Öffentlicher Vortrag und Master Class

Mittwoch, 17. Juni 2026 | 18-19:30 | Seminargebäude 106 S01 (106/EG/0.02)

Against Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia

Marcela Suarez Estrada (Radboud University) 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies have been actively promoted in universities under the guise of efficiency, time optimization, and the fear of missing out or “falling behind.” Advocates for these technologies promise students to improve their writing, help them “taking notes,” or even “giving feedback.” However, the adoption of AI technologies is already showing the deskilling of students and teachers, along with an exponential increase of cases of fraud and plagiarism. At the same, the uncritical adoption of AI technologies puts scientific integrity, diversity, sustainability, digital sovereignty and democracy at risk. This presentation has the objective of discussing the harms of the uncritical adoption of AI technologies in academia and calling for action based on critical AI literacies framework. The presentation will center around the harms for students and lecturers, the responsibilities of universities in responding to these harms, as well as the potential of collective action and agency to resist these harms. The uncritical adoption of AI technologies in academia has harms for:

• Quality of education and student learning: process of deskilling students, fraud and plagiarism cases are on the rise.
• Sustainability and socio-environmental harms: Emissions, land and water use, energy demand, and the scaling effects of AI technologies.
• Coloniality, power, and governance: AI and sustainability frameworks (including SDGs) reproduce global inequalities, and AI often reinforces power asymmetries between the Global North and Global South (often overlooked).
• Institutional responsibility: Contradictory university policies, examination boards that are overworked, and the increasing deskilling realities that teachers face in the classroom. What are universities currently doing?

A call for action to resist the uncritical adoption of AI technologies in education based on conceptual clarity, slow science, respecting expertise, critical thinking, decoloniality (see Guest et al. 2025) will be discussed.

Der Vortrag ist öffentlich.

Marcela Suarez Estrada is a Lecturer in Critical Intersectional Perspectives on AI at the School of Artificial Intelligence, Radboud University, The Netherlands. Her academic background is in the social sciences, particularly the interdisciplinary fields of decolonial theory, gender studies, and science and technology studies. Her expertise covers two areas: the ways AI systems intersect with and reinforce social inequalities, and the environmental costs associated with artificial intelligence. 

Begleitend hierzu:

Masterclass: The coloniality of sustainable AI

Donnerstag, 18. Juni 2026 | 14-15:30 | Seminargebäude 106 Raum S14

On-demandness is a defining feature of digital media. It manifests in the often taken-for-granted expectation of instant accessibility and nonstop service. This talk features feminist media practices from the Asian diaspora, from onscreen performance to on-set production, to explore how on-demandness is also key to the imperial legacy of Asian gendered racialization. In dialog with select media works by Asian diasporans, we’ll ask how to reframe the function of digital media in ways that intervene in often violently neutralizing discourses and theories of digitality. Through shared reading, a lecture, in-class discussion and activity, we’ll explore how a feminist diasporic media method can help us theorize media in ways that bring back marginalized histories and lived experiences, including forms of resistance, sabotage, and community-building.

Bei Anmeldung unter info-memo@uni-koeln.de erhalten Sie per Email eine vorbereitende Lektüre zugesandt.