PgCert Reflective Journal

Now I want to make an impassioned plea for reading. In the process of writing this blog post, I read Paulo Freire’s ‘The Importance of the Act of Reading’, where he describes that reading the word is reading the world. He describes how it is a political and creative act that transforms the world by a means of ‘conscious practical work’; in doing so, it leads people to critically perceive culture by developing an understanding of ‘how human practice or work transforms the world’ (Friere, 1983, p.8-11). It is the act of reading that helps us to critically reflect on these processes of how we imagine, interpret and transform the world around us.

It is difficult to watch the world change around me. Particularly as I hear about all the books that are being banned in the US now. If reading is such a political action, why prompt us away from the challenges of reading? As I edit this blog post now, to refine my writing through a reflective lens, I too could not finish the reading from last week. It was Sara Ahmed’s text about use, which I only read half. I wonder if AI could have picked up upon the nuances of language in that essay – which thought about use, using, used, and all its iterations while reiteratively using the word in its many forms (see Ahmed, 2019). Oh what I would have lost if I had not engaged with that text! Even if I only finished half of it, it was the kind of text where the form and the rhythm seemed illuminate the very content. I worry about a world where our creative acts shaped by bots that these losers built (see Shaw, 2025).

Works Cited

Ahmed, S. (2019) ‘Using Things’, What’s the Use: On the Uses of Use. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 21-67.

Brown, W. (2003) ‘Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy’, Theory & Event 7(1) https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tae.2003.0020 [Accessed 14 January 2024]

Freire, P. (1983) ‘The Importance of the Act of Reading’, translated by Slover, L. The Journal of Education 165(1), pp. 5-11.

Li, P., Yang, J., Islam, M. and Ren, S. (2023) ‘Making AI Less “Thirsty”: Uncovering and Address the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models’ arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03271 [Accessed 14 January 2025]

Luccioni, A., Viguier, S., and Ligozat, A-L. (2022) ‘Estimating the Carbon Footprint of Bloom, a 176B Parameter Language Model’ arXiv. http://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.02001 [Accessed 14 January 2025]

Ren, S. (2023) ‘How much water does AI consume? The public deserves to know.’ OECD AI Policy Observatory. https://oecd.ai/en/wonk/how-much-water-does-ai-consume [Accessed 14 January 2025]

Savage, P. (2022) ‘“The New Life”: Mozambican Art Students in the USSR, and the Aesthetic Epistemologies of Anti-Colonial Solidarity’, Art History 45(5), p. 1078-1100.

Shaw, R. (2025) ‘I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers’, The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/16/i-knew-one-day-id-have-to-watch-powerful-men-burn-the-world-down-i-just-didnt-expect-them-to-be-such-losers [Accessed 24 Feb 2025].

Vincent, J. (2024) ‘How much electricity does AI consume?’ The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/24066646/ai-electricity-energy-watts-generative-consumption [Accessed 14 January 2025]. 

Fig. 1. Photograph of data centre growth from Nicholson, R. (2024) ‘Data centre growth seen in scaled schemes and retrofits’, Construction Journal. Available at: https://ww3.rics.org/uk/en/journals/construction-journal/data-centre-demand-retrofit.html [Accessed 14 Jan. 2025].

A prompt was sent via our PgCert Moodle page about how to prepare for Workshop 1A: if the reading activity was challenging, it suggested that we ‘also try [to] run the text through ChatGPT and ask it to summarise and/or clarify it for you.’ I found this disheartening, as I can imagine a future where people have increasingly short attention spans, and less capacity of critical thinking. Reading, like writing, is a practice, and letting AI replicate those tasks for us seems to diminish the process of learning itself. In my assigned paper, I learnt a new word: ‘metanoia’ (Savage, 2022, p. 1081). As I edit this blog post now, I’ve completely forgotten what it means, but that’s ok. Unfamiliarity, challenges, and difficulty are markers that I am learning.

Some academic writing is confusing, but our ability to communicate in our own unique ways is something to preserve in this world. Feeding texts through ChatGPT allows it to determine what is important, how we should read the text, when it is our engagement with new materials that is part of learning. I think the problem that we are not addressing here is perhaps the difficulty of the materials, or more likely, the fact that none of us seem to have time to engage with these texts properly.

ChatGPT seems to be able to condense and reduce a 23-page text into 2 or 3. It can probably condense hours of reading into 10 minutes. But I worry about what gets lost in this process. I also worry about Elon Musk taking over the world, and the massive problem with sustainability as these machines consume. Because they are out of sight, they very much become out of mind. Yet, I have read reports about the water and land (see fig. 1) that these machines take up (Luccioni, Viguier, Ligozat in Vincent, 2024; Ren, 2023; Li et al., 2023). Already it seems that our jobs are at risk, but now we have machines responding to machines, and I worry that the world we’re continuing to develop makes us ‘useless’ – at least in the perspective of this techno-feudalist society that these tech bros are building.

The reality of neoliberalism is that we have allowed these multinational corporations and capitalism to go unchecked (see Brown, 2003). This system of profiteering privileges the few, while continuing to destroy the environment and dehumanise more and more groups of people. Corporate profiteering certainly shapes UAL as well, on a bad day I feel like a cog in a machine – an act for a consuming student public. We talk about decolonisation, but I wonder how I am cared for; it sometimes seems like an abstraction that has no material foundation.

To be continued in Part 2…

Monday, 9 December 2024

Hello, welcome to the blog and reflections of Christin Yu. I am a Lecturer of Cultural Studies at Central Saint Martins, teaching on the Jewellery, Textiles and Fashion programme, as well as in the MA Fashion Histories & Theories course. I am also an Associate Fellow of the Transnational Art, Identity and Nation Research Centre, and the Secretary of the British Association of Korean Studies. 

Not sure if it’s helpful to list all these credentials, the practice of writing this blog feels like I am positioned in an overlapping space between performing a public persona and reflecting upon private matters. A few weeks ago, our team delivered a module about Web 1.0 transitioning into Web 2.0, and I was reminded of platforms such as livejournal. This blogging platform was a precursor to the public lives that Instagram, and TikTok have now produced, but there was a seemingly ‘authentic’ vulnerability in those posts. I think maybe it helped that we were not posting our images, but our thoughts – it was an embodied versus solely visual practice. Anyway, I find it difficult to mediate between what I should be writing as an earnest reflection of my thoughts, or as a performative profile of myself. Do I write to an audience or as I did in my adolescent diaries? I write this interjection in a space of privacy, which lends itself to a personal reflectivity that I did not feel comfortable accessing in a classroom yesterday. Perhaps this speaks to accessibility and temporality in learning…

My pedagogical practices are informed by decolonial feminist aims that include seminar-led discussions, and collaborative writing practices to imagine and re-exist toward an otherwise. I am a design historian, and material cultural specialist that is interested in the non-visual world, and embodied practices of being, alongside generative practices of knowledge making that privilege communal and polyphonic stories.

As I embark on this PgCert course, I look forward to generating strategies and practices that can inform my teaching as we move through an increasingly polarised world. My difficulties of experience thus far have included questions about how to mediate controversial worldviews (although these instances have been few and far between). I hope to learn more strategies toward my own resilience, as I teach a student body undoubtedly afflicted by anxieties, and perhaps worse, an apathetic worldview. As a marginalised person in a position of power, I want to undo the historical relations of authority, while also maintaining some protection over my own integrity.