Conference Program

Over the past decade, a growing body of work has sought to develop critical literacies oriented toward socio-technical systems and processes (Markham, 2019; Pangrazio & Selwyn, 2023; Acker et al., 2024; Pronzato & Kubrusly, 2025). These pedagogical approaches, participatory practices, and forms of digital literacy aim to equip citizens to engage critically with algorithms, digital platforms, datafication processes, and AI-based systems. Yet such efforts—designed to foster agency, reflexivity, and resistance in relation to technologies—are persistently undermined by the power asymmetries structuring human-machine relations (Couldry & Mejias, 2019), the illusion of control promoted by interfaces (Markham et al., 2019), and the hegemonic acceptance of futures that appear inevitable (Markham, 2021; Pronzato & Markham, 2023). The most urgent contemporary instance of this tension is the difficulty educational institutions—schools and universities alike—face in responding to the proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), in a context dominated by technological solutionism and ideological narratives (Macgilchrist et al., 2025).

This contribution presents a research project developed in collaboration with the Futures+ Literacies+ Methods Lab (FLL) at Utrecht University, a center specializing in the design of participatory pedagogical interventions through creative methods to cultivate critical literacies at the intersection of technology, lived experience, and social change. Drawing on critical pedagogy, technofeminism, and critical theory as guiding theoretical frameworks, the study engaged 250 university students in a two-week guided autoethnographic project. The research aimed to investigate how students use and interpret GenAI systems within higher education, and how they perceive the impact of these technologies on the future of the university.

Autoethnography was mobilized not merely as a method for eliciting dimensions of literacy, but as a tool for fostering genuine civic empowerment. Consistent with the panel's emphasis on opacity, vulnerability, and unpredictability as educational values that resist algorithmic optimization, the autoethnographic diaries revealed a significant interpretive trajectory: students progressively elevated their conceptual awareness and developed new frameworks for understanding the present. In particular, opaque datafication processes became more legible and critically apprehensible—even as the black boxes of generative AI systems remained irreducibly closed. The pedagogical structure of the diaries compelled students to develop critical thinking through meticulous argumentation—a reflective labor they reported they would not otherwise have undertaken.

Furthermore, in line with theoretical perspectives on narrative identity and autobiographical orientation (Di Fraia & Risi, 2017), the autoethnographic experience stimulated forms of emancipatory competence with respect to acritical and compulsive uses of AI. The narrative and self-reflexive character of the diary format—as both a research instrument and a pedagogical proposition—thus emerges as a site of resistance to anticipatory control and predictive design, reclaiming the granularity of human experience. The diary narratives solicited from participants proved valuable in unpacking the socio-technological opacity of certain processes, while also fostering a sense of agency among those involved.

This contribution presents the methodological and epistemological architecture of the diary instrument, alongside preliminary findings concerning participants' usage practices of GenAI and self-reflexive narrative orientations. Selected quotations are presented and discussed to ground the analysis in participants' own voices.