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Generative AI and the emergency remote scholarship of the Covid-19 pandemic

This is an extract from Generative AI for Academics

During those moments when change is taking place, it becomes easier to reflect upon the technology our scholarship depends on. We notice it far more during these periods of change than we do once it has faded into the background of our working environment. In his commencement speech at Kenyon College, the novelist David Foster Wallace (2005) began with a parable that been a repeated favourite of bloggers over the years: 

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

The point Wallace was making is that “the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about”. For academics our dependence upon technology is one such reality, it is so intimately relied upon that we easily ignore how integral it is to what we do. We get frustrated when it breaks, upgrade devices in pursuit of better experiences and sometimes talk to each other about practical issues we encounter. There’s a particular sort of infantile rage which otherwise sedate academics can express when the office printer doesn’t work that has always fascinated me. But the manner in which our scholarship is digital at this point tends to go unremarked upon, apart from during those times when a dramatic shift is enforced upon us. 

The enforced digitalisation of the Covid-19 pandemic was one such event, we all became digital scholars by default because lockdown restrictions squeezed out those remaining arenas which were not entirely reliant on the digital (Carrigan, 2021). But rather than being the prelude to a newly reflective approach to digital technology, the emergency digital scholarship of the pandemic has faded. In using the term I’m drawing a connection to the emergency remote teaching which dominated pedagogy during the pandemic (Nordmann et al, 2020). It was a pragmatic response to circumstance that had little relationship to the rich repertoire of digital education which preceded the pandemic (Weller, 2020). Yet for many academics online learning is synonymous with the hastily improvised Zoom meetings and self-recorded videos of the pandemic, contributing to an understandable impulse to revert to the pre-pandemic norm. The same I suggest is true of digital scholarship, with the unwelcome technological reliance of the crisis now shaping the unexamined practice of academics in a hybrid work culture. When we are adjusted to the technical systems we work within, it “fades into the background, forgotten as it disappears into everydayness, just as, for a fish, what disappears from view, as its ‘element’ is water” (Stiegler, 2019: loc 887). But when that adjustment breaks down as the system changes, we are confronted with the fragile nature of the tools we use and our dependence on them. These are moments in which professional cultures can inadvertently establish practices which get locked in before the change dissipates. The challenge of GAI is an invitation for academics to grapple with the digitalisation of their practice more broadly. But the track record in many disciplines and fields does not give cause for optimism.

This matters for academics because technology is a disrupter of professional jurisdiction (Abbott, 1988). Each new development offers alternative ways to address the challenges traditionally within the purview of that profession. By advocating a reflexive approach to GAI, as an interlocutor rather than a tool, I am advocating a creative exploration of how our problem-solving activity might be changed and our professional jurisdiction redefined. This does not mean standardising our use of GAI, which I suspect would be impossible across diverse disciplines and fields, but rather recovering common questions of professional purpose which unite what we do as people who produce and communicate knowledge. While the purposes underlying our work might often recede in the mundane reality of university life, there are nonetheless purposes to research, teaching, service and engagement. These are values which can guide us in a complex and uncertain landscape.

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