Artificial Intelligence and Transdisciplinarity

I am interested in how we can higher education can exploit AI for transdisciplinarity; learning and knowledge production that moves across disciplines, connecting and enabling local/social/indigenous forms of knowledges, and interventions for grand sustainability challenges.

One set of these projects was a collaboration with Danielle Heinrichs and Michael Camit around the use of generative AI for multilingual adaptations/ translations to facilitate accessibility to health communications. We engaged with students in Hong Kong and Australia, working with the Children’s Tumour Foundation on the communication of neurofibromatosis.

One paper published in Critical Public Health titled “Response-able, collaborative adaptations of multilingual health messaging: a case study from Australia and Hong Kong, SAR” found the potential of AI-assistance in citizen adaptors/ translators, but also highlighting the time-intensive nature of careful and culturally-responsive adaptation work.

Our second work to be published in the journal Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education discusses the promise of epistemic interoperability of generative AI and responds to debates calling for attending to human intelligence and skills. Through Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis and empirical data based on students’ translation work, we argue against this call for human exceptionalism or AI super-intelligence. Instead, we point to historical reality and permanence of human-animal-non-human technology assemblages and its likely continuation. Nonetheless, practices of subversion and resistance can transform AI technologies with its harmful and exploitative origins into something good.