Future Learning Lab Roundtable 2026
Speech, Writing and Thought in the AI Era:
First Covid • Then AI • Now What?
Something is happening to language, to knowledge, and to the ways human beings make sense together. AI systems now mediate how stories are told, how ideas travel, and how cultural expression is produced and distributed across the world. These systems were initially trained on large troves of internet data, western in orientation, and to a great extent in the English-language. This bias shapes what gets amplified and what gets erased. It determines, in ways we are only beginning to understand, who defines the symbolic resources of a society.
This is a conversation worth having.
The Future Learning Lab at the University of Agder invites scholars, artists, policymakers, and cultural practitioners to join us for our informal Roundtable 2026: Speech, Writing and Thought in the AI Era — an open, interdisciplinary gathering that asks questions about cultural power, institutional responsibility in education and culture.
Keynote address by L. K. Bertram, professor of History at the University of Toronto, followed by four roundtable discussions.
- How do education institutions cope with a global information system gone amok?
- About our uses of AI — How are students responding?
- How to improve on connecting the dots between social science, humanities, and creative arts?
- Reclaiming truth, trust, and reflection in an algorithmic society: A lost cause?
PROGRAM DETAILS
KEYNOTE THEME AND SPEAKER
L.K. Bertram, associate professor of history, University of Toronto
Read more about L.K. Bertram here
The keynote: The weaponization of communication systems and unchecked polarization campaigns remain an unresolved, existential threat in the AI Age. As genAI accelerates and automates campaigns of social division and inequality on a vast new scale, Karen Hao (Empire of AI) recently called for a new focus on historical precedents that can help connect modern problem solvers to the generations who developed successful resistance campaigns to racism, empire, and systemic oppression. This talk responds to Hao’s call with an overview of common facets of historical anti-racist resistance moments and their communications strategies.
Successful networks like the Underground Railroad and anti-colonial Indigenous resistance movements indeed can teach us about the foundational importance of communications security. Conversely, the weaponization of communications technologies in North America, including the central role of the telegraph in North American colonial violence and subtle Nazi radio and film campaigns designed to deter Canada and the US into entering a war against Germany, attest to the enduring urgency of communications security and knowledge defence. Can we retool the strategies of the past to deal with the problems of the present?
This paper focuses on the historical strategy of “disinformation displacement” or “feeding the good wolf” (promoting respect, understanding and connection) in anti-polarization campaigns. It follows a small group of community leaders, filmmakers, and officials who built an innovative system to undermine white supremacist campaigns in North America in the 1930s and 40s as they faced the dual threat of entrenched racism in North American society and fascism abroad. These change makers embraced new media and built groundbreaking, early anti-racist and anti-polarization campaigns that reframed white supremacy as an existential threat, helped end the war, and helped to pave the way for postwar legal victories and the Civil Rights movement. Drawing from an anonymous, larger-scale algorithmic knowledge mobilization campaign built around this model (55m views), L.K. Bertram describes how new tools can be adapted to reanimate old strategies, defending online access to research, knowledge, and education for at-risk communities at a new speed and scale.
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