Special Issue of Digital Culture & Education | Making with Machines: Generative AI, Creativity, and Postdigital Pedagogy
Category: Publication
The rapid diffusion of generative and agentic AI across diverse meaning-making practices has sharpened long-standing questions for educators, artists, and scholars. Issues that have always haunted creative practice - agency (Watkins & Barak-Medina, 2024), authorship (Craig & Kerr, 2021; Formosa et al., 2025), copyright and acknowledgment (Frye, 2020), and identity (Horst, 2025; Gunkel & Wales, 2021) - take on new significance as generative systems now produce outputs indistinguishable from what we still call “human-authored” work (Elkhatat et al., 2023). In this postdigital landscape, data, labour, bodies, and machinic processes entangle (Horst, 2025), unsettling how we think about the relationships among creativity, meaning, and responsibility in educational spaces. Given these challenges, how should arts-based and aesthetic modes of inquiry and invention adapt to, resist, or otherwise encompass sociotechnical systems that mirror - however darkly - what has long been treated as a uniquely human capacity for creative expression (Bassett, 2024)? In light of AI’s extractive infrastructures and cultural–political entanglements (Crawford, 2021; Pasquinelli & Joler, 2023), what do these systems suggest about the colonising tendencies of contemporary education more broadly? What imaginaries can we fabulate in order to understand ourselves within and against these systems (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015; Horst, 2024)? Should we be building them at all (Rahm, 2024) - and if so, under what conditions (Birhane, 2021; Mohamed, Png, & Isaac, 2020)? This special issue foregrounds speculative (e.g., Dunne & Raby, 2013) and arts-based (e.g., Leavy, 2020) approaches to understanding the algorithmically saturated transformations underway in education and educational research - attending to AI as object, subject, medium, and muse (Dishon, 2024; Nichols, 2024). It takes up computation, predictive algorithms, and datafied landscapes through posthuman and postdigital lenses (Braidotti, 2019; Jandrić, 2023), exploring how speculative and arts-based inquiry can open new ways of engaging with our algorithmic entanglements in contemporary education, foregrounding how data, code, and human practice are co-emergent. Generative AI does not stay still under our inquiring gaze; rather, these systems recursively entangle with the ways in which we represent and understand the world (Hayles, 2017). Speculative, arts-based, and posthumanist methods (Harris & Rousell, 2022; Horst, 2023) offer practices for engaging AI not only as a tool but as a cultural, aesthetic, and ethically fraught phenomenon marked by tension, contradiction, and negotiation. This special issue invites contributions that situate AI in education through creative and arts-based inquiry, speculative design, relational and postdigital research, and artistic inquiry - while centring protocols of reciprocity and sovereignty where appropriate (Birhane, 2021). Our aim is to show how these approaches can open new pathways for critical understanding and transformative pedagogy across classrooms, studios, laboratories, and public spaces.
Initiator(s):
Journal Digital Culture & Education
Deadline: 15.12.2025
Publication-Type: Article / Journal
https://www.digitalcultureandeducation.com/call-for-papers-si
Post created by: interculture.de e.V.