shaping how efficiency, identity and participation are established and realised, and by extension, how the purpose of education is articulated.
Whilst most of the academic focus has been on using AI for learning, attention has increasingly been given to using education to learn about AI. The aim is to support teachers, students and parents develop critical AI literacy. While AI literacy is yet to be widely addressed in K12 settings, there are many resources available online, mostly provided by industry. However, almost all these resources focus on the technological dimension of AI (how AI works and how to create it), to the exclusion of the human dimension of AI (its impact on humans, on human rights, and ethics; and how we can deal with AI hype, AI biases, fake news and so on)
The handbook ‘Critical Studies of AI and Education’ will engage with these complex debates centred on teaching and learning with and about AI (AI&ED). It will explore a range of conceptual resources with which to analyse AI in terms of social, cultural, and historical practices and ideologies. It will build on existing scholarly areas, notably critical studies of AI (e.g., Lindgren 2023), and critical studies of educational technology (e.g., MacGilchrist 2021), extending these to examine more specifically AI in/and/as education. It will be a companion volume to the Handbook of Artificial Intelligence in Education (du Boulay et al., 2023).
The editorial aim is to develop understanding of the political choices and interests expressed in the promotion and use of AI in education; what constitutes AI literacy and how it could be taught; how AI is recruited as an actor in education policy and governance; and how AI is implicated in the re-making of educational subjects, cultures, institutions and infrastructures.
The editors will take a broad view of what might count as ‘critical.’ First, we would like to include accounts of how AI is reconfiguring education: empirical and non-empirical analyses examining how it is affecting the discourses of education, how its use unfolds in the messy realities of educational practices, how ways of knowing and responding to educational problems are emerging in specific instances of AI use or promotion. Second, we would also like to include accounts of how AI is perpetuating injustices and inequalities in education: how it re-inscribes ordering and sorting in education, how it is implicated in the legitimation of inequality, how it re-enforces imbalances in the exercise of power. Third, we would welcome accounts that explore ways of intervening productively in the politics of AI in education, re-directing its social, ethical, and political implications, either as researchers, designers, policymakers or advisors, regulators, community organisers or teachers. This would include teaching, research, and other scholarly practices that open ways of imagining and doing education in more utopian terms, with AI and about AI. Within this third strand, we also welcome discussions on the benefits and challenges that AI brings to doing critique in education; how it limits or opens up ways, for researchers and educators, of doing education as both social scientific discipline, political project, and public service.
We also define ‘education’ in broad terms: schools, higher education institutions, workplaces, cultural centres, etc.: anywhere that there are activities focused on teaching and learning, and/or certification and assessment. We will include chapters from an international range of writers, and welcome comparative studies.
Topics
These are indicative topics that the Handbook of Critical Studies of Artificial Intelligence and Education will include, among others:
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- How AI is influencing education policy, and vice versa
- AI, commercialisation and platformisation in education
- How AI is implicated in monitoring and shaping behaviour in education
- Conceptions of data and their consequences for education
- Prediction and predictive analytics in education
- Facial recognition technologies in use in education
- AI ethics as lived practice in education
- AI and the re-configuration of work in education
- AI and the enrolment of new actors in education
- AI’s impact on definitions of what it means to be educated, to be a student with rights, on educational ethics
- The place of AI in educational infrastructures
- AI and educational imaginaries
- AI and the production of educational subjects and subjectivities
- AI and alternative or utopian education
- AI, critique, and research in education
- The discourses of AI in education
- AI and the politics of representation in education
- AI and re-configurations of justice in education
- AI, colonial and decolonial approaches to education
- AI critical literacy and education
- How, educationally, we respond to AI hype, AI biases, fake news, and so on
The handbook will be published in 2025, as part of the Elgar Handbooks series. Chapters should be approximately 8,000 words, although shorter essays may also be included. There will be approximately 30 chapters with a total word count of around 240,000 words.
We will be asking all authors to peer review at least two other chapter submissions.
Timeline and deadlines
If you would like to submit a chapter for this handbook, please send a 300-word (plus references) proposal to the editors by 15th April 2024 (critical.ai.ed@gmail.com). You are very welcome to contact the editors in the first instance to discuss any ideas.
The timetable is as follows:
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- ***Abstracts delivery*** EXTENDED DEADLINE: Monday, 15 April 2024
- First draft chapters delivery: September 2024
- First draft feedback: December 2024
- Final draft chapters delivery: March 2025
- Final manuscript delivery: May 2025
- Publication: by December 2025.
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We very much look forward to receiving and reading your abstracts and to working with you.
Best wishes,
Wayne Holmes and Caroline Pelletier
December 2023