Dylan Paré, PhD (they/them)

This article examines how transgender youth used virtual reality (VR) painting to critique harm and imagine more livable futures. Drawing on a 2018 linear and 360° documentary with three trans youth, I analyze their 3D VR paintings and narratives to show how they moved from recounting exclusion and constraint to envisioning futures grounded in joy, kinship, and belonging. I frame these creative acts as virtual world-becoming – a process of pivoting between lived histories and imagined futures while creating virtual worlds. The analysis brings together trans-queer phenomenologies, studies of trans joy, speculative approaches, and restorying to explore how youth storytelling resists erasure and constructs counter-narratives. While the project is presented through Big Tech infrastructures, the youths’ stories emphasized cozy, accessible, and communal technologies rather than sleek corporate futurism. Their visions highlight the importance of collective spaces where trans and queer people can thrive. This work contributes to educational research on fiction and digital media by showing how digital storytelling can function as both critique and possibility: revealing how technologies are entangled with inequities while opening space for collective imagination and trans-queer joy.

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪

@mxdylanp.bsky.social looked at how #transyouth used #VR painting to envision livable and joyful futures for themselves, showing how #BigTech technologies can be used "towards liberatory ends".

Read more: tinyurl.com/nkwwj38t

Quilicura, Chile, one of the communities I wrote about in EMPIRE OF AI, has launched a brilliant initiative to inspire more responsible AI prompting. Today, don't use AI; ask the townspeople instead: quili.ai. So heartened to see this creative act of resistance.

Populism, Emotions, and Boundary Work Among Political Activists in the Trump Era How do emotions shape boundary work among populists and anti-populists? Based on 52 in-depth interviews, we analyze how political activists construct their positions through “emotive contestation.”...

Our article on populism is published in @socquarterly.bsky.social

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Based on 52 interviews with populists and anti-populists during Trump’s first presidency, we make the following contributions
1) We demonstrate the centrality of emotions in anti-populist politics

Screenshot of a paper entry: Fictional Failures and Real-World Lessons: Ethical Speculation Through Design Fiction on Emotional Support Conversational AI Authors: Faye Kollig, Jessica Pater, Fayika Farhat Nova, Casey Fiesler (There are tabs with "abstract" and "summary" and "summary" is selected.)

The ACM Digital Library, where a LOT of computing-related research is published (I'd say at least 75% of my own publications), is now not only providing (without consent of the authors and without opt-in by readers) AI-generated summaries of papers, but they appear as the *default* over abstracts.

Deadline for this is in three days! Learning scientists, consider also being artists!
#isls26 #isls2026 #learningsciences #learningscientists

✔️ 14 original manuscripts
✔️ 14 response papers
✔️ 1 synthetic commentary

And now…
✔️ 1 editorial by us

Our 30-paper special issue on affect and emotion in science education is complete.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

UNTIL IT'S DONE, Ep. 2

When the Brownsville Clinic opened in 1916, it was the first birth control center in America. Its very existence felt impossible. For young women, it was a lifeline.

109 years later, the Clinic is long closed—but Brownsville mothers are still struggling.

AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event Three years in, one of AI’s enduring impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.

Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it

An absolutely amazing opportunity for senior doc students and postdocs. An opportunity for community and mentorship in academia that includes non-academic career paths in industry, nonprofits, policy, etc.

I have only ever heard fantastic things.

Organized by @luismn.bsky.social and Cecile Sadler

hey just an FYI: we're not yet at the part where AI companies and the state are so closely intertwined that disclosing energy usage would constitute a threat to national security or some other such bullshit, making transparency into the environmental impact of data centers all but impossible

It was funny in an, oh god, it's too real, kind of way. It was like the actors were playing out exaggerated caricatures of tech bros. Except then you read about real tech bros and it's truly not an exaggeration 😭

"What is most outstanding about frugal innovation is not just that its technologies are impressive, but that it might actually prompt systemic change by showing people that tech can be developed locally, and not just imported from Silicon Valley."

We got a visit from @seattletimes.com on Monday at KidsTeam. You can try Aayushi Dangol's AI Puzzlers for yourself!

@hcde.uw.edu @ischool.uw.edu @juliekientz.bsky.social @jasoncyip.bsky.social

One of the best parts of this job is reading, teaching, and learning alongside of fabulous doctoral student colleagues. This open-access article, led by my fantastic advisee Kyle P. Smith, looks across two years of data generated in a class we co-taught at our previous institution.🧵 (1/3)

Teaching-Focused Postdoctoral Scholar in Education APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS: CURRENT PENN STATE EMPLOYEE (faculty, staff, technical service, or student), please login to Workday to complete the internal application process. Please do not apply here, a...

We are hiring Teaching-Focused Postdoctoral Scholars for our academic programs at Penn State: a) Lifelong Learning and Adult Education, b) Workforce Education and Development / Organizational Development and Change, and c) Learning, Design, and Technology. Apply by July 11. tinyurl.com/22cv7z9u

Thank you! I am very happy to coach potato as much as possible to get over this. I'm pretty sure it's nimbus. An ISLS clean air club sounds like a great plan.

The hidden labor that makes AI work Alex Hanna and Emily M. Bender examine the hype behind artificial intelligence in their new book, The AI Con. Below is an excerpt on the invisible labor behind some AI tools.

Call it clickwork, crowdwork, data labor, or ghost work - they are all poorly-paid, precarious and traumatic jobs that make AI possible. Read an excerpt from The AI Con by @alexhanna.bsky.social and @emilymbender.bsky.social on @restofworld.org .
restofworld.org/2025/the-ai-con-book-invisible-labor

The recording of my event w/ @timnitgebru.bsky.social & @xriskology.bsky.social w/ @datasociety.bsky.social is now posted. Emile & I are planning a Fall event on how the conversation on AI, Big Tech, Eugenics & TESCREALism needs to include others beyond tech researchers. Stay tuned! lnkd.in/g9Q_gffq

Generative AI Has a Visual Plagiarism Problem Experiments with Midjourney and DALL-E 3 show a copyright minefield

I wanted to provide a thread here of some of the things I've been involved with in the fight against unethical generative AI for easy reference, starting with my work with @GaryMarcus.bsky.social. Our article shows irrefutable evidence of blatant plagiarism 🧵

spectrum.ieee.org/midjourney-c...

Workday Hit With Lawsuit Claiming Its AI Shuts Out Black, Disabled, Older Jobseekers A lawsuit alleges Workday's AI-powered hiring tools discriminate against Black, disabled, and older job seekers, automatically rejecting applications within minutes.

Here come the lawsuits.
Workday AI hiring lawsuit over disability and age discrimination. Uber pays out over its AI uses with racial bias in UK. Estée Lauder ex employee win after being sacked by algorithms. Disney and Universal sue midjourney.

One of many ...
www.ibtimes.co.uk/workday-hit-...

AI Ethics with Professor Casey AI Ethics with Professor Casey bit.ly/ai-ethics-syllabus For nearly five years, I've (Casey Fiesler aka Professor Casey) been creating social media content (largely on TikTok and Instagram) about art...

I've been working on something! It's not nearly done yet, but I thought no need to gatekeep the work in progress. This is an AI ethics "syllabus" based on a post-hoc curation of hundreds of short form videos I've made for social media, to make the content more accessible. bit.ly/ai-ethics-sy...

As I've been saying over and over on our book tour for The AI Con, the inevitability argument (including in the form of "AI is here to stay") is an attempt to steal our agency. We don't have to accept that and I encourage everyone to refuse it.

Anyone surprised by this, though? Very few people, especially the privileged, are willing to cut back for climate/ environmental reasons

Remembering Dr. Alan Hart for Pride, trans man from the early 1900s. He revolutionized the detection of tuberculosis, saved thousands of lives, and died using his name, as the man he always was meant to be.

We have always been here.