“University Infrastructure and/as Fiction: The Fairy Tale of Generative AI in Higher Education and the Stories that Can Haunt Its Dominance”
Journal article
(2026, forthcoming)
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“Fairy Tales and Ghost Stories: Higher Education, Artificial Intelligence, and Alternative Sociotechnical Configurations” 
Presentation delivered at the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague
(July 2025)

In the summer of 2025, I had the tremendous opportunity to deliver a seminar at the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. It was an honor and recognition of the work I’ve done at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies, Political Economy, and Critical University Studies. Below, you can watch a recording of the talk with which I began the seminar, titled “Fairy Tales and Ghost Stories: Higher Education, Artificial Intelligence, and Alternative Sociotechnical Configurations.” 
 
This talk also served as the springboard for a forthcoming (as of Oct. 2026) journal article, titled, “University Infrastructure and/as Fiction: The Fairy Tale of Generative AI in Higher Education and the Stories that Can Haunt Its Dominance” (pre-print available here). The abstract is as follows: 

Just as the technologies deployed within a university constitute modes of governance, the method by which a university is governed is also a technology. Technologies under capitalism—both techniques of governance as well as tools used by the governed—serve to augment surplus value for the capitalist class, and any benefit to the working class is part of the engineering of consent for their domination. But capitalist hegemony also exerts its force through the circulation of fictions—fairy tales that inspire awe and wonder—about technological progress and economic growth. These fictions structure material reality, reifying today’s neoliberal-authoritarian governmentality, circumscribing the parameters of political possibility, and denying to the working class that things could be otherwise. The university is just as much subject to these conditions as any other industry. Indeed, the utility of generative artificial intelligence for universities under capitalism appears as the result of such fairy tales. The fairy tale of genAI’s utility for higher education—as evidenced through press releases and policy documents—is deeply pernicious and ignores the evidence of the deleterious nature of genAI for people and planet alike. To delegitimize this fairy tale and its material impacts, I tell what I call “ghost stories,” which haunt the fairy tales of economic expansion and technological progress that hold our collective imagination hostage. These ghost stories—of lost futures and small instances of autonomous communal self-determination and technological conviviality—range from the development of a student information platform at a major research university in the 1990s to democratic technological innovation in Rojava. Such stories, when taken together, can both destabilize capital’s structuring fictions and their role in higher education while producing new structuring narratives, allowing us to begin to, as J.K. Gibson-Graham write, “excavate the possible.”