ai-et: RSCA Lane

Connection to our guiding values

• Advancing Knowledge through scholarly and community-engaged research.

• Playfulness that encompasses creative activity on an equal footing with scholarly research, and that explores different forms of scholarship.

• Ethical Imagination in fostering, producing, and sharing work that brings multiple viewpoints into conversation with each other, expands our understanding of who matters, and builds our capacity for world-sharing.

• Courage in our openness to unexpected conclusions and our commitment to sharing good work that challenges corporate capture and narratives of inevitability.

• Sustainability through robust communities of practice and support structures and by explicit valuing of collaboration, works in progress, and “small” outputs that have high impact.

Mentor(s) for RSCA lane

Professor Janet Stemwedel

Portfolio for the AIET Fellow in the RSCA Lane

Capturing what’s already there (relevant existing work and people in H&A at SJSU):

  • Construct an annotated bibliography of the RSCA work on ethical technologies by H&A faculty and students for the ai-et website.

  • Construct a directory of H&A faculty with experience undertaking RSCA work on ethical technologies.

  • Work with practitioners to describe this existing work and how it matters (e.g., for ai-et Annual Report, pieces for SJSU Magazine, etc., ideally local or national news).

Building structures to support new RSCA projects and communities of practice:

  • Curate a list of current work from beyond SJSU (nationally and internationally) in ethical technologies and critical technology studies.

  • Curate a collection of external and internal calls for submissions to relevant journals, conferences, and workshops.

  • Convene sessions to connect people interested in finding collaborators at SJSU and beyond.

  • Foster a network of H&A faculty practitioners engaged in ai-et related work.

  • Convene “Work In Progress” sharing sessions and/or a WIP group.

  • Organize a session to share/brainstorm concrete strategies to document ai-et.

  • RSCA projects and their impacts for RTP.

  • Work with ai-et support staff to organize lane-relevant information to be posted on the ai-et website and to develop a strategy to keep posted information current.

Exploring overlaps/connections/synergies with the other AIET lanes:

GRANTS

  • Work with Grants Fellow and SJSU RTP policy to share models for documenting significant ai-et related grant proposals as RSCA outputs.

  • Help construct descriptions of local ai-et-related RSCA accomplishments to support grant proposals (especially to answer the questions “why you? why here?”).

  • Work with Grants Fellow to flag grant opportunities that require collaborations of particular sorts and to share these with the network of H&A faculty practitioners engaged in ai-et related work (to make assembling teams that fulfil the grantors’ requirements more organic and less transactional).

  • Work with Grants Fellow to identify appropriate venues to publish/present/perform the grant-funded work.

PEDAGOGY

  • Work with Pedagogy Fellow to support research on ai-et related pedagogical methods and tools.

  • Curate local RSCA products as resources to support ai-et related teaching.

  • Work with Pedagogy Fellow to identify where ai-et related RSCA projects could work as course assignments.

  • Work with Pedagogy Fellow to identify ai-et related RSCA projects in which students could participate as collaborators (inside and outside the bounds of particular courses).

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

  • Work with Community Engagement Fellow to create public-facing programming built around ai-et related RSCA projects, especially based in interesting research in the field.

  • Work with Community Engagement Fellow to build capacity for community-engaged ai-et related RSCA projects (e.g., how to work with the IRB, how to partner with communities rather than engaging with them in extractive ways, etc.).

All four Fellows will help produce:

  • A working mission statement for ai-et, to be posted on the ai-et website, on which the Institute will continue to iterate over time.

  • Text for a Fall 2027 Annual Report.