CIDER Session: Accountability in AI-Assisted Scholarship: A Goffmanian Perspective

You are invited to the next CIDER session on Wednesday, March 18, 2026. This online session will feature Jim O’Driscoll of the UK presenting a talk on AI-assisted scholarship and a potential framework to address its “thorny questions”.

Accountability in AI-Assisted Scholarship: A Goffmanian Perspective

The use of Generative AI to formulate text has thrown up a number of thorny questions concerning the position of authors and publishers in scholarship. To whom/what should a scholarly work be credited? Who has copyright? Who is responsible for the claims made therein? Who can be approached for clarification or (further) evidence of these? In short, where does accountability lie?

This talk addresses these issues by applying and developing the concept of production format, a framework first devised half a century ago by Erving Goffman. In one part of a 1979/1981 paper, this sociologist deconstructs the timeworn notion of the 'speaker' of a piece of language into three distinct roles (which he terms 'animator', 'author' and 'principal'). With only a little tweaking, the framework can be readily applied to written language, and with a little modification can be brought to bear on scholarly publishing, offering solutions to the thorny questions raised above.

Jim O'Driscoll (BA Cambridge 1974, MA Essex 1986, PhD Ghent 1999) is a linguistic sociopragmatician who has held posts in six different countries, most recently at the universities of Huddersfield, Sheffield and Leeds in the UK. His research straddles several areas of language-in-situated-use. He is the author of some 30-odd papers and the book Offensive Language: Taboo, Offence and Social Control (Bloomsbury Academic 2020). He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Politeness Research (De Gruyter Mouton) and co-founder of GAS, an informal group excavating the works of Goffman.

Registration is not required; all are welcome.

About CIDER

CIDER is supported by the International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning (IRRODL) and the Centre for Distance Education, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Athabasca University: Canada's Open University and leader in professional online education.

The Sessions and their recordings are open and available to all, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.