Emancipatory Narratives and AI: Pedagogy, Bias, and Agency across Disciplines
MLA 2027
Los Angeles, California (January 7th-10th, 2027)
Conference URL: https://www.mla.org/Events/2027-MLA-Convention
The MLA 2027 presidential theme, Emancipatory Narratives, invites us to consider how description and agency function in moments of institutional and cultural precarity. If emancipatory narratives insist on conscious action and responsible articulation, what does emancipation mean in writing classrooms shaped by artificial intelligence?
Across disciplines, AI has disrupted the familiar cycles of learning, reading, writing, and revision. Students often approach these tools as neutral, intentionless machines. Yet AI systems encode assumptions, reproduce bias, and privilege particular forms of knowledge and representation. Their outputs participate in acts of description, shaping meaning even when students believe they are merely receiving assistance. In this context, writing instruction and learning practices stand at a crossroads between possibility and risk. The question becomes how emancipatory practices at the classroom, programmatic, and institutional levels might help us reimagine writing and research as sustained, reflective, and agentive processes rather than episodic or siloed performances.
This session invites interdisciplinary perspectives on AI’s impact in writing studies, the humanities, libraries, and other fields. We welcome, but are not limited to, work on pedagogy and assignment design. We also seek proposals that address program administration, institutional policy, information literacy, multimodal composition, faculty governance, cross disciplinary collaboration, and broader theoretical or cultural analyses of AI in higher education.
Possible areas of focus include:
- Writing pedagogy in AI rich environments
- Critical AI literacy and reflective practice
- Multimodal composition and machine interpretation
- Algorithmic bias and representation
- Libraries and information literacy
- Writing center and program level initiatives
- Ethical frameworks for AI use
- AI and authorship across disciplines
This session will be held fully in person. Please submit a 250 to 300 word abstract and brief bio by March 25. Submissions from scholars and librarians across ranks, institution types, and disciplines are welcome. To submit please email (michalr@gbc.edu) or Dr. Eman Al-Drous (aldrouse@gbc.edu) with questions.
