Human Communication Collective (HCC)

In this moment of the breakneck adoption of so-called “generative artificial intelligence” across college and university campuses, spaces where teachers and technologists can gather together to critique, resist, and refuse the rapid adoption of generative technologies for written and visual communication are few and far between.

This is especially unfortunate when at the same time individuals and corporations who are materially invested in the popular adoption of generative technologies are actively promoting their rapid adoption in higher education, producing a rhetorical situation and intellectual climate where critique, resistance, and refusal are readily caricatured as anachronism and technophobia.

The Human Communication Collective (HCC) seeks to return the conversation back to the core commitments of liberal arts education—truthfulness, responsibility, and personal integrity—and to connect these core commitments to practices and pedagogies of human communication that we worry may be hastily replaced by those of machine-generated communication.

Toward this end, the HCC aims to foster a space where teachers and technologists can gather together to practice critiques of and pedagogical resistances and refusals toward the haphazard adoption of generative technologies for written and visual communication in teaching and learning contexts. We seek to imagine together and share back with our colleagues pedagogies that honor and actively cultivate the distinctive responsibility and personal integrity of human communication in a social context increasingly being reorganized around machine-generated communication by for-profit corporations and their representatives.

In the Catholic, Jesuit tradition, we are inspired by the message of Pope Francis: “The representation of reality in “big data”, however useful for the operation of machines, ultimately entails a substantial loss of the truth of things, hindering interpersonal communication and threatening our very humanity. Information cannot be separated from living relationships.”

In another tradition, we are similarly provoked by the thinking of philosophers and theorists like Byung-Chul Han who writes: "Information and data have no depth. Human thinking is more than computing and problem solving. It brightens and clears the world. It brings forth an altogether other world. The main danger that arises from machine intelligence is that human thinking will adapt to it and itself become mechanical."

The HCC is led by Maxwell Gray (Raynor) and Jacob Riyeff (English). It is generously supported by Raynor Library and the Academic Integrity Office of the Office of the Provost.

Fall Semester Pedagogy Micro-Seminar

The Human Communication Collective (HCC) welcomes our faculty, staff, and graduate student teacher colleagues to join us for a three-meeting micro-seminar on pedagogy. 

We’ll discuss and experiment together regarding: 

• In what contexts does academic integrity require the refusal of generative technologies? 
• How can we design courses, coursework, and assessments that clarify students’ unique voices, knowledge, and lived experiences against the growing background noise/static of the machine-generated communication of generative technologies? 
• How can our pedagogical practices encourage students—especially our first-generation students and students of color—to value their own embodied human communication over the algorithmic reason and statistical analysis of machine-generated communication? 

If you’re also interested in these questions, then we hope you’ll join us for the micro-seminar. Participants should try their best to come prepared to discuss the (short) pre-circulated readings, but no matter what we’re looking forward to thinking together in the space of the seminar room.