Brown, Gary ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-1529-1244, McCall, Victoria and Conaldi, Guido ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3552-7307 (2025) The university educator as bricoleur: protecting the personal in higher education in the age of AI deepfakes. Emancipatory education without boundaries in the age of neoliberalism, artificial intelligence and digital learning platforms. Palgrave. (In Press)

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Abstract

This chapter presents a case for understanding and protecting university educators’ personal imprint on education, arguing that the era of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) challenges the personal in several important ways. Our chapter seeks to propose new thinking on the impact to the way we collaborate, educate and engage with our roles as professional educators, proposing considerations for future HE good practice. The central concern we address, within the chapter, is that GenAI offers potential to replicate educators’ personas online, producing deepfake avatars with few technological constraints. In one sense, GenAI has the potential to colonise the way we educator, reshape our identities and take precedent in the classroom. It changes the way we collaborate, communicate and the overall cohesion of HE across an increasingly global sector. To illustrate the significance of GenAI in reshaping our lives as educators, we discuss, in this chapter, dynamics at play in the 2022-23 Hollywood actors’ dispute. We maintain this dispute represents parallel opportunities, paradoxes and challenges in university education. Both rely on personal creative endeavour, and both reveal the precarity arising from GenAI. We regard the actors’ dispute an early example of the responses likely to arise in creative industries following the advent of GenAI, a portent for university educators. Therefore, we unpack the issues arising from GenAI for university educators, outlining why our personal imprint (how we uniquely deliver education based on distinctive combinations of personal biography, skillset and individual idiosyncrasies) matters and exploring how we might protect the personal in the age of generative AI. The chapter, however, does not present GenAI as a dystopian technology. We outline instead a case for embracing the technology, whilst protecting the personal, retaining educators’ personal imprint on education. Conceptually, GenAI presents significant opportunities, then. For example, its ability to replicate virtual personas, as a ‘deepfake’ of a person, so an artificial image and identity that reflects the original subjects ‘tone of voice, expression and communication, presents a potential threat (Watermeyer, Phipps, Lanclos, and Knight, 2023). We posit as university educators, we invariably perform as ‘bricoleurs’ (De Certeau, 2011), by which we mean that educators make use of an accumulated body of professional knowledge and practical skill. Crucially, this means, for us as educators, always leaving something of our distinct personal imprint on what we do - whether writing for publication, delivering lectures, or engaging with personal tutees. However, and as we also explain, what makes our contribution to Higher Education (HE) personal, connected and intimately to us as physical beings, reflects a distinctive confluence of experience, knowledge, and identity traits. As such, this becomes increasingly precarious with the advancement of GenAI although not inevitably so, but certainly introduces new implications for not only how we collaborate with each other, our students and society, but also with technologies that will shape our practice in the future.

Item Type:	Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords:	generative AI, deepfakes, AI governance, academic integrity, Higher Education, academic identity, collaborative practice
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD61 Risk Management Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Computer software
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Greenwich Business School Greenwich Business School > Networks and Urban Systems Centre (NUSC) Greenwich Business School > Networks and Urban Systems Centre (NUSC) > Centre for Business Network Analysis (CBNA) Greenwich Business School > School of Business, Operations and Strategy
Last Modified:	08 May 2025 09:34
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/50332

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