Abstract

This paper interrogates the challenges that deepfake media and AI-generated synthetic content pose for educational policy, governance, and the evolving notion of classroom safety. Moving beyond traditional paradigms that center student welfare and physical security, the analysis foregrounds the neglected psychosocial risks facing teachers, whose occupational safety is increasingly threatened by gendered forms of digitally mediated violence. Calling for novel forms of digital literacies that focus directly on the impact of emergent technologies on teachers’ workplace, human and consumer rights, I draw on Feenberg’s Critical Theory of Technology and Manne’s analysis of misogyny, to situate deepfake harms within broader structural inequalities and neoliberal logics that commodify both teacher and student identities. To explain the analysis, I use Rahm’s concept of “educational imaginaries,” to present two vignettes. The first shows how teachers face new OHS risks through real-time, technology enabled abuse. The second shows how marketing uses of student images create additional vectors for consent violation and institutional risk. The analysis critiques current governance frameworks and calls for intersectional, anticipatory policies that address both relational and systemic dimensions of AI-facilitated harm. Ultimately, the study aims to provoke the audiecne into considering whether we need to reimagine the notion of ‘classroom safety’ as a result of consider AI’s impacts far beyond acadmeic integrity and assessment reform. I argue that initial teacher education programs must reframe classroom safety through a lens of gender justice, psychosocial well- being, and collective accountability to center AI governance in education; for education.

Presenters

Janine Aldous Arantes
Teaching Focused Academic, Education, Victoria University, Australia

Details

Presentation Type

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

Theme

2026 Special Focus—Digital Literacy for Future Readiness

KEYWORDS

AI Literacies, Deepfake, Education, AI Governance, Gender, Harm

Digital Media

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