Featured Topics Introduction

AI Literacy

I never expected AI to be the focus of my first quarterly journal-slash-newsletter. Deeply weary (AND wary) of the AI-related hype we’re all seeing everywhere, I’m loath to add to it. But one of my learning goals this summer was to do the responsible thing and try to better understand AI. Through a small set of webinars, books, articles, and webcasts, I’ve learned enough so far to: 1) know that I don’t know enough, and 2) share what little I do know with others because *waves arms around* ALL. OF. THIS.

I’m a Banana Slug, a graduate of UCSC. In 1991, I changed my college affiliation (there were eight comprising the campus, at the time) to avoid a required core course on computers. My reasoning was that I’d never center my life around tech so much that I’d need to know anything about DOS or whatever else they were going to try to teach me. Little did I know that I’d later be writing html in pursuit of an MLIS degree, or that today I’d have a smart phone in my hand morning-to-night and do DIY IT support for my consulting business. Yet it's with the same naivete and lack of foresight that for a long while I chose to skip reading articles about AI, thinking that it would never be that important to me. Well, obviously that was B.S. because —ready or not—AI has come for us all.

So, with this five-minute read, I hope to lift up a few gems that may help others who, like me, want to cut through the signal noise and get a reasonable handle on AI and what we’re all getting ourselves into.

Fake Love

AI is changing not just the way we work—but how we play. The entertainment industry is a hotly contested space when it comes to AI, and while many have weighed in on the stakes for actors, writers, and creators of all kinds, I’ve personally been observing its impact in fan spaces, specifically K-pop (more specifically BTS ARMY). Participating in an online forum where a global, multicultural, multigenerational fandom engages with artists and with each other is a dynamic learning lab for exploring AI ethics, digital hygiene, what it means to be a consumer or creator, how we’re using this technology, and at what cost. Link to three-minute read.

Decolonizing

As summer turns to fall, I’m also turning my attention to another area of learning I may not have anticipated at the start of the year but now feels both natural and inevitable.

It must have been spring when I first noticed posts about the Reimagining Research cohort from Pause and Effect and its team members sahibzada mayed and Sabrina Meherally. In fact, I think it was this post about the natural world—the trees, rivers, and mountains—as “researcher” that spoke to me as though it were calling my name. I’ve experienced their subsequent posts as refreshment in the otherwise somewhat stolid LinkedIn feed, and as invitation to a different way of viewing, valuing, and practicing my work. I enrolled in May for the five-week course beginning on Friday and am preparing to give my all to this learning journey. I expect it to challenge me, from the ground up, to uproot my colonial conditioning and cultivate an authentically liberatory practice of research, writing, and consulting.

I’m grateful to be getting a head start on this work over the past two weeks as part of Create Good’s Naaima Khan’s inaugural four-week series, Beyond DEI: Embedding Anticolonialism into Strategy. These thoughtfully-presented and -facilitated sessions have already given me a helpful grounding for thinking and feeling into what decolonizing my research, consulting, and leadership can look like—and inspiration for making it happen!

Planting a Seed

Finally, and with an eye toward the rest of this year and into next, I’m sharing my intention to prepare a book offering for 2026. I have the great privilege to live in the midst of a forest ecosystem and find peace here that I want to extend to others. Plant Based is emerging as a collection of short readings inspired by the more-than-human world. Because growing in the garden and rustling in the trees, there is a world of life that—when we pay attention—teaches us what we need to know about how to begin, grow, thrive, and end.