Much of the existing scholarship on GenAI has focused on its implications for student learning. In this talk, we’ll think instead about GenAI’s relationship to questions of academic labor and political economy.

Universities are playing pivotal roles in the integration and normalization of corporate-backed GenAI tools at the same time that GenAI is being used for strikebreaking, rationalizing increased class sizes, censorship of educational materials, and the extraction of more value from faculty labor. Lindsay Weinberg will argue that by understanding academic workers as part of a global labor market where algorithmic management is used to discipline precariously employed workers, we can better understand how GenAI can be used to automate, deskill, and discipline academic labor.

Bio: Lindsay Weinberg is a clinical assistant professor in the John Martinson Honors College and Director of the Tech Justice Lab at Purdue University. Her research and teaching are at the intersection of science and technology studies, media studies, and feminist studies, with an emphasis on the social and ethical impacts of digital technology. Her book Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age examines the proliferation of digital tools for higher education governance, and their impacts on marginalized people within and beyond the university’s walls.