feedback-ual-doctoral-symposium

context - technological, pedagocial, socio-politcal all form a backdrop that need to be highlighted and made clear on the confirmation-document. Adding the glossary (shortened version) might be good

this piece of the feedback really resonates and is something I have been trying to articulate through the work, but haven’t quite achieved yet
“if generative systems can persuade us to reconsider what thinking looks like, perhaps they can also invite us to value forms of intuition, association, hesitation, and speculation that sit outside computational logics”

Mahalia, thank you for your presentation. I was interested in the central tension running through the project: how AI might participate in learning and knowledge-making without closing down the uncertainty, contradiction, and unfinishedness that often characterise creative research. Your distinction between LLM reasoning and creative thought feels exciting, while AI systems are frequently designed to resolve, predict, optimise, research often requires us to remain with ambiguity, to sit in and with questions, rather than rush towards answers. There is so much discussion around the ways in which AI focuses on efficiency and assistance, and your project, through epistemic frictions, asks whether a useful research tool might sometimes slow us down, disrupt habitual thinking, or create productive obstacles. In this sense, I wonder whether the supervisor bot can be less a guide (although a poor one), and more a kind of ‘companion in uncertainty’. The idea of PhD-Live and the repositioning of doctoral thinking itself as a public-facing output is interesting. This feels connected to broader questions about liveness, process, and visibility within research culture. What happens when thinking is no longer hidden behind the finished thesis but becomes something that unfolds in public, with all its hesitations, revisions, and unfinished edges? And of ‘intelligence’ itself, if generative systems can persuade us to reconsider what thinking looks like, perhaps they can also invite us to value forms of intuition, association, hesitation, and speculation that sit outside computational logics. Thank you so much.

You presented with confidence and authority (in a positive sense). I thought it went well, people were engaging with your work, had questions and were generally interested, perhaps even fascinated by your research subject and design. It is difficult to add anything to Bob’s comprehensive feedback! Would be good to bring this to your next supervision meeting or share here. There were many comments about making the PhD process visible, and what this might mean, and an interesting conversation about ‘something being so local that it can’t compete with commercial LLMs’. There was another comment about intimate and embodied encounters -> understanding how the LLM is infiltrating your thinking, and how collaborating with different other’s impacts on the process and will change you as a researcher. Whilst people followed your presentation well - so it seemed, I wondered whether it would be good to provide more context at the start of the presentation. I think for me this also relates to your work on the confirmation document: clear introduction, aims and objectives to bring the reader in to your space.