We are experiencing a seismic AI revolution, which is reshaping our world at warp speed. While artificial intelligence is regarded as the land of promise and opportunity in research fields ranging from health to material design and language and image production, in the absence of guardrails and meaningful regulations, these new information extraction, generation and navigation tools are leaving all kinds of toxic byproducts in their wake, not the least of which is a heavily polluted information environment that erodes our trust in democratic institutions and processes, while threatening our security and limiting our capacity for communal action in vital areas of public life.
The 2024 CII workshop invites informal, open-ended discussions on how to cultivate informational resilience in the age of AI. We hope for these conversations to point the way forward and lay the groundwork for community-oriented research and collaborations across the range of fields represented by our membership. We will be hosting special guests Vivek Venkatesh and Bradley Nelson, who will be joining us from Concordia University in Montreal to share their experiences leading public pedagogical projects aimed at preventing radicalization and violent extremism.
Vivek Venkatesh, PhD is a filmmaker, musician, curator and applied learning scientist focused on building community resilience and tolerance against hate through a resolutely public pedagogical approach. He holds the UNESCO co-Chair in Prevention of Radicalization and Violent Extremism and is Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada, where he is Full Professor of Inclusive Practices in Visual Arts and Chair of the Department of Art Education.
Bradley J. Nelson is a Professor of Spanish and the Chair of the Department of Classics, Modern Languages and Linguistics at Concordia University in Montreal. He is the author of The Persistence of Presence: Emblem and Ritual in Baroque Spain (UToronto, 2010), and co-editor (with David Castillo) of Writing in the End Times: Apocalyptic Imagination in Hispanic Cultures (Hispanic Issues Online, 2019), and the forthcoming Anti-Disinformation Pedagogy: Understanding the Power of Manipulative Narratives and What We Can Do About It, HIOL 2024. Recent publications link early modern and contemporary literature and culture through the lens of science fiction.