UoM-UNESCO AI in Education seminar series: Recovering agency in an age of AI
| Dates: | 17 June 2026 |
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| Times: | 11:00 - 12:30 |
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| What is it: | Webinar |
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| Organiser: | School of Environment, Education and Development |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Prof Duncan Ivison, Helen Beetham, Jian Xi Teng, Prof Susan Robertson, Prof John Traxler |
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Speakers:
Helen Beetham, Lecturer in Education , Manchester Institute of Education, UoM
Prof Duncan Ivison, President and Vice-Chancellor, UoM
Session Outline:
This seminar explores the risks to personal and collective agency arising from the widespread use of generative AI. We have already considered a host of social and geopolitical issues: historically biased data; minority world norms; knowledge infrastructures being owned, governed and developed by global corporations; extractive data labour practices; and geopolitical conflicts around access to data, energy and critical minerals. In this closing session we consider how these structural effects play out more personally. How does use of AI create new kinds of intellectual and cultural dependency? What happens to people when their collective cultures are captured and enclosed? What does it mean to ‘use’ AI: or is AI a project of using people in new ways?
The seminar also considers AI agency in a positive and recuperative sense. What critical pedagogies and literacies of AI can make a difference? What role might Higher Education play globally - and regionally - as a force for personal and cultural resilience? How can we draw on past histories of resistance alongside present stories of the AI imaginary? Above all, if both access to AI and the capacities to resist AI are unequally distributed, what hope is there for collective action, within the UNESCO programme and beyond it?
Panel discussion:
Jian Xi Teng, Programme specialist for education, UNESCO South Asia
Professor Susan Robertson (Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Manchester)
Professor John Traxler (UNESCO Chair-Innovative Informal Digital Learning in Disadvantaged and Development Contexts; Chair-the Commonwealth of Learning; Professor of Digital Learning in the Institute of Education at the University of Wolverhampton)
Teams Link:
https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/344385811777219?p=hKu3fQwp0buv8HPbBr
Meeting ID: 344 385 811 777 219
Passcode: Fu9Kw96x
Speakers
Prof Duncan Ivison
Role: President and Vice-Chancellor
Organisation: University of Manchester
Helen Beetham
Role: Lecturer in Education
Organisation: University of Manchester
Jian Xi Teng
Role: Programme specialist for education
Organisation: UNESCO South Asia
Prof Susan Robertson
Role: Professor of Sociology of Education
Organisation: University of Manchester
Prof John Traxler
Role: Professor of Digital Learning in the Institute of Education
Organisation: University of Wolverhampton
Travel and Contact Information
