AFIRMASI Deepens Global Footprint at AERA 2026
LOS ANGELES — Last week, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting served as the backdrop for a significant moment in AFIRMASI’s research trajectory. Chelsia Shanen Panekenan, an AFIRMASI researcher and Texas State University MA candidate, presented her groundbreaking work to a global audience of over 15,000 scholars.
The 2026 meeting, themed "Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures," provided a perfect stage for Chelsia’s paper: "Figured Worlds, Class Hegemony, School Rituals, and AI: Ethnographic and Ethical Perspectives on Identity, Harm, and Humanizing Pedagogy in Education."
Showcasing Critical Research on AI and Pedagogy
Chelsia's presentation synthesized "figured worlds" theory with the sociological dimensions of class hegemony and formative harm in educational settings. Her work explores how school rituals co-author student identities and can inflict lasting emotional wounds. Crucially, she draws analytical parallels between traditional forms of harm and the new, algorithmically-driven harms emerging from AI integration in early education.
During her session, she highlighted an autoethnographic vignette titled "The Ritual of 'Sumakey' and Formative Wounds", recounting a personal memory from Minahasa, Indonesia. This powerful narrative illustrated how a communal meal intended to foster community became an arena for reinforcing class hegemony and symbolic violence, devaluing students from less affluent backgrounds.
Building on Critical Pedagogy, Chelsia argued that just as human bias can inflict harm in traditional settings, opaque algorithms risk replicating and amplifying historical inequities unless filtered through a humanizing, empathetic pedagogical judgment.
A Resounding Success
Chelsia’s roundtable session, "Teaching with AI: Identities, Challenges, and Burnout," under Division K (Teaching and Teacher Education), was attended by prominent researchers from George Mason University, Teachers College Columbia, and Harvard.
"Congratulations! I really enjoyed your presentation and the whole roundtable session. I also really enjoyed connecting with you," — Stephanie Calabrese, PhD researcher at George Mason University
AFIRMASI’s Research Leadership
For AFIRMASI, Chelsia's participation in AERA 2026 is a demonstration of our commitment to producing academic-grade research that influences global discourse. Her work reaffirms the enduring relevance of figured worlds theory and contributes a crucial ethical perspective to the contemporary debate on AI in education.
"Chelsia’s work represents the best of AFIRMASI," said the research team. "She brings rigorous, evidence-based inquiry to the most pressing ethical challenges of our time."
AFIRMASI will continue to support our researchers as they engage with global institutions to ensure that the voices of frontier communities are heard at the highest levels of academic inquiry.