Whilst it would be hard to argue against the benefits of a whole raft of new information technologies for all students, it is also true that technological change has historically tended to benefit the most advantaged. Similarly, if one looks at this issue from the lens of ‘race’ and Western colonialism, we see a history of technological innovations being deployed as tools for oppression and dominance (e.g. surveillance, punishment, incarceration, medicalisation, etc) of those othered as non-white and/or non-European. The important point is that not only were new technologies developed and deployed to advance the imperial project, but the idea of technological innovation itself overlaid racial tropes associated with Western civilisation, whiteness, intelligence and the primitiveness of the natives. In relation to the online world, various applications and artificial intelligence (AI) in particular possess great potential to exacerbate existing forms of racism and bias, since they are trained on data that has constructed and reproduced historical or societal biases. For example, facial recognition algorithms have been shown to have higher error rates for people with darker skin tones, which is likely due to biased training data. On the plus side, it is argued that the advent of AI has resulted in heightening awareness of such pitfalls and the necessity to develop algorithms that can actively identify and correct racial biases. Indeed, some argue that the advent of AI offers an opportunity to empower disadvantaged students and to develop new and innovative anti-racist and critical pedagogies.

Through a series of focused presentations and panel discussions with leading experts, this webinar will provide participants working in the field of higher education with a particular interest in race equity to explore some of the concerns and possibilities that AI raises in developing anti-racist and critical pedagogies.