VOILA! Fighting Weaponized Technology in Higher Education

AI & Higher Education

Title

Lecturer

Prof. Britt Paris,

Content and organization

Date and time: 08.10.2025 at 4pm CEST

Speaker: Prof. Britt Paris

Affiliation: Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University

Title: Fighting Weaponized Technology in Higher Education

Topic: AI & Education

Abstract: The uncritical adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) across higher education poses a threat to academic professions through work intensification and job losses and through its implications for intellectual property, economic security, and the corporate capture of faculty working conditions that affect student learning conditions.

Over the last 40 years, US higher education has been defunded and institutions have reached for privatized technology solutions. For decades, there have been significant labor issues around the use of technology in higher education. Now, however, the US federal administration’s direct attacks on people of color, trans and disabled people, immigrants, science, democratic institutions, freedom of speech and assembly, and higher education highlight the interconnectedness of struggles for what is left of the public good, labor, and human rights on multiple fronts. As the tech industry has facilitated and benefitted from these attacks, analyses of the current moment must also critically consider the crisis of corporate technology and its unchecked power over our working, learning, and daily lives.

To move us forward in this fight, the AAUP’s ad hoc Committee on Artificial Intelligence and Academic Professions has published a new report based on research and organizing engagements with members of AAUP members across faculty ranks, job categories, and institution types. It includes principles like shared governance and faculty and student right to control their educational futures, recommendations like worker and student collectives to govern technology procurement and deployment, and the capacity to opt-out of data capture and technology use, and strategies to build power across sectors. Our committee recognizes that what’s at stake with how AI is deployed in higher education is the possibility of informed participation in democracy, as well as labor and education justice.

Speaker’s BIO: Britt S. Paris is chair of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) national ad hoc committee on AI in the profession. She is also on the executive board of her local AAUP chapter at Rutgers University. Paris is an associate professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University.

Paris is a critical informatics scholar studying the political economy of information infrastructure, as it relates to evidentiary standards and political action. Her book: Radical Infrastructures: Imagining the Internet from the Ground Up” published with University of California Press will be available in January 2026. Previously, she has published work on Internet infrastructure projects, artificial intelligence-generated information objects, digital labor, and civic data, analyzed through the lenses of science and technology studies, political economy, cultural studies, and social epistemology. These streams of research focus on developing a broader understanding of the social, political, economic, and historical forces that have shaped our current information and communication environment to allow us to envision and organize political will around a future worth fighting for.

Paris has her MA in Media Studies from the New School in New York City and her PhD in Information Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is an alumni of Data & Society Research Institute where she published a landmark critique on generative AI – on deepfakes – in 2019. She joined the faculty at Rutgers University as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Library and Information Science in Fall 2019. She was promoted to Associate Professor in Spring 2025.