Sociological Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence, Education, and Inequality

A comprehensive set of 50 fill-in-the-blank practice flashcards examining the sociology of education, artificial intelligence, algorithmic governance, and social inequality based on scholarly work by Shi et al. (2026) and Zajko (2022).

Lee Vinsel (2021) coined the term __________ to describe the trap of lending unwarranted legitimacy to industry promotional claims by taking them too seriously.

criti-hype

Drawing on the sociology of expectations, Bohner and Vertesi (2025) argue that hype plays both a __________ and performative role in organizing social and economic behavior around emerging educational AI.

constitutive

According to Horvath, Frei, and Steinberg (2025), the concept of __________ describes how justice-related considerations during edtech design are bypassed by drawing on self-evident assumptions in public narratives.

short-circuiting

Steve Woolgar (1985) famously argued for analyzing artificial intelligence technologies as legitimate __________ decades prior to the launch of ChatGPT.

sociological objects

Gebru and Torres (2024) describe the __________ bundle as an ideology combining accelerationism, transhumanism, and eugenics with the promise of utopia through Artificial General Intelligence.

TESCREAL

Narrow distributive analyses of the 'AI divide' that focus primarily on the allocation of devices or skills align with the critiqued tradition of __________ arithmetic in the sociology of education.

political

Komljenovic (2021) argues that the edtech sector is increasingly driven by economic practices of rentiership and __________, treating software and data as assets that generate continuing value.

assetization

Mike Michael (2006) observed that mundane interactions with new technologies remain deeply entwined with older non-AI artifacts, ranging from web browsers to __________.

Post-It notes

Bekirsky (2025) examines how AI in education __________ leverage social, symbolic, cultural, and economic capital to position themselves as pedagogical brokers.

influencers

Gulson, Sellar, and Webb (2026) conclude that while AI does not radically alter classification in educational governance, it generates new __________ that shift how policy subjects act.

descriptions

Dai, Thomas, and Rawolle (2025) argue that AI-supported surveillance in schools produces new forms of disciplinary power within a __________ power structure.

post-panoptic

Rau and Bellinger (2026) analyze European policy documents and critique common metaphors that conceptualize AI as a human-like __________.

companion

Hansen and Carrigan (2025) introduce the concept of __________ education tools to demonstrate how Large Language Models fail when deployed as technical fixes for structural problems.

bureaucratic

Hillman and Couldry (2025) draw on the sociologist __________ to argue that calculable edtech promises rearticulate risk and infantilize children by removing real-world uncertainty.

Ulrich Beck

Kim (2026) adopts the analytical lens of __________ to show how AI in education treats human otherness as dirt that needs to be detected and cleaned up.

waste

Foley and Melese (2025) argue that instead of merely aiding disabled students, AI educational systems actively reorder school life by encoding __________ norms into learning systems.

ableist

In evaluating generative AI in Indigenous education contexts, Alterator et al. (2025) utilize the __________ method to show how systems decontextualize knowledge and obfuscate provenance.

walkthrough

Tolbert et al. (2025) use __________ dialogues to resist the epistemic flattening and saturation associated with AI in education.

feminist cogenerative

Mochizuki, Bruillard, and Bryan (2025) critique policy guidance from the international body __________ for legitimizing AI as an instrument for educational progress.

UNESCO

Public and educational interest in generative AI expanded rapidly following the public release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in __________.

November 2022

A global sociological critique of AI infrastructure highlights substantial environmental degradation, particularly the massive consumption of __________ required to cool data centres.

water

A sociology of everyday AI in education shifts analytical attention away from novelty and innovation toward issues of repetition and __________.

maintenance

Röhl (2025) illustrates that algorithmic automation in schools leads to teachers' professional __________ becoming actively contested rather than simply erased.

autonomy

From an everyday sociological standpoint, students may use generative AI to write __________ essays because school assessment regimes only require that level of output.

mediocre

Sociologist Anthony Giddens emphasized that small-scale, everyday practices are __________ within social structures and connected to macro-level divisions.

inscribed

Mike Zajko outlines three primary modes of action for sociologists engaging with automated systems: critique and the politics of refusal, fighting inequality through technology, and the __________.

governance of algorithmic governance

Because automated decision-making systems tend to reproduce and entrench the existing social order, Birhane (2020) and Zajko (2021) describe their disposition as inherently __________.

conservative

In artificial intelligence research, the external reality or baseline dataset against which algorithms are trained and evaluated is referred to as the __________.

ground truth

While data scientists traditionally define bias as statistical error or inaccuracy, a broader sociological definition equates bias with anything considered __________ in society.

undesirable

Friedman and Nissenbaum (1996) identify inequalities that originate from structural and cultural conditions prior to system design as __________ bias.

societal

Suresh and Guttag (2020) categorize structural inequalities that already exist in the world and are reflected in training datasets as __________ bias.

historical

Judy Wajcman (2017) contends that automation anxiety is misplaced because new technologies typically result in 'not less work but more __________ jobs.'

worse

Audra Simpson (2014) theorizes that the politics of refusal is inherently __________, functioning as an affirmation of alternative values and social relationships rather than mere negation.

generative

Robert Lempert (2019) conceptualizes a speculative dystopia characterized by extreme wealth concentration in the hands of the tech elite as __________.

Bezos World

Aaron Bastani (2019) authored a manifesto outlining an alternative egalitarian future built around full automation termed fully automated __________.

luxury communism

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman suggested that the wealth generated by artificial intelligence could fund an annual universal basic income payment of __________ to each adult.

$$\$13,500$$

Roberge and Castelle (2021) propose an __________ sociology of AI that tracks algorithmic systems from upstream genesis to downstream impact and back.

end-to-end

Hashemi and Hall (2020) published a subsequently retracted study attempting to detect criminality from facial images, citing the 19th-century criminologist __________.

Cesare Lombroso

Timnit Gebru was controversially ousted from Google following conflicts concerning critical research conducted while co-leading the company's __________ team.

Ethical AI

In 'Race After Technology', Ruha Benjamin argues that when confronting sociotechnical injustice, people must demand not liberatory designs but 'plain old __________.'

liberation

Polish sociologist Adam Podgórecki is associated with the development of __________, an applied social science approach to rational social engineering.

sociotechnics

Thomas Etzemüller (2014) notes that in twentieth-century Sweden, the concept of __________ referred positively to the rational planning of the post-war welfare state.

social engineering

Jamie Susskind (2018) warned that due to their growing influence over the digital lifeworld, __________ engineers will increasingly act as de facto social engineers.

software

Moats and Seaver (2019) critique the interdisciplinary divide in which data scientists make systems and do science, while social scientists are relegated to observing and doing __________.

ethics

Celia Lury (2018) characterizes interdisciplinary methods as conduits for relations of __________ that constitute problems in novel ways rather than simply supplying solutions.

interference

Davis, Williams, and Yang (2021) formulate the concept of algorithmic __________ to envision how technology might redress structural racial inequalities rather than entrench them.

reparation

In 2020, critical scholars and civil society figures organized an independent watchdog group dubbed the __________ Oversight Board to scrutinize corporate platform policies.

Real Facebook

Canadian federal agencies have piloted automated decision-making (ADM) systems across several domains, including immigration applications, suicide surveillance, and __________ detection.

fraud

Bahar Amani (2021) argues that AI legal regulation must be reoriented from abstract procedural metrics toward the promotion of __________ equality.

substantive

Drawing on Bourdieu, Ellen Helsper (2008, 2012) argued that the digital divide should be reconceptualized as a process of digital __________ rooted in broader social disadvantage.

exclusion