Colloquium "Emotions and Silence in Translanguaging"
Emotions and Silence in Translanguaging
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nara Hiroko Takaki
This work presents partial results of ongoing research on social justice. It counts on the researcher´s locus of enunciation to interpret the participants´ views assuming that they are important characteristics of the qualitative and interpretive methodology. The research participants are all volunteers: five professors, six undergraduate students, six graduate students of languages from public Brazilian universities. The data generation includes individual online questionnaires (sent by email) and interviews (via WhatsApp). The theoretical underpinnings assume that translanguaging relates to the existing and emerging resources the research participants use while constructing knowledge. Concerning emotion, Barcelos (2205) and Aragão (2011) argues that emotions are socially constructed. The conception of silence also draws on localized and meaningful aspects, following Grander (2004) and King (2013). This investigation is also grounded on researches by García; Alves (2019), García; Wei (2014), García (2020), Blackledge; Creese (2011), Canagarajah (2013), Makalela (2015, 2016, 2017), Makalela; Dhokotera (2021), Nkadimeng; Makalela (2015) in dialogue with decolonial perspectives by Grosfoguel (2013), Menezes de Souza (2019, 2021), Mignolo; Walsh (2018), Maldonaldo-Torres (2007), Quijano (2007) and Southern theories by Santos (2018). The partial results suggest that more studies are needed to bring the place of emotion and silence as embedded in translanguaging in order to expand the understanding of social justice.
Language, Literacy and Generative AI through the Lens of (a Critical) Posthumanism
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Marcelo El Khouri Buzato
Our visions of the future define what we do in the present and redefine what we did in the past. Despite all the hype, tech evangelism, and moral panic currently surrounding the cultural and ideological insertion of agents based on Large Language Models -- such as GPT4, Bard, PaLMe etc. -- as sparks of an artificial general intelligence in the making, perhaps we should spend less energy in the poorly informed discussion about the advantages and risks of the instrumental use of these sociotechnical agents, in linguistic and literacy education, than in informing educational (linguistic) pedagogies and policies aimed at a critical review of certain liberal humanist foundations that leave our present educational context unprepared to deal with the ultra and transhumanist visions of the future embedded in the onto-epistemology of connectionist AI. I propose a discussion on critical literacies of Artificial Intelligence starting from the metaphor of AI as an identity/alterity criterion of the human in the present and the future.
Data Literacy: Reflecting on Citizenship in the Age of Big Data
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rodrigo De Lima Lopes
I discuss the possible contributions that a model based on data literacy brings to the context of applied linguistics, focusing on the paradigm transformations it would bring about. I acknowledge the growing importance that data has achieved in our society while reflecting upon the hegemonic processes of data extractivism and surveillance capitalism. Lastly, the possibilities of epistemological resistance offered by data literacy are examined.
Brave New ChatGPT: Navigating the Intersection of Writing Ethics, Creativity, and Intellectual Property in the Age of Generative Artificial Intelligence View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Paulo Boa Sorte
Taking Huxley’s dystopian novel as an inspiration to this study, my objective is to share research insights into the GPT-3 algorithm, which has been developed at the Federal University of Sergipe in Brazil since 2019. This algorithm leverages an extensive database comprising approximately 0.06% of Wikipedia's content, encompassing over 170 billion parameters extracted from the World Wide Web. By utilizing this database, users can generate sentences, paragraphs, dialogs, images, and book chapters that adhere to established grammatical rules by simply providing a prompt. The findings indicate that the texts produced by ChatGPT closely resemble human compositions, leading to challenges in determining authorship and incorporating proper references to used sources. These findings raise concerns regarding ethics, creativity, and intellectual property. While ChatGPT, as an AI text generator, can execute tasks and respond to commands, it lacks the ability to generate questions based on observation, which is a unique human capability. This study prompts discussions on integrating ChatGPT into writing instruction and underscores the importance of fostering critical questioning skills. Writing as a social practice encompasses more than mere sentence completion, summarization, or translation. The fundamental challenge lies in identifying individuals who will pose thought-provoking questions that hold true significance for humanity.
