Gaza wall at Minho University

Braga fountain

Minho University, Braga, Portugal

Braga signage with hotel Vila Gala behind it

Some glimpses of #EATAW25 in Braga, Portugal, where it was 40ºC and our hosts were impéccables, generous, and gracious as us speakers sweltered 🥵

Slide on AI bullshit with reference to Frankfurt 2005: ‘Bull’ is slang for ‘bluff, bravado, hot air’ [...] Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed. Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment, what remains when the vital elements in food have been exhausted. In this respect, excrement is a representation of death […]

✅Got that out of my system (no pun intended😆)

Looking forward to #EATAW25

Train itinerary from London UK to Portugal

After much organising, I finally have my #Interrail & overnight reservations from UK to Portugal sorted.

This is my 1st university-funded EU train travel and I'm grateful to #EATAW25 for supporting sustainable travel - could have flown for half the cost & time.

Will use the keynote to thank them.

AI Realism: Reclaiming the Human in AI-enhanced Academic Literacies Julia Molinari ​ Language technologies (LTs) are not new and a life without them means many things to many people: unimaginable, impractical, unavoidable, undesirable, undemocratic, maybe even a welcome relief. LTs include the familiar (dictionaries, machine translators, spellcheckers) and now the unfamiliar, which is rapidly becoming the new normal: LLMs (Large Language Models) powered by GenAI (GenerativeAI) and, apparently, AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) are automating writing in unprecedented ways. I wish to use this talk to press pause, just for a moment, to catch our collective breaths. I would like to halt the dizzying speed at which these technologies are affecting our professional and personal existence by sharing a critical realist perspective (Archer & Maccarini, 2023) on LTs and what it means to be human (Molinari, 2025). This includes reflecting on LTs’ implications for academic literacies broadly understood as multisemiotic modes of communication, which include multilingualism (Lillis & Tuck, 2025). AI Realism entails neither techno-determinism nor techno-enthusiasm nor luddism. Rather, it provides a critical space in which to interrogate why AI has so abruptly irrupted into everyday life and how we might want to respond as educators. For example, it’s no coincidence that ChatGPT was released in the wake of the COVID19 pandemic (Hussain et al., 2024), with significant implications for the development of proctoring and surveillance technologies (McKenna, 2022). It’s also no coincidence that AI is associated with fascist ideologies (McQuillan, 2022). That it remains a black box in terms of how it is trained and by whom also raises concerns for academic writing (Gallagher, 2020). All this presents ideological challenges and opportunities for academic literacies that include, for example, re-visiting what we mean by criticality and agency if these foundational tenets of academi…

I'll be giving this year's keynote at #EATAW25 - alongside Suresh Canagarajah & Federico Navarro - on:

'AI Realism: Reclaiming the Human in AI-enhanced Academic Literacies' (cf abstract) {JM}
🤞
#PACEspace #AcWri #AcademicLiteracies #GenAI #CriticalRealism #OpenUniversity

www.eataw2025.com/keynote