Department of English

• Thursday, February 19, 2026 - 5:00pm to 7:00pm

FBH Faculty Lounge (room 135)

At a time of rising autocracy that under-regulated tech monopolies have helped usher in, teachers and students in writing-based humanities disciplines can engage generative AI technologies from a standpoint of action—without unnecessary technodeterminism, catastrophism, or passivity. As theorists of action they can nimbly address the primacy of language and the social challenges of generative AI by recognizing the intersubjective and embodied actions through which people start something new in the world. In this lecture, Professor Lauren Goodlad explains how generative AI works; how its underlying political economy centers extraction, resource intensivity, and concentration of power; and why teaching critical AI literacies to students and others can interrupt the "AI first" logic that governs the current hype cycle. Participants are invited (but not required) to look over the latest issue of Critical AI and the living document, "Teaching Critical AI Literacies," maintained by Critical AI @ Rutgers. 

Lauren M.E. Goodlad is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, the chair of Critical AI @ Rutgers, and the editor of Critical AI (published by Duke University Press). Her ongoing research interdisciplinary critical AI studies and putting "humanities in the loop" has been supported by the NEH, the NSF, and the Mellon Foundation. Her talk derives from a current book project, The Lifecycle of Writing Subjects: On the Futures of Human Poiesis in a Time of Generative AI.