Speculative Frictions: Literacy, AI, and Civic Imagination

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 2:30 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Sociotechnical Perspectives on Young People Using, Experiencing, and Making Sense of AI (Table 17)

Abstract

This paper shares findings from a practitioner research study (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) that asked, what happens when young people use speculative fiction writing to engage in civic inquiry about artificial intelligence (AI) technologies? As a subject that has long fascinated speculative fiction writers (Vint, 2023) and that has recently risen in prominence as a pressing civic concern (Crawford, 2021), AI offers a textured entry point for examining the relationship between “the speculative” as a narrative form and “the civic'' as a site of political transformation. As scholars of speculative fiction suggest, “the speculative'' has political potential for stimulating imagination about what other worlds, and ways of inhabiting them, might be possible; but it is also capable of reinforcing the assumptions and norms of the society that produced it (Jameson, 2004). In this way, we argue that young people’s speculative fiction writing about AI not only helps make visible the ways they imagine the impacts of emerging technologies and the modes of collective action available for leveraging, resisting, or countering them, but also the frictions and fissures between the two.

Our study brings together literature on platform studies and civic education. Over the last decade, scholars of platform studies have documented the spread of platform technologies (including AI) in personal and civic life (Burgess, 2021; van Dijck et al., 2018). They argue that platforms should be understood not as stand-alone “tools,” but as complex “ecologies” with social, technical, and political-economic dimensions (Author, 2022; van Dijck, 2013). Research in civic education, likewise, has expanded the scope of “citizenship” from a focus on state loyalty and personal responsibility to a more “ecological” position, centering the interplay of civic identities, civic values, and civic actions (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004; Ladson-Billings, 2004; Vickery, 2017). Bringing these ecological perspectives together offers a standpoint from which to assess the civic implications of digital platforms, like AI, and to imagine collective actions for addressing them.

This framework guided our inquiry as students considered the social impacts of AI and explored the subject through speculative fiction writing. Data included student artifacts (speculative fiction stories, prewriting and relevant unit work) as well as teacher fieldnotes (from the first-author). We used inductive coding to identify emergent patterns in the ways young people wrote about AI and civics, as well as deductive coding using our ecological platform/civic framework. Our findings spotlight both the breadth of intractable civic concerns that young people associate with AI, as well as the limitations of the civic frameworks for imagining political interventions to these challenges. Importantly, they also indicate that the process of speculative writing itself can help reconcile this disjuncture by opening space to dwell in, rather than resolve, the tensions between “the speculative” and the “civic.” In concluding, we consider how these findings contribute to the rich and growing literature on the role of “the speculative” in literacy studies (e.g., Coleman, 2021; Lizárraga, 2023; Mirra & Garcia, 2020; Toliver, 2020; Wargo, 2021) and to justice-oriented civic education.

Authors

• Alexandra Thrall, Baylor University

• T. Philip Nichols, Baylor University

• Kevin R. Magill, Baylor University