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
T.
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.
MORE SPEAKERS
HEIDI BOHAKER, History professor at the University of Toronto
Read more about Heidi Bohaker here
Heidi Bohaker’s research and University of Toronto teaching centers on Anishinaabe political history in the Great Lakes region, Indigenous writing systems and material culture, treaty relationships, and federal government policies toward Indigenous peoples in Canada. She also serves as a Director of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History. A committed practitioner of digital humanities, she co-founded and co-directs GRASAC — the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures — and authored the technical design document for the original GRASAC database, working closely with software developers through subsequent phases of the project. Her landmark book, Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance (University of Toronto Press, 2020), was awarded the Canadian Historical Association’s Prize for Best Book in Political History and the Joseph Brant Award. Through her scholarship and public engagement, Bohaker consistently invites reflection on Ontario as a long-time Indigenous homeland and on what that history means for settlers who have made their own family histories there.
DONNA KIDWELL, Chief Information Officer, University of Toronto
Read more about Donna Kidwell here
Donna Kidwell is the University of Toronto’s Chief Information Officer, a role she assumed in May 2025 following a career that has spanned higher education, technology commercialization, and cybersecurity leadership across three continents. Donna is also a long time Vice Chair of Future Learning Lab. She joined U of T in May 2024 as Chief Information Security Officer and Deputy CIO, bringing eighteen years of IT leadership in large research-intensive public universities, most recently from Arizona State University, where she served as Deputy CIO and Chief Information Security and Digital Trust Officer. Prior to her higher-education roles, Kidwell worked as Director at the IC² Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, supporting innovators worldwide, and before that developed technology innovation strategies for Keller Williams Realty International, creating educational platforms reaching over 100,000 agents. Notably, she also served as Associate Professor at the University of Agder between 2016 and 2019. She holds a Doctorate in Business Administration in Commercialization and Innovation from Grenoble École de Management and is a recipient of the Cadenhead Distinguished Achievement Award for entrepreneurship from the McCombs Business School, University of Texas.
MIRKO T. SCHÄFER
Associate professor at Utrecht University, Founder of the Data School
Read more about Mirko Schäfer here
Mirko Tobias Schäfer studied theater, film and media studies, and communication studies at the University of Vienna, and digital culture at Utrecht University, where he earned his PhD in 2008. Since 2015, his research has been situated in the field of critical data studies, investigating how datafication and artificial intelligence affect citizenship, democracy, and public management. He is co-author of the Fundamental Rights & Algorithms Impact Assessment (FRAIA) and a leading voice in the ethics of algorithmic governance. Together with Thomas Boeschoten, Schäfer co-founded the Utrecht Data School in 2013 — a platform for teaching data analysis and digital methods that developed applied research services for corporations, government organizations, and NGOs, allowing students and researchers to engage directly with real-world datafication challenges. Among the tools to emerge from this work is the Data Ethics Decision Aid (DEDA), a dialogic instrument for value-sensitive design in data projects. His edited volume The Datafied Society: Studying Culture Through Data is a foundational open-access anthology in critical data and humanities scholarship.
BRUCE MUTSVAIRO, Professor of media studies, Utrecht University
Read more about Bruce Mutsvairo here
Bruce Mutsvairo is a professor at Utrecht University where he also holds the UNESCO Chair on Data, Disinformation, and Democracy. A former journalist with the Associated Press, he has published numerous scholarly books and edited volumes, with his work consistently centering on the political and democratic dimensions of journalism in non-Western contexts. His research examines digital and data dissidents, and how journalists and activists use online technologies, including social media platforms, to influence political dynamics under authoritarian conditions. His 2024 inaugural lecture, Platformized Journalism in Authoritarian Contexts, argued that understanding the operational mechanisms of digital media is essential to protecting citizens and journalists from authoritarian encroachment — a threat he sees as no longer confined to the Global South but increasingly present in traditionally open democracies. Central to his scholarship is a commitment to challenging elitist and Western-centric epistemologies, and to bringing non-Western knowledge and community-based journalism into mainstream academic discourse.
Bruce is a long-time associate of UIA, as a peer reviewer, guest lecturer and PhD defense opponent.
KRISTOFFER HOLT, Professor of media studies at Linnaeus University
Read more about Kristoffer Holt here
Kristoffer Holt earned his PhD in 2008 with a dissertation on Ivar Harrie, founding editor-in-chief of the Swedish evening paper Expressen. He is Research Leader at the Department of Media and Journalism and coordinator of the Linnaeus Knowledge Environment: A Questioned Democracy — an interdisciplinary research environment spanning law, economics, political science, educational sciences, and media and communications. His research centres on alternative media, media ethics, media criticism, populism and political communication, and the conditions of democratic discourse in digital environments. He is internationally recognized for his contributions on alternative news media, citizen and participatory journalism, and is currently leading the project Young Citizens and the Quality of News: Construals, Strategies and Emotions. He also directs the Linnaeus Media Observatory (LiMO), a centre for media research, praxis, and development affiliated with the Fojo Media Institute.
ODDGEIR TVEITEN, Professor media studies, UiA
Read more about Oddgeir Tveiten here
Oddgeir Tveiten is the host of Future Learning Lab Roundtable 2026, bringing together the speakers from Canada, Netherlands and Sweden, where a project is being forged on the impacts of Artificial Intelligence on education, societal learning and contemporary culture. He co-founded Future Learning Lab at UiA with others in 2010, to provide an arena for reflection on higher education at a time of change caused by accelerating communication technology development. He has held together the series of annual Future Learning Lab Roundtables and World Learning Summits, since then.
Tveiten is a Professor of Media Studies at the University of Agder (UiA) and has also served as Adjunct Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at NLA University College, as well as a similar role at the Norwegian School of Business (BI) for a number of years. At NLA he served for 15 years as a lecturer traveling to Ethiopia and Uganda, building MA and PhD degrees in journalism and media studies. At BI he primarily worked on strategic communication and the rise of PR. With an MA and a PhD degree from the University of Minnesota School of Journalism, funded by Fulbright and a number of award-wining scholarships, his academic profile centers on journalism studies, globalization, digital transformation in education, philosophy of knowledge, and development studies.
Tveiten has held visiting scholar roles at Stanford University twice, UC Berkely once, and the University of Iceland once. His work bridges traditional academic boundaries with community interactions, as evidenced in his role as the first head of R&D at Arkivet, where the 2026 Future Learning Lab Roundtable takes place. He coined their first research strategy and their first communication strategy, together with their then director and board chairperson. He was also the co-architect of the first communication strategy for the Cultiva Foundation, an funding institution in Southern Norway catalyzing innovations in the cultural industries.
Across his career, Tveiten has become a voice in Nordic media scholarship—linking journalism’s democratic functions with the challenges and possibilities introduced by globalization and digital transformation. He was on the founding team of establishing the Norwegian Media Studies Journal in the 1990´s, and sits on several international journal editorial boards. A schooled musician and for a number of years the chair of the Kristiansand Opera Choir, he has in recent years joined research projects pioneering AI in the creative arts, notably the recently established MishMash network – an ambitious national network of artists and researchers exploring creative uses and critiques of AI.
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