Conference Program

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are increasingly confronted with the arrival of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in teaching and learning environments. With AI’s firm rooting in an inevitability discourse (Bearman et al., 2023) and GenAI’s promises of “assessment reform, personalisation, or inclusion” (Jensen et al., 2025), GenAI seems to be here to stay, even if it is yet contested what its role in knowledge production, representation and transfer can and should actually be.

The impact of GenAI on academic integrity and its potential for misconduct has been a particular concern for HEIs. Accordingly, HEIs around the globe have begun to develop policies and modes of institutional governance, oftentimes treating GenAI in a similar way as plagiarism or cheating (Mack & Byanjankar, 2025). In our contribution, we address the effects of GenAI on academic integrity less as a misconduct problem that needs institutional control but as a relational issue that requires institutional care.

We conceptualize academic integrity as matter of socialization into Responsible Academic Practice (RAP). Over the course of their studies, students develop skills and capabilities; they incorporate values, norms, embodied routines and affective states; and they do so via participation in academic practice, initially with more limited roles and responsibilities that gradually expand (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Learning, thus, is a fundamentally relational and transformational endeavor. It presupposes meaningful relationships with others within which one learns to act responsibly as one becomes part of a practice and its respective community (ibid.) These meaningful relationships are grounded in mutual recognition and care within sociomaterial assemblages of human and non-human actors (Gravett, 2024).

Drawing on qualitative engagements with undergraduate students at three Austrian universities (from STEM and SSH fields), we examine the effect of adding GenAI to this sociomaterial relational socialization process. We reconstruct how GenAI often serves as a response to a perceived lack of meaningful connection in HE. It creates attentive and seemingly personalized responses, thereby filling relational gaps where human guidance seems unattainable or absent, and students fail to establish affective relationships with tasks, topics, peers or educators.

We conclude that HEIs not only need to provide guidance for the appropriate use of GenAI and the governance of misconduct; much more, they haven an obligation to care for spaces where relationships can flourish, if they want to assure the socialization process into Responsible Academic Practice and, thus, academic integrity.