URGENT/EMERGENT Seminar & Conversation Series
On 15 May 2025, Professor Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, Director of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS) and Dr. Anaïs Nony, Senior Researcher at JIAS on “AI & Life Matters”, launched the URGENT/EMERGENT seminar and conversation series with an event titled “The Machine and the Margins”. Literary and digital scholars, Dr. Carrie Timlin and Dr. Colette Gordon presented their research on AI-resistant teaching and learning in the wake of generative Artificial Intelligence in higher education.
The seminar opened with a welcome from Prof Collis-Buthelezi and Dr Nony. Referencing Judith Butler’s recent talk in South Korea on “Democracy and the Humanities”, Collis-Buthelezi invited attendees to understand the seminar series as about the relationship between the humanities, democracy, and how we might “reenchant the human’s relationship to study in light of AI”. Nony offered us a quick history of AI from the 1920s to the present, reminding us that while “2/3 of the world has access to the internet and generative AI, 1/3 is still without access to safe water”.
Drs. Timlin and Gordon revealed how they used social annotation in their courses to ‘hack’ their students’ plagiarism of assessments. For Gordon, “the essay invites students to plagiarise”. ChatGPT and other forms of generative AI simply enhance students’ toolkits for plagirising, but Gordon argued that the problem is in the type of assessment. Rather, she suggested that the future of humanities teaching and scholarship lies in a return to reading. “Deep reading is hard,” she said, “but too often universities invest in writing programmes and not reading programmes.
But students cannot write original content if they cannot read and understand what they are reading”.
When asked what the implications of their research are on the understanding that the act of writing is transformative of the human self, Dr Timlin responded that generative AI “disrupts the idea of writing as a mark of individual intelligence or genius”. She saw generative AI as pushing us toward collective knowledge production and reemphasised what their “classroom pedagogy of social annotation — students reading and writing in ‘the margins’ of texts — offers by way of the relationship between reading and writing”.
Both scholars pointed out that in the age of AI, lecturers’ ethical admonishment of students about plagiarism is increasingly less impactful than their classmates asking them for “relevance” in online and in-class discussions.in the face of generative AI, Timlin and Gordon pointed us back to reading, knowledge making, and writing as collective, social activities.
This seminar was recorded and will be viewable on the JIAS YouTube channel.
Upcoming events in the series include Professor Mohammad Shabangu on attentional infrastructures and African time (Colby College), Dr. Phokeng Tshepo Setai on Black curatorial practices (Zeitz Mocaa), Professor Efua Prah on intercontinental African migration politics (University of Johannesburg), Professor David Scott on revolution (Columbia University, US), Professor Ruchi Chaturvedi on the violence of democracy (University of Cape Town, SA), and Philosopher Sara Baranzoni on the Anthropocene, artificial intelligence and digital art.
Seminars take place on Thursdays from 3pm to 5pm (SAST) URGENT/EMERGENT is a public seminar and conversation series at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS) microcampus in Westdene, Johannesburg as well as online. To stay informed about upcoming seminars in the URGENT/EMERGENT series, sign-up for our mailing list or follow our programming via https://www.jias.joburg.
URGENT/EMERGENT Seminar Series was established in 2025 at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study to provide a research platform for debates on the political, historical, technological and cultural sources of 21st century societal developments. Hosted by Prof Victoria Collis-Buthelezi and Dr Anaïs Nony, it is rooted in JIAS’s commitment to critical, transdisciplinary thought and convenes thinking around key emerging, urgent questions of our time such as climate, AI, democracy, violence, war, genocide, and freedom.