Before I begin: This is the first post I’ve written here in over five years. 2020 was a caesura for many, and for me it was no different. The conference I’d been planning with fellow ICLS grad students for nearly a year–CFPs distributed, abstracts reviewed, keynotes secured, budgets scraped together–suddenly evaporated. We have nothing to show for it. I participated in the transition to online teaching both as an instructor and a student (an experience which I wrote about for Another Chicago Magazine). My living situation was thankfully stable, at least for that first year of pandemic upheaval, but as the rest of the world began to cobble itself together, the foundations of mine began to shake.

A non-exhaustive list: I ended a long-term relationship, entered my thirties, came out, wrote and defended a prospectus, moved across the Atlantic, suffered through German bureaucracy (visa), suffered through German bureaucracy (working in a data-protected archive), published my first peer-reviewed article, and moved to Brooklyn–somewhat in that order.

Throughout all of that I’ve kept my internet presence to a minimum, unsure of how exactly to position myself or what exactly it is that I am ultimately trying to do here in this strange, glorious, mystifying academic adventure. I’ve come to a few conclusions worth noting: I believe in my work, even if it’s hard to love it all of the time. Saying that writing a book is like giving birth seems a bit trite, but at this point I feel I really do have a far more intimate understanding of labor.

I also, to foreshadow some of what is ahead, am trying very much to allow myself to be seen in all of this sometimes unglamorous labor: I am aware of being nearer to the beginning than the end, even if the encroaching May graduation date feels at times like the most dire of conclusions. A version of me–younger, more naive, but working desperately to find a way to speak and be heard–wrote about some of this same anxiety nearly eight years ago. I must still remind myself that I have permission to be unsure, to continue learning and above all to be seen in that learning.

Which I suppose brings me to what I’d hoped to cover here.

I am recently back from the 2025 MLA conference in New Orleans. As is the way with these things, I submitted my abstract nearly a year ago, with little idea where exactly I’d be when January 2025 came around. I responded to a call for round table participants on the topic “(Re)Thinking Academic Forms” (and is not the parenthetical prefix/interfix one of the most beloved of academic forms, or at least tropes?), sponsored by an international Working Group on Academic Forms. As a round table, we were invited to submit something closer to position statements than abstracts, and to prepare only short, informal presentations. As such, I think it’s appropriate to include my statement, since the real meat of the session was in the discussion.

Conventionalized academic forms may have once been a helpful pedagogical and disciplinary tool, however the ability of new technologies to reproduce convention means the need to make space for human innovation, variation, and creativity is more urgent than ever if we hope to foster meaningful spaces for intellectual discourse. Doing so necessarily entails developing new schema for assessing academic writing as educators, and new perspectives for encountering such work as scholars.

AI tools by definition can only mimic patterns which already exist. Students today often enter undergraduate studies with an understanding of the writing process as formulaic and rule-based, not as a place for creativity—or to put it another way, not as a way for their individual voices to be heard. This is reinforced in the policing of tone, and the suppression of regional and cultural differences in language. If we hope to preserve the human element of scholarly writing, we must help students understand that the expectations placed on them relate to their unique thought, not their ability to mechanically reproduce a given convention. So long as they believe the latter, there will always be a strong inclination among students to turn to AI tools.

My position is influenced not just by my own research, which draws heavily from scholarship on epistemic forms of writing (Pethes, Gamper), but by my own experiences as an undergraduate student of writing at the University of Denver, which had a highly experimental and even radical creative writing program. Much of my initial training in writing occurred in an environment where experimental forms were not only accepted but encouraged, and perhaps most importantly of all, treated as academically rigorous and entwined in important ways with content.

There are many subtle elements that tie this statement to my research. What does it mean to create a data point? For let’s not delude ourselves: they are all created in some way or another. (I am always thinking back to Norbert Elias’ analysis of how Galileo measured “time” in his foundational experiments–there were no clocks involved.) Misrecognizing them as 1:1 descriptors of the world leads to the incredible prescriptivist danger of declaring a natural law, and thus leading contradictorily to the need to enforce such a law in the ways a legal law is enforced. More and more often recently I have been unable to escape the sense that Wittgenstein really did say everything that needed to be said. For example, sentence 6.371 of the Tractatus:

At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.

and later in 6.372:

…the modern system makes it appear as though everything were explained.

So this is at the core of my issue with “AI,” which is ultimately the most extreme expression of a Newtonian physics which claims that given sufficient data, the motion or location of an object can be precisely predicted or surmised. Staying within the realm of physics, the quantum world has already well and truly disrupted this conviction. This is an important distinction: although on our lived scale Newtonian physics does have accurate-enough powers to permit prediction, and therefore building, engineering, etc. It is, at its core level, not perfectly accurate. But ultimately this is not a large issue if we stay in the mechanical sciences.

However, an incredible danger arises when the social, the human, come to be mined for data points. For these data points are never produced with an innocent desire for description, but rather always in service of the goal of prediction: the creation of a “natural law”–and implicitly, the need to police it. There’s no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater–this is not an attempt to dismiss the entirety of social and medical sciences by any means. But, especially given the incursion of AI “predictive algorithms” into a disciplinary realm which has already always been saturated with biased predictive models (so few of these issues are actually new or unique to these technologies), it does seem that so much of the work being done has failed and continues to fail to truly question what “data” actually is, its inherent separation from the “real.” (Lacanians, please don’t ask me to define this).

Well I’ve gotten a bit ahead of myself. What does all this have to do with academic forms? I see questions of form and the pedagogical stakes of teaching writing as if it were a predictive algorithm as incredibly urgent and concerning. Noam Chomsky published an op-ed addressing some of this concern a few years ago, not that anyone listened to him. But my main point, as summarized above in my abstract, remains the incredible harm, the incredible foreclosure of possibility and of life inherent in mistaking language for data.

During our round table discussion, there was a wonderful moment–or image, idea, maybe–that arose thanks to one of my fellow panelists. An employee of The Huntington Library, she discussed the unique status of the institution’s collection, namely that it includes many thousands of written records, documents, objects, and a garden. The status of this living garden as “part” of the institution’s collection was framed as somewhat contentious, although at the same time essential to the main thrust of efforts to open the scholarship there to new possibilities and forms. I may be imposing some of my own thoughts here, but it seemed to me that there was a core question lingering behind her discussion: can a garden be an “archive”? Can it be rendered into a collection of data points the way a written text can be? a stable unchanging object locked away in a temperature-controlled room? A garden after all is always changing, growing. Maybe the number of countable distinct “species” can remain the same (even the species category is an imposition!), but even then I can easily see how the wild world gets in: a wayward bee arrives carrying foreign genetics. Plants hybridize unexpectedly. A blight decimates a section. The concern about whether to include the garden as part of the “collections” seems to come from this anxiety for life: it is unpredictable, creative in unexpected ways, cannot be entirely controlled.

The discussion of this garden was a bit revelatory for me. As an audience member brought up the “organic unwieldyness” of the garden I was struck with the urge to shout “yes! that’s it!” That is what I am trying to say! Let words be the garden. We can cultivate, we can nourish, we can even prune and shape, but we must not yield the inherent liveliness, chaos, and wild generation of writing to cold prediction. We must not close ourselves off to the wayward, to failure, to uneven growth.