Speculative Futures with and Against AI: Youth Worldbuilding as Sociotechnical Intervention

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium inquires into young people’s speculative encounters with generative AI technology and their worldbuilding practices, both with and against AI technologies, to offer “expansive possibilities” (Authors, 2025) that intervene in oppressive sociotechnical systems and imagine otherwise. Convening scholars and educators from literacy studies and learning sciences whose work spans diverse theories, methods, and research contexts, this panel will share projects that interrogate how youth speculative practices with AI might (re)write structural inequities, biases embedded in AI systems, and hegemonic flows of power in the age of AI. Through four distinct research projects, the panelists illuminate the mutually constitutive relationships between youth writers and AI, highlighting their critical orientations toward AI technologies and the generative potential of AI–human entanglements.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Writing and Literacies

Chairs

• Rabani Garg, University of Pennsylvania

• Clara Abbott, University of Pennsylvania

Papers

• Ideating Worlds with ChatGPT: Critical Inquiries into the Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Narrative Composing - Alex Corbitt, Syracuse University

• High School Students as Designers of Generative Language Models - Luis Morales-Navarro, University of Pennsylvania; Daniel J Noh, University of Pennsylvania; Yasmin B. Kafai, University of Pennsylvania

• Re-imagining AI-Human Relationships in World-Building Contexts through Everyday Movement - Michael Alan Chang, Boston University; Beth M. Warren, Boston University; Gia Kim, Boston University; Heila Precel, Boston University

• Speculating AI’s “Second Life”: Youth’s Carnivalesque (Re)Writing with AI - Rabani Garg, University of Pennsylvania; Clara Abbott, University of Pennsylvania; Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania

Session Organizer

• Clara Abbott, University of Pennsylvania

Discussant

• Tiera C. Tanksley, University of Colorado - Boulder