Artificial intelligence (AI) has gradually been integrated into major aspects of schooling and academic learning following breakthroughs in algorithmic machine learning over the past decade. Interestingly, history shows us that as new technologies become perceived as ‘normal’ they fade into uncritical aspects of institutions. Considering that schools produce and reproduce social practices and normative behavior through both explicit and implicit codes, the introduction of AI to classrooms can reveal much about schooling. Nevertheless, artificial intelligence technology (specifically new machine learning applications) has yet to be properly framed as a lens with which to critically analyze and interpret school-based inequities. Recent education discourse focuses more on practical applications of technology than on the institutional inequalities that are revealed when analyzing artificial intelligence technology in the classroom. Accordingly, this paper advances the case for a critical artificial intelligence theory as a valuable lens through which to examine institutions, particularly schools. On the cusp of machine learning artificial intelligence becoming widespread in schools’ academic and hidden curricula, establishing a practical epistemology of artificial intelligence may be particularly useful for researchers and scholars who are interested in what artificial intelligence says about school institutions and beyond.

Recent advances in science and engineering have facilitated the development of artificial intelligence voice assistants. While this is true from a technical aspect, smart speakers and voice assistants did not develop in isolation from the rest of human society. The devices may be new, but the practices and patterns in their development and use are not. Using Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, I map homologous practices of smart speaker interaction onto historical conceptions of supernatural magic use. This structural comparison suggests that practices and patterns that were essential to magic use have re-emerged in smart speaker utilization in similar forms. Some of these practices are noteworthy for their homology alone. However, other homologous behaviors revive patterns of inequity that, in Western magical traditions, had privileged the traditionally educated man. The goal of this paper is to elucidate the ghost in the machine: the prejudiced social practices of supernatural magic that were asserted to be eradicated yet which are now, nevertheless, newly instantiated within our most cutting-edge devices.

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A student hovers over red-underlined text, clicks a button, and watches her errant writing replaced. The red line disappears. She continues typing, pausing to address the flagged words and phrases. When she stops typing, what appears before her is spotless – its errors coded out of existence by a modern grammar checker. Her teacher may never become aware of the artificial intelligence that has augmented her writing production. She submits her paper.

This essay examines Raymond Williams’s autobiographical novel Border Country, the first novel of his ambitious “Welsh Trilogy.” The aim of the essay is twofold. Firstly, it analyzes the unsettling issue of how a bio-regional place (native place) shapes polyvalent identities in a historically changing environment and how the boundary that crisscrosses the passages of life is redrawn through narrative re-circumscription and optical revision. Secondly, the essay calls this trope of internalizing “border-crossing” into question in the context of global diaspora and critically problematizes Williams’s identity politics as schizophrenic split from British post-colonial empire.