On June 4th, 2026, Andrea Guzman and I will be presenting research from our HMC/AI and Social Robotics Syllabus project at the Human-Machine Communication pre-conference at ICA in Cape Town, South Africa.

Conference Abstract:

In the face of rising threats against gains made toward equality, fairness, care, and justice in civic life and the academy, it is essential that every scholarly field ask a similar question – how does our research and teaching contribute to righting historical injustices and promoting more equitable futures? For Human-Machine Communication, a subfield that is quickly growing , the timing of this intervention is ideal as it constitutes a moment of reflection and reflexivity before a canon, formal or informal (see Rambukkana, 2022), becomes entrenched and boundaries firmly marked. While HMC scholars have made great strides in establishing HMC as an area of research and marking out theoretical and methodological contributions to communication writ large and cognate fields (Makady & Liu, 2022; Richards et al., 2022), less collective attention has been paid to questions of pedagogy and curriculum; although, individual HMC scholars have certainly wrestled with them in their own teaching. The purpose of our presentation is to generate dialogue within the subfield regarding the development of an HMC curriculum. Keeping with the preconference theme, we specifically focus on addressing social, cultural, and ethical issues and power dynamics (such as race, gender, disability, social class, and accessibility) within the content of our graduate and undergraduate courses. We take as our starting point the examination of HMC syllabi to understand the different approaches scholars have taken to introducing students to critical issues and scholarship before offering provocations to generate a community discussion about HMC curricula, pedagogical practices, and research to support these areas. 

For many of the same reasons that communication as a discipline does not have a unified definition, there is no singular curriculum or even canon to build one around. Furthermore, the study of communication education is less pronounced, as scholars have tended to focus research on their subject areas rather than how to educate within those areas (Sprague, 1993). This does not mean that such research should be seen as any less important.  As Sprague (1993) stresses, “While we may write about organizations, the media, or politics, it is in our classrooms that we ourselves wield power and manipulate symbols with real consequences on other human lives” (p. 106). Within HMC, our curricular choices and pedagogical strategies inform undergraduate students in fields who may build AI and robotic technologies or decide to integrate them into businesses, graduate students who will continue to grow the field, and people who will need strategies to empower them as they make decisions about how to (dis)engage communicative machines on a daily basis. In the classroom, particularly graduate courses, research trajectories are established or closed off and biases and inequalities within the field are reified (Chakravartty & Jackson, 2020; Woodall & Meeks, 2024).

Given the breadth of communication research and, thus, education, Sprague (2002) argues that curricular and pedagogical questions may be best handled at the subfield level. HMC scholars already have argued for the importance of studying HMC education and the contributions of HMC to education research more generally (e.g., Edwards & Edwards, 2017). Research also is underway into a variety of questions regarding human-machine communication in the classroom, such as student perceptions of robotic and intelligent teachers and their efficacy (e.g., Abendschein et al., 2021; Kim et al., 2022; Spence et al., 2024). In this current moment in the growth of Generative AI, the expertise of communication scholars in informing the larger discourse surrounding GenAI in higher ed is proving particularly important (e.g., Kim et al., 2025). At the same time, a larger conversation has not been had regarding the nature of HMC education and its essential parts. Beyond the preconference theme, we focus on how critical and cultural scholarship (and related areas) has been integrated into HMC education because it has tended to be overlooked within HMC literature but is no less vital. When the functional component of HMC is presented without critical and cultural insights, the implications of human-machine communication and communicative technologies are not fully understood and addressed. Such a concern is being raised in adjacent fields, such as Library and Information Science, in which a review of syllabi regarding the inclusion of critical AI literacy, found a lack of consensus and, in their view, a  concerning “ tendency to present AI as technologically neutral, divorced from social, political and economic contexts […] potentially producing graduates ill-equipped to address AI’s equity implications” (Bridges et al., 2025, p. 811). HMC scholars cannot prepare students and future scholars to address inequity without embedding critical and cultural perspectives in curricula and pedagogical practice.

This presentation represents part of our work into HMC curricula that, in its first phase, has focused on examining syllabi for HMC and closely related courses. Although a syllabus cannot reveal everything that takes place within the classroom, it does provide “implicit and explicit messages about what constitutes model work–and which scholars do that work” (Smith et al, 2020, p. 101) and serves as one access point to understanding education as it “powerfully represents the field to future scholars” (Chakravartty & Jackson., 2020, p. 2). Because HMC is still a developing subfield of communication and courses have only been introduced within the past decade, it is difficult to seek out syllabi on university websites. We solicited syllabi through requests on professional organization e-mail lists germane to HMC and that are geographically diverse (ICA, AEJMC, HMC, AoIR, NCA, IAMCR, ECREA, AANZCA) from fall 2024 – fall 2025. We also attempted to distribute the solicitation to e-mail lists for scholars in China and parts of Africa, but to limited success.

We received 24 syllabi (9 undergrad, 4 undergrad/grad, 11 grad) from scholars in several nations, with the majority of syllabi from the United States. We took a qualitative approach for this exploratory research that aimed to understand the breadth of the different ways in how scholars approached addressing topics around inequality and integrated critical/cultural and related scholarship into the classroom. The sample proved adequate for these ends as we were able to identify emerging patterns. We followed an inductive approach and analyzed course descriptions, objectives, assignments, schedules, and readings for phrasing and descriptions that would indicate a focus on some aspect of inequality (including, ethics, social impact, bias, gender, race, class, inequality) and presence of critical theory, cultural studies, feminist, and related literature. 

In the preconference presentation, we will offer a more detailed explanation covering the breadth and depth of topics related to inequalities covered within the courses as well as highlight readings from the syllabi that cover these topics. Overall, how HMC scholars approached these topics varied greatly. On one end of the spectrum were courses that had no evidence of taking up such issues within the course and on the other end were courses focused entirely on critical and cultural issues. But there were also courses running the range between these two poles, some with limited attention to critical issues in the form of a single lesson or reading to courses that included several. Another aspect we will discuss is the degree to which these topics were either siloed into their own week where they were the sole focus or woven throughout several weeks as part of the discussion of a larger topic. We also will discuss differences between graduate and undergraduate courses, chiefly, that graduate courses tend to address these issues more so than undergraduate courses. 

The topics covered in these syllabi point to emerging curricula patterns and priorities in the field that will shape not only our undergraduates understanding of and relationship to HMC but also shape a future generation of scholars that will continue to grow HMC through research and teaching. To end our presentation, we plan to discuss a couple works already produced in HMC that can orient researchers as they consider the questions concerning equality, equity, and power (Iliadis, 2022, Gardner & Rauchberg, 2024). Most importantly, we will leave time and space for a robust discussion regarding how we might address issues of inequality in our curricula and pedagogy moving forward, whether we should establish a research cannon to guide development in these areas, and if so, how we might do so, and how we might build up a curricular and pedagogical research path within HMC to support continued research that can help us grow the field while also connecting to a larger swath of communities who are not always accounted for in our teaching or research.

References

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Bridges, L., Lopezosa, C., Centelles Velilla, M., & Ferran-Ferrer, N. (2025). Moving towards critical AI literacy in LIS education: A scoping review and syllabi analysis. The Electronic Library, 43(5), 798–817. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-06-2025-0224

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