LECTORAAT CHANGE MANAGEMENT – De Haagse Hogeschool

A colleague is making a slide. Two words, in the house style of our own university’s slogan: “no war.” She has Microsoft Copilot open, licensed, official, blessed by IT, so she asks it to generate the slide. Copilot refuses. Not because it can’t. Because it has an opinion, the opinion is not ours, and nobody tells you whose it is. I still remember her scream.

My questions are about the tools and systems that hold education together. A corporate AI that gets a vote on an anti-war slogan. Proctoring software that decides whose face looks like an exam cheater. Analytics scoring how much of your week counts as collaboration. A semester of teaching flattened into a satisfaction score. I read these the way you’d read a design brief, a user manual, or a script for a theatrical performance: for the roles they assign the student, the teacher, and the institution, and for what they take teaching to be, assumptions rarely stated and therefore rarely open to argument.

I teach design at the Faculty of IT & Design, and I’m doing a PhD on teacher agency under platform conditions: what it looks like to teach on your own terms inside infrastructure chosen for you without you. Drawing on critical media theory and science and technology studies, I ask a narrower question than whether a given technology is good or bad for education: what world does it assume, and who is still allowed to build another one? In that sense my project is political as much as aesthetic: if education and design are meant to make space for new ideas about the world, neither can rely on tools that see creativity as something to be managed.

I trained as an industrial design engineer at TU Delft, then studied Unstable Media at the Rietveld Academie: two disciplines for looking closely at how things are made, and at how they come apart. What I took from the second was a set of tactics more than a medium: institutional critique, net.art, the durational absurdity of Forced Entertainment, work that turns subversive by taking a system entirely at its word. My PhD is hosted by the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, supervised by Geert Lovink, whose path from nettime and tactical media to the Institute of Network Cultures runs through more counter-cultural alleys than academic avenues, and models what research can look like outside the university as much as within it. At THUAS the research began inside Philosophy & Professional Practice, where Chris Detweiler brought me in and still co-supervises my PhD.

Critique is its own kind of pleasure: the naming of what a tool assumes and forecloses, the too-close-too-slow reading, the playful misuse that makes a tool show its seams, the out-of-interface experiences that leave us with an afterimage of the user model we embody. Critique and creativity feed each other, one process, imagining things otherwise as much as accounting for what already is. That imagining is collective and often slower work: bottom-up visions of agency and autonomy on our own terms, room for counter-narratives, polyphony and wandering doubt instead of blind alignment and compliance. This is the university I feel committed to sustaining. Not a set of values declared from above, but something a course team, a curriculum committee, a department can practice together, with self-conscience. That includes turning the same scrutiny on the tools of our own daily work, the authority we’ve stopped noticing because it arrived as a feature. Inevitable.

[1] I first told the Copilot story in Utrecht, opening a symposium on open source and Big Tech dependency organised by Niels Kerssens, a name some of you will recognise from this blog’s own On Our Terms series. 

[2] The Philosophy & Professional Practice research group was quietly killed in 2026. It still haunts the corridors and servers, in calendar invites that glitch back to life, a Teams call that never quite ends, an out-of-office reply that already seems to know about the new terms and conditions.

[3] Chris and I also run a self-hosted web radio: www.xlab.radio. In between student-run programs, we’re open for sound-based research experiments.