Congratulations to the recipients of the PHH Cluster/Incubator Grants! We look forward to the impact these projects will have in connecting humanities research with broader communities. Find out more about their projects here.
Appraising AI: A Student-Led Approach to Critical Evaluation, A Workshop with Kate Greenslade
DATE: Wednesday, July 22, 2026
TIME: 10:30 AM – 2:00 PM
VENUE: Ponderosa Commons North 2012, 6445 University Blvd.
Designed for educators navigating the possibilities and risks of AI technologies, this two-part workshop offers actionable recommendations to inspire critical approaches to generative AI and student agency. It explores AI education through the lens of climate, racial, and social justice. Addressing the concern that AI is often treated as just another step in a trajectory of tech innovation, Kate Greenslade will present her process of developing a curriculum that positions AI as a socio-techno phenomenon, including a curriculum overview that encourages students to critically examine generative AI’s corporate interests, labour models, environmental impacts, and technical debates.
The presentations will include examples of how students moved from passive to active users – including how and why some students ultimately opted out. The topics will include:
- The ‘Metascience’ Approach: Treating Large Language models as a method for analysing results rather than simply generating them. This inspires students to interrogate bias, inaccuracy, and software limitations.
- Navigating Anxiety: How curricula, structured dialogue and ethical manifesto writing can provide space for students to process concerns regarding craft, originality, employability, and environmental costs.
- Student Responses: Examples of student work reflecting on what happens when undergraduates align technology use with their own values.
Workshop Schedule
10:30-12:00 Session 1: Critical path towards AI knowledge for educators
12:00-12:30 Lunch will be provided
12:30-14:00 Session 2: Developing critical AI curricula
Speaker
Kate Greenslade is a Lecturer in Experimental Imaging & Illustration in the School of Media & Communication at the University of the Arts, London (UK). Her pedagogical approach is deeply rooted in over a decade of leading the Foundation Arts program at London’s largest inner-city college. Working with very diverse groups of students who often had challenging relationships to traditional education was instrumental in shaping her teaching ethics. Through hands-on workshops, Kate encourages students to decode both the explicit and implicit messages in media; championing the education gathered from outside formal institutions so students can weave popular culture, emerging technology, and their own esoteric knowledge into academic dialogue. Her current research interrogates the ethics of artificial intelligence, specifically exploring the question: ‘As an educator, how can I stay committed to the project of decolonisation while integrating tools that rely on the ‘Empire’s playbook’?’. Her iterative findings will be presented in the Creative Education Festival (London, 2026) and will be published in the Journal of Educational Innovation, Partnership and Change (2027).
In partnership with:
UBC Department of Educational Studies
Office of Research in Education
Out Of Office Hours Collective: The Mega-Event and The City
DATE: Tuesday, June 30, 2026
TIME: 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM
LOCATION: 312 Main, 312 Main St, Vancouver (Entrance on Cordova St)
Out of Office Hours is a new student-led collective bringing together students from UBC, SFU, and communities across Metro Vancouver to collectively learn from community expertise about activism and social justice in the city. The collective emerges from the 2026 “What Kind of University do we Want?” conference and a student-led panel entitled “Student as Producer” where we shared a desire for radical love and change in the university. As of now, students, staff, and faculty are navigating increasing precarity and uncertainty within academic institutions and the collective seeks to create space for action-oriented learning beyond the campus — connecting students, organizers, researchers, and community members.
Our first session focuses on the relationship between mega-events and the city. As Vancouver hosts FIFA World Cup 2026 matches, we will explore how large-scale sporting events reshape urban space, housing, policing, policy enactment, and community life. Through discussion and shared reflection, participants will examine how cities are transformed by mega-events, and the afterlives of ‘temporary measures’ introduced as part of such events. By bringing together organizers and community advocates, the conversation will reflect on lessons from past organizing around the 2010 Olympics and consider what forms of future oriented collective action and civic engagement are needed in the present moment.
All are welcome! Light food will be served.
Speakers
- Beverly Ho, Yarrow Society
- Maddie Clark-Jones, VANDU and OHCW
- Paul Henry, POWER and OHCW
- Laura Macintyre, Pivot Legal Society
No registration required.
The collective’s teach-ins are supported by UBC Public Humanities Hub, in partnership with The Mainlander publication. Pivot Legal Society serves as a partner for this first teach-in.
