Educational institutions repeatedly change the technological conditions of participation: they procure learning platforms, redesign assessment, and introduce rules on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Students differ in their previous opportunities to learn how to adapt to such changes, and these differences can reproduce educational inequalities even after earlier gaps have been reduced. Combining Sen’s capability approach with Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, the article argues that postdigital educational justice is also a question of unequally distributed speeds, and that the tempo to which learners must respond is set largely by institutional decisions rather than by technology alone, which makes it a political matter. The institutional side of this tempo is reconstructed analytically. The concept of habitually practised transfer competence names the capacity, acquired over earlier changes, to work out what an institution counts as competent once its tools and rules have changed. Where changes are assessed before students could practise, differences in this capacity can be expected to be reproduced at each change, so that gaps can reopen rather than close. The article proposes a pluralist criterion, combining a threshold of participation with relative standing, to determine when unequal speeds are unjust. It also outlines a longitudinal research programme through which the argument can be tested.
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) enters higher education within established hierarchies of knowledge and expertise, becoming entangled with judgments about who sounds authoritative and which forms of writing carry weight. Those judgments were gendered, long before GenAI arrived. Drawing on feminist postdigital inquiry and collaborative, experimental approaches to knowledge production, this article reports a chain-letter experiment. Thirteen academics who identify as women or gender-diverse, from nine countries, write in relation to the letters preceding their own. The chain letter produces knowledge through response, so that each letter is partial and the argument accumulates between them. Read together, the letters describe a persistent need to defend expertise within a field shaped by masculine norms of authority, and the frustration and exhaustion this produces. Authors variously report work intensifying rather than easing, critique of GenAI tools being reframed as failures of individual users, and a sense that AI-assisted writing diminishes what makes teaching and research pleasurable. Their positions differ, with some refusing these tools while others work closely with them. At the same time, the exchange brings solidarity, hope and relief, and the discovery that these difficulties are structural as well as personal. The letters suggest that GenAI makes long-standing, gendered questions about expertise and working conditions more pressing, and that these remain shared and unfinished. The article closes with an open invitation to join a feminist and postdigital conversation about GenAI in research and education.
This paper argues that Artificial Intelligence (AI) constitutes a second theological fall: not a repetition of the Edenic narrative but its structural recurrence in a new medium. Drawing on Augustinian, Lutheran, and kenotic traditions, and engaging Islamic and Jewish theological counterparts through the concepts of khalifa and tikkun olam, the paper proposes that AI systems inherit the distorted intentionality of their makers rather than transcend it. The Abrahamic traditions, Christian, Islamic, and Jewish, share a set of anthropological commitments that the transhumanist aspiration systematically misreads: that the human being bears a dignity constituted by relationality and limitation, not by cognitive power alone. The imago dei is not a property to be replicated; it is a vocation to be answered. When AI development is governed by the logic of optimization and elimination of friction, it recapitulates the Augustinian incurvatus in se, the self curved inward, mistaking its own horizon for the whole of reality. The paper situates this analysis within the emerging field of postdigital theology, arguing that the postdigital condition makes the theological stakes of AI development newly visible. The paper concludes that the appropriate theological response is not prohibition but metanoia: a turning of the whole maker, not merely a recalibration of the made.
