Speakers:

• Kathryn Conrad, Professor of English, University of Kansas
• Melanie Dusseau, Associate Professor of English, University of Findlay
• Miriam Reynoldson, PhD candidate and digital learning specialist, RMIT University
• Emily Tucker, Executive Director, Center on Privacy and Technology, Georgetown Law
• Rose Willis, Undergraduate student and freelance illustrator, University of Kansas

This participatory workshop invites delegates to experiment with zine-making as a creative pre-digital technology for expression and connection in an increasingly all-digital education landscape. The workshop hosts are students, teachers, leaders, writers and artists based across various geographies and disciplines, brought together by a shared desire to hear from and be heard by others who object to the incursion of AI technologies in education.

Delegates will explore strategies for individual and collective resistance against the imposition of surveillance technologies, data products and automation in spaces of teaching and learning. The collaborative zine-making exercise will bring delegates into a live exploration of the kind of embodied thinking and relational knowledge-seeking which we argue is necessary to counter the algorithmic logics of edtech. Simultaneously, we will facilitate a conversation about the growing resistance against "AI" in education (Guest et al. 2025; Holmes et al. 2025; Jowsey et al., 2025; McQuillan et al. 2024), and the need for solidarity, flexibility and experimentation as we movement-build across global and institutional contexts.

The group we have begun to build together, the Library of Babel Group (Georgetown Law, n.d.) is one of many communities that actively resist AI adoption in education, academia and research. We currently connect over 500 members across four continents, away from the algorithmic governance of LinkedIn, X, and university enterprise platforms. Our group creates spaces for conversation, strategizing, resource-sharing, collaborative research, and skill building among members. One of the questions that Library of Babel Group members keep coming back to is how to connect our resistance of edtech products to a more fundamental resistance against a model of education that focuses on training students to reliably produce certain kinds of outcomes, as opposed to guiding them toward true intellectual, creative and moral agency.

The workshop will consist of:

• Introductions (10 minutes): An introduction to the workshop hosts, the Library of Babel Group origin story, and our different but intersecting approaches to creative pedagogy and AI resistance.
• The Power of the Zine (10 minutes): A short history of zines as vehicles for voice and connection in resistance and counterculture movements, and as an analog craft technology for raw expression (DAIR, n.d.; Furze, 2026).

Workshop hosts will then alternate between:

• Collaborative Zine-Making and Panel Discussion (30 minutes):
• • Zine Creation. With their tables, delegates use an array of art supplies and scrappy collage materials to bring together a zine page expressing a response to this moment in education technology. Hosts will circulate to support the creation process.
  • Panel Discussion. Hosts will continue to reflect, and to draw out reflections from workshop participants, on the theme of resistance.
• Close (10 minutes): we will bring participants back together to reflect on the process and collect their creations in anticipation of creating a conference session collage zine.

This is a workshop about finding each other; something that, at this moment in history, is what any resistance community hopes to foster: human connection to combat the ubiquitous nature of the rapid implementation of unethical technologies into our classrooms and lives. It is the only way to reckon what we all want: the possibility of greater freedom and justice, and the energy and collective agency necessary to fight for those things.

References

DAIR (n.d.). The DAIR zine library. https://zines.dair-institute.org/

Furze, L. (2026). Artefacts of the AI resistance. https://leonfurze.com/2026/02/04/artefacts-of-the-ai-resistance/

Georgetown Law (n.d.) The Library of Babel Group. https://www.law.georgetown.edu/privacy-technology-center/about-us/the-library-of-babel-group/

Guest, O. et al. (2025). Against the uncritical adoption of 'AI' technologies in academia. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17065099

Holmes, W. et al. (2025). Critical studies of artificial intelligence and education: putting a stake in the ground. SSRN. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5391793

Jowsey, T. et al. (2025). We reject the use of generative artificial intelligence for reflexive qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004251401851

McQuillan, D., Jarke, J. & Pargman, T. C. We are at an extreme point where we have to go all in on what we really believe education should be about (2024). Postdigital Science and Education, 6(1), 360–368 https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-023-00433-5