CALL FOR PAPERS

Special Issue of Digital Culture & Education

Making with Machines: Generative AI, Creativity, and Postdigital Pedagogy

 
 

Context

The rapid diffusion of generative and agentic AI across diverse meaning-making practices has sharpened long-standing questions for educators, artists, and scholars. Issues that have always haunted creative practice - agency (Watkins & Barak-Medina, 2024), authorship (Craig & Kerr, 2021; Formosa et al., 2025), copyright and acknowledgment (Frye, 2020), and identity (Horst, 2025; Gunkel & Wales, 2021) - take on new significance as generative systems now produce outputs indistinguishable from what we still call “human-authored” work (Elkhatat et al., 2023). In this postdigital landscape, data, labour, bodies, and machinic processes entangle (Horst, 2025), unsettling how we think about the relationships among creativity, meaning, and responsibility in educational spaces.

Aims

Given these challenges, how should arts-based and aesthetic modes of inquiry and invention adapt to, resist, or otherwise encompass sociotechnical systems that mirror - however darkly - what has long been treated as a uniquely human capacity for creative expression (Bassett, 2024)? In light of AI’s extractive infrastructures and cultural–political entanglements (Crawford, 2021; Pasquinelli & Joler, 2023), what do these systems suggest about the colonising tendencies of contemporary education more broadly? What imaginaries can we fabulate in order to understand ourselves within and against these systems (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015; Horst, 2024)? Should we be building them at all (Rahm, 2024) - and if so, under what conditions (Birhane, 2021; Mohamed, Png, & Isaac, 2020)?

This special issue foregrounds speculative (e.g., Dunne & Raby, 2013) and arts-based (e.g., Leavy, 2020) approaches to understanding the algorithmically saturated transformations underway in education and educational research - attending to AI as object, subject, medium, and muse (Dishon, 2024; Nichols, 2024). It takes up computation, predictive algorithms, and datafied landscapes through posthuman and postdigital lenses (Braidotti, 2019; Jandrić, 2023), exploring how speculative and arts-based inquiry can open new ways of engaging with our algorithmic entanglements in contemporary education, foregrounding how data, code, and human practice are co-emergent. Generative AI does not stay still under our inquiring gaze; rather, these systems recursively entangle with the ways in which we represent and understand the world (Hayles, 2017). Speculative, arts-based, and posthumanist methods (Harris & Rousell, 2022; Horst, 2023) offer practices for engaging AI not only as a tool but as a cultural, aesthetic, and ethically fraught phenomenon marked by tension, contradiction, and negotiation.

Invitation

This special issue invites contributions that situate AI in education through creative and arts-based inquiry, speculative design, relational and postdigital research, and artistic inquiry - while centring protocols of reciprocity and sovereignty where appropriate (Birhane, 2021). Our aim is to show how these approaches can open new pathways for critical understanding and transformative pedagogy across classrooms, studios, laboratories, and public spaces.

 

We welcome submissions on (but not restricted to) the following themes:

  • Authorship, agency, and creativity

    • How do generative systems reshape questions of authorship, acknowledgment, and creative responsibility?

  • Datafied and algorithmic selves

    • In what ways do AI systems reconfigure identity, subjectivity, and educational experience?

  • Protocols of reciprocity and sovereignty

    • What models of refusal, care, or kinship might resist extractive infrastructures of AI?

  • Speculative and fabulative imaginaries

    • How can speculative design and fabulation be mobilised to imagine futures of AI in education otherwise?

  • Materialities and ecologies of AI

    • How do creative practices reveal the environmental and labour costs of generative AI?

  • Posthuman and postdigital methods

    • How do posthumanist and postdigital approaches challenge human-centred narratives of creativity and learning?

  • Pedagogical transformations

    • How might arts-based inquiry open new pathways for teaching, learning, and research in AI-saturated contexts? 

These themes are meant to spark, not limit, the conversation. We warmly invite contributions that engage creatively and experimentally with these questions, whether through speculative writing, arts-based inquiry, performative or multimodal forms, or other inventive approaches. Submissions that reimagine what it means to study, teach, or make with AI are especially encouraged.

 

Submission Guidelines

Please include a 350–500 word abstract outlining the focus, context, and contribution of your proposed piece. You may also include a sample of the data, artwork, or creative material you plan to feature (optional but encouraged, especially for arts-based or experimental formats).


Please email your submissions to: rachel.horst@ubc.ca

Submissions should include:

·       Abstract: 350–500 words

·       Author bio: 50–100 words

·       Optional sample: 1–3 images, short audio/video clips, or a brief description of the creative work

 

Special Issue Timeline

Abstracts due: December 15, 2026

Notifications of acceptance: January10, 2026

Full papers due: May 30, 2026

Peer review completed: August 2026

Revisions due: October 2026

Final publication: November 2026

  

About the editors

Lead Editor

Dr. Rachel Horst is a lecturer in the Master of Educational Technology program at the University of British Columbia. Her research and creative praxis examine how AI systems and practices are reshaping meaning-making and communication amid digital saturation. She engages digital arts-based inquiry and speculative design as modes of pedagogy and research, exploring how creative practice can foster imaginative and transformative learning within conditions of technological change. Grounded in critical, relational, and futures-oriented approaches, her work traces how emerging technologies reconfigure creativity, pedagogy, and communication. Across her projects, Dr. Horst seeks to cultivate agency and support educators and learners in shaping more just, sustainable, and plural digital futures.

Editor
Andrea Hoff is a multimedia artist, writer, and researcher whose work explores the intersections of narrative, technology, and ecology. Her writing and creative projects have been featured on platforms such as The Tyee, Broken Pencil, Room Magazine, Display Canadian Design, and Netflix. In addition to her research and artistic endeavours, Andrea is a co-founder of Beyond Collective, an Indigenous/settler feminist studio that uses comics, research, installation, and performance to challenge colonial narratives and foster reconciliation efforts. Her academic contributions have been recognised through her roles as a Public Scholar and a Mitacs Accelerate Fellow at the University of British Columbia. From 2022 to 2023, Andrea served as a Shadbolt Fellow in the Arts and Humanities at Simon Fraser University and as a Visiting Faculty in their Department of Sociology and Anthropology. She is currently completing a PhD in Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia.

 

References

Bassett, C. (2024). The author, poor bastard: Writing, creativity, AI. In A. Ensslin & A. Bown (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of AI and literature (pp. 8–xx). Routledge.

Birhane, A. (2021). Algorithmic injustice: A relational ethics approach. Patterns, 2(2), 100205. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2021.100205

Braidotti, R. (2019). Posthuman knowledge. Polity Press.

Craig, C., & Kerr, I. (2025). The death of the AI author. In R. Calo, A. M. Froomkin, & K. Thomasen (Eds.), Robot law: Volume II (pp. 250–285). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800887305.00016

Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI: Power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. Yale University Press.

Dishon, G. (2024). From monsters to mazes: Sociotechnical imaginaries of AI between Frankenstein and Kafka. Postdigital Science and Education, 6(3), 962–977. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-024-00482-4

Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative everything: Design, fiction, and social dreaming (1st ed.). The MIT Press.

Elkhatat, A. M., Elsaid, K., & Almeer, S. (2023). Evaluating the efficacy of AI content detection tools in differentiating between human and AI-generated text. International Journal for Educational Integrity, 19, Article 17. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-023-00140-5

Formosa, P., Bankins, S., Matulionyte, R., & Ghasemi, O. (2025). Can ChatGPT be an author? Generative AI creative writing assistance and perceptions of authorship, creatorship, responsibility, and disclosure. Ai & Society, 40(5), 3405-3417.

Frye, B. L. (2020). Plagiarize This Paper. IDEA, 60, 294.

Gunkel, D. J., & Wales, J. J. (2021). Debate: what is personhood in the age of AI?. AI & society, 36(2), 473-486.

Harris, D. X., & Rousell, D. (2022). Posthuman creativities: Pluralist ecologies and the question of how. Qualitative Inquiry, 28(5), 427–434. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004221080219

Hayles, N. K. (2017). Unthought: The power of the cognitive nonconscious. University of Chicago Press.

Horst, R. (2023, December 14). Imagining difference: Technological posthumanist methods for arts-based futures literacies research. Digital Culture & Education. https://www.digitalcultureandeducation.com/volume-14-5-papers/horst-2023

Horst, R. (2025, July). Entangled dimensions of AI literacy [LinkedIn post]. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rachelhorst-futures_entangled-dimensions-of-ai-literacy-activity-7335782030682607616-0cQF

Jandrić, P. (2023). Postdigital / Postdigital AI. Postdigital Science and Education. https://link.springer.com/journal/42438

Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S.-H. (Eds.). (2015). Dreamscapes of modernity: Sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power. University of Chicago Press.

Leavy, P., & ProQuest (Firm). (2020). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice (Third ed.). The Guilford Press.

Mohamed, S., Png, M.-T., & Isaac, W. (2020). Decolonial AI: Decolonial theory as sociotechnical foresight in artificial intelligence. Philosophy & Technology, 33(4), 659–684. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00405-8

Nichols, T. P. (2024). Speculative capture: Literacy after platformization. Reading Research Quarterly, 59(2), 297–311. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.535

Pasquinelli, M., Joler, V. (2021). The Nooscope manifested: AI as instrument of knowledge extractivism. AI & Soc 36, 1263–1280. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01097-6

Rahm, L. (2024). ‘Help!? My students created an evil AI’: On the irony of AI in education. Learning, Media and Technology. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2024.2367707

Watkins, R., & Barak-Medina, E. (2024). AI’s Influence on Human Creative Agency. Creativity Research Journal, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2024.2437264