In today's @civicsoftech.bsky.social blog, I join @philnichols.bsky.social and @anterobot.bsky.social to reflect on what we've learned while writing about the Luddites over the last three years. We share thoughts about Luddism and education, collaboration, and writing for different audiences.
The hype surrounding the potential of AI to augment human capabilities and supercharge productivity is matched by fears that it will irrevocably change life and the world as we know it. On the one hand, AI is thought to be a ‘gamechanger’ in terms of its potential to transform industries and make new discoveries. But on the other hand, fears around AI replacing jobs, degrading the environment, and changing the way we think and learn are making many sceptics very cautious and pessimistic. For both the AI optimists and pessimists, however, literacy has been put forward as a response. If one is AI literate, then one is ‘empowered learners’ who use AI ‘ethically’ and ‘meaningfully’ (OECD Citation2025), not only guarding against the concerns but also ensuring one is making the most of its potential. In this sense, literacy becomes a kind of ‘cure all’ – a solutionist, normative approach to the complex and evolving phenomena of AI. But what exactly is literacy and can it be applied to AI?
🟨 Volume 51, Issue 1 (2026) of LMT 🟪
In the editorial for our latest issue, @lucipangrazio.bsky.social questions the usefulness of #literacy as a response to #AI.
Read all articles: tinyurl.com/mma35vah
As some of you may know, I’m writing a book on the history of high school English in the United States, and I’m excited to share a new article from that project—“High School English and the Making of American Readers”—out today in American Literary History! 🧵
academic.oup.com/alh/article/...
I have a big new essay out that argues that Erich Auerbach is the crucial figure for historicist reading in lit studies today + argues that the epistemology of such reading depends on the profoundly humanist criterion "sufficient passion" muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...
New OA article just out on "assetizing academic content" led by @jkom.bsky.social with me, @keanbirch.bsky.social & Klaus Beiter, exploring how academic materials are turned into value-generating digital assets by HE institutions, edtech platforms, and AI companies link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Close Reading Is For Everyone Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant Call for Pitches Based on our previous Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, we are at work on a new version that’s shorter, slimmer, and aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for a new set of contributors who would write excellent, brief, model close readings of texts that high schoolers might know and care about. Think: “The Gettysburg Address,” Macbeth, and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” but also song lyrics, idioms, or even a visual image. What is your best, most instructive, most exciting, most welcoming example of how a close reading builds a real argument out from a tiny, perhaps overlooked detail? If you’re interested in pitching us, please send us your 250-word close reading of the text you propose. Your close reading should be mappable using our vocabulary of close reading: the five steps of scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation, and global theorizing. (Our close reading of “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the early pages of our introduction is the sort of thing we’re seeking.) If we think we can use yours, we’ll ask you to expand it to a 1,200 word essay in which you explain how your close reading works step by step. We seek close readings both of texts that are canonical and also ones that aren’t. And so we invite contributors both from the discipline of literary studies, and other disciplines across the university, and the public humanities beyond it. Send your pitches—please include your name and contact info—to daniel.sinykin@emory.edu and jwinant@reed.edu by March 15.
CALL FOR PITCHES
@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience.
We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not.
Details below!
This was published in the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s. If you work in education & were, reasonably, taking a break, maybe you missed it.
Don’t miss it.
Teach like a Luddite!
@olivia.science @irisvanrooij.bsky.social @bcmerchant.bsky.social
Loved this short read! Luddites weren't opposed to new tech, but rather to the consequences of that tech: profit flowing to the already-wealthy, de-skilling of labor, and destruction of communities. We see the same threats to our students and fields, so why not learn what we can from the Luddites?
I wasn’t sure they were going to publish this. So good for them.
I was interviewed for this story about the bleak state of "academic freedom" in Texas universities and how AI is making things worse. Great reporting from Jessica Priest at the Texas Tribune.
www.texastribune.org/2025/12/15/t...
slate.com/life/2025/10...
“The future they’re selling has not arrived — and perhaps it never will. But the de-skilling, surveillance, and extraction — all of that is happening now, in our classrooms, today.”
ICYMI
Teach like a Luddite! In which I join @philnichols.bsky.social and @anterobot.bsky.social to argue for a Luddite praxis in education grounded in three elements: embracing strategic playfulness; developing localized tactics; and building networks of resistance. Read the article at Kappan:
⚒️🤖⚒️
This was part of a project tracing the history of 'Luddism' as emblem people have organized around, differently in different times/places, to contest the idea of technological inevitability—and implications for edu post-GenAI.
(PDF here: tinyurl.com/4eedzmnv)
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Maybe of interest: @charleswlogan.bsky.social, @anterobot.bsky.social, and I put together this public Zotero library of resources related to 'Luddism' as a mode of resistance to automation: www.zotero.org/groups/57720....
(Didn't have the Linton piece you linked, so I just added it. Thanks!)
Something I’ve encountered a lot lately is misperception of Luddites as technophobic reactionaries motivated by ignorance & resentment, rather than what they were, part of a well-informed labor movement seeking to seize control of means of production.
Teachers—university and K-12—don’t have to capitulate to this.
When a technology is antithetical to learning, when it erodes our collective capacity to know and teach our students, then it is irredeemably miseducative and we should reject it.
www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...
So honored that our article “Speculative Capture: Literacy after Platformization,” co-authored with @philnichols.bsky.social, @quirosjulian.bsky.social, and @ezekieldixonroman.bsky.social received the 2025 Arthur Applebee Award at the Literacy Research Association! Check it out open access!
Many congrats to Dr. @philnichols.bsky.social and team for receiving the 2025 Arthur Applebee Award at the Literacy Research Association conference! You can read the winning article here (ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....) #literacies
