Virtual Talk - AI and academic literacy: A multimodal linguistic ethnographic approach
February 23, 2026, 10:00 am to 11:00 am
Please RSVP, as it is required upon entry.
Kasper Engholm Jelby is a PhD Fellow at the Centre for Internationalisation and Parallel Language Use at the University of Copenhagen. His PhD project is part of “AI and the University: Towards a sociolinguistics of literacy and voice in the age of generative language technology” (AI-UNI), a five- year sociolinguistic research project funded by the Carlsberg Foundation that explores AI in academia as a site of sociolinguistic change. Kasper’s research interests include linguistic ethnographic approaches to the study of language as social practice, and his PhD project focuses on the use of generative AI technologies in the academic literacy practices of undergraduate university students.
This talk is online; please see the Zoom details below.
When:
Monday, February 23, 2026
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM PST
Please use the Zoom details below to attend virtually:
Link: https://ubc.zoom.us/meeting/register/omMeRycRQWWYxUX5mpztOA
Meeting ID: 665 4819 2846
Passcode: 859491
Title: AI and academic literacy: A multimodal linguistic ethnographic approach
Kasper Engholm Jelby, PhD Fellow, Centre for Internationalisation and Parallel Language Use, University of Copenhagen
The rise of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technologies based on large language models has had, and continues to have, an immense impact on academic literacy practices—social practices related to the production and interpretation of academic texts (Lillis and Scott 2007). Recent large- scale surveys provide insights into broader patterns of AI use and attitudes among university students and researchers alike (Stöhr et al. 2024; Andersen et al. 2025). However, a fuller understanding of academic literacy in the age of generative language technology also requires research that focuses on meaning-making processes in local disciplinary environments, and the implications of GenAI technologies for these processes. Providing situated accounts of this sort is the aim of the sociolinguistic research project “AI and the University” (www.ai-uni.dk). The project explores this continually changing academic landscape through linguistic ethnography: an approach that combines different research methods from linguistics, anthropology and related disciplines in order to arrive at an understanding of the situated role of language in local social contexts (Tusting 2013). In this talk, I will present preliminary analyses from my own linguistic ethnographic fieldwork in the AI-UNI project, conducted among undergraduate health-science students at a Danish university in the spring semester of 2025. Through analysis of a combination of sound, video and screen recordings from participant observation of students’ group work, I argue that students assign interactional roles to GenAI technologies that were previously reserved for (human) peers. Based on this example, I discuss how linguistic ethnography can be used to understand the local processes of meaning-making in which GenAI technologies are embedded. In this way, the example provides a case for linguistic ethnography as an interdisciplinary approach to the study of social worlds through language.
This talk is part of a series on Reimagining Public Discourse (RePD), a key research area of Language Sciences that focuses on how online spaces shape language use. To learn more about how RePD supports interdisciplinary research on the impact of technology on discourse, please email RePD Research Lead, Dr. Ron Darvin (ron.darvin@ubc.ca)