Assistant Professorship, Project ‘AI and the University – Towards a sociolinguistics of literacy and voice in the age of generative AI’

Centre for Internationalisation and Parallel Language Use (CIP) at the University of Copenhagen is offering a 4-year fixed-term position as assistant professor commencing 1 September 2024. The candidate will undertake research as part of a five-year collaborative project on text-generative AI and the university (AI-UNI) funded by the Carlsberg Foundation. In addition to research activities related to the host project, the assistant professor must undertake research-based teaching and contribute to knowledge sharing with wider society.

AI-UNI

Large language models and their application as part of text-generative AI are rapidly changing the way we engage with language. The ways we write, read, speak and listen are all being transformed by various forms of AI technology which are quickly becoming part of the mainstream. In the university context these changes will have – and have in fact already had – quite fundamental consequences for how knowledge is produced, acquired, and disseminated. AI-UNI will contribute to an empirically founded and theoretically coherent understanding of how text-generative language technologies affect research, teaching and learning practices in academia, and what the implications are for knowledge production, dissemination, and evaluation. 

The project will 1) document ongoing change in the way generative language technology is used as part of academic practices, 2) critically assess the associated implications for research, teaching, and learning, and 3) progressively build a theoretical model of human engagement with generative language technology as a site of sociolinguistic change.
Find more information at the UCPH job portal (link below). 

Research task

The successful candidate will undertake an independent research project, designed to fit the overall research agenda of AI-UNI. The assistant professor will be expected to design and conduct a linguistic ethnographic case study focussing on undergraduate students within the humanities or social sciences as they prepare for, attend, and produce assignments in relation to their regular study activities. The case study will focus on a selection of students in one or two classes (or similar unit), with specific practices that involve the use of AI selected for detailed study after an initial period of observation. 

Applicants are expected to outline a proposed research design for their case study as part of the application. The proposed research project should allow the candidate to explore how text-generative AI is used as part of academic practices and critically assess the associated implications for learning. The project should fall within the general framework of linguistic ethnography. This means that we welcome projects that include e.g. participant observation, recordings of textual practices and social interaction in offline and online environments, as well as ethnographic interviews and feedback sessions with participants. Theoretically, the project should contribute to the host project’s understanding of the use of text-generative AI at the university as a site of sociolinguistic change with potential implications for how we conceptualize the notions of literacy and voice in sociolinguistics. 

Teaching

The postdoc position is primarily devoted to research, but the successful candidate will also be expected to contribute to the development and delivery of an MA module on Sociolinguistics and AI together with the AI-UNI research group. 

Find more information on qualification requirements, assessment criteria, application and the recruitment process, click the 'Apply' button