IN-PERSON MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY. SECTION B

Abstract

The rapid integration of generative AI (GenAI) in education arrives at a moment when postdigital and posthumanist scholarship is reconsidering the very foundations of knowledge, learning, and human agency. Postdigital theory reveals that the digital is no longer a separate sphere but is woven into everyday educational life, while posthumanism challenges the assumption that the autonomous human subject is the sole locus of knowing. Together, these perspectives demand ethical assemblages for GenAI that account for the entanglement of learners, educators, technologies, and environments. Drawing on the research of Northeastern University’s CPS LEARN Lab and the presenter’s theoretical work in connected relationalism, this presentation offers such a framework. Connected relationalism synthesizes process philosophy, agential realism, relational quantum mechanics, and Indigenous relational epistemologies to argue that relations are ontologically primary: learners, educators, and AI systems emerge through relations rather than precede them. GenAI, from this perspective, is not a neutral tool but a participant in the relational assemblages through which knowledge and agency are co-constituted. Through ethnographic documentation and the presenter’s research on AI as an equity enhancer for historically underrepresented doctoral students, the presentation examines how GenAI reshapes intellectual authority, ethical obligation, and cultural practice within experiential education. It offers practical strategies for educators seeking to integrate AI responsibly while cultivating the relational ecologies through which humans and more-than-humans continuously emerge and transform together.