Lockey Lecture 2027

 

Join us in welcoming Dr. Tiera Tanksley to the Millersville University campus for the 37th annual Anna Funk Lockey Lecture.

DATE: Wednesday, April 21, 2027

TIME: 7:00 PM

LOCATION: TBD

Registration is required and will open soon!

Millersville University proudly presents the 37th Annual Lockey Lecture, featuring Dr. Tiera Tanksley.

This year’s lecture topic is "Teaching to Transgress …the Algorithm: Fostering Algorithmic Agency and Sociotechnical Consciousness in the Age of AI".

Since the high-profi le release of ChatGPT in 2022, the desire to leverage the power of AI to transform teaching and learning has hit a fever pitch. Believed by many as the “silver bullet” that will bring an end to educational inequality, AI technologies continue to proliferate within college classrooms and across campuses, promising to bolster academic achievement, spark student engagement and ensure campus safety all while lessening the workload of overworked and systemically underpaid faculty and staff. However, as research is beginning to show that many of the AI technologies being used in and designed for institutions of learning are rife with algorithmic biases that threaten to exacerbate - rather than remediate - educational inequity for historically marginalized students.

In this keynote, I will discuss the challenges, critiques, and calls to action that currently permeate the field of education concerning AI, and highlight how an explicit focus on justice and educational equity within the design, procurement, use and teaching of AI technologies can produce transformative changes for teaching and learning. I simultaneously center the experiences, perspectives and sociotechnical innovations of Black youth that participate in the Race, Abolition and Artifi cial Intelligence program, and in doing so showcase how we can collectively reimagine, rebuild and even refuse anti-Black AI systems within education.

Meet our speaker:

Dr. Tiera Tanksley is a Senior Researcher whose work examines the socioemotional, mental health and academic impacts of digital and artificially intelligent technologies on Black youth.  Her work examines anti-Blackness as the “default setting” of schools and school-based technologies, including GenAI chatbots, facial recognition systems, weapons detection systems, and more. Her work simultaneously recognizes Black youth as digital activists and civic agitators, and examines the complex ways they subvert, resist, and rewrite algorithmically biased technologies to produce more-just and joyous digital experiences for Communities of Color across the diaspora. In 2020, Dr. Tanksley founded the Race, Abolition and Artificial Intelligence summer program - a critical science and technology program that prepares young people to have more critical, agentic and algorithmically-conscious relationships with AI and digital tech.

Dr. Tanksley earned her PhD from the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies where Dr. Safiya Noble served as her dissertation advisor and chair of her committee. Since completing her doctorate, she has served as an expert AI research consultant for organizations such as Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the National Institute for Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Education Office of Technology, Children and Screens, Digital Promise and Common Sense Media to name a few. In 2023, Dr. Tanksley was awarded the Public Voices in Technology fellowship by the MacArthur Foundation and the Op Ed Project, and was subsequently named one of the 100 Brilliant Women in AI. In 2025, she was awarded an AI in Education research grant from the Spencer Foundation, and was featured in a critical AI documentary, Ghost in the Machine, that premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

Join us for an inspiring discussion on Teaching to Transgress …the Algorithm: Fostering Algorithmic Agency and Sociotechnical Consciousness in the Age of AI.

Register Here! (Registration will open soon!)