CTDC Academy Arabic Launch: Learning, AI, and Responsibility in a Changing World

Event Summary

CTDC Academy’s Arabic launch was not only an introduction to a new learning platform. It was a conversation about what learning means when institutions are under pressure, knowledge is increasingly treated as a product, and technology is reshaping the conditions of work, education, and everyday life.

The event brought together Dr Nour Abu-Assab and Dr Nof Nasser-Eddin in conversation with Weam Guesmi, legal consultant, gender studies researcher, and one of CTDC Academy’s instructors. The session was originally planned to be facilitated by Carla Boulos, PhD Candidate. Due to unforseen circumstances, Carla was unable to join, and Wiem Guesmi stepped in to moderate the conversation at short notice. The session opened with an acknowledgement of Carla’s absence and appreciation for Weam’s generous and thoughtful facilitation.

The conversation began with the story behind CTDC: the friendship, intellectual partnership, and shared political commitment that brought Nour and Nof together more than twenty years ago. They reflected on their early academic journeys, their experience of migration and study in the UK, and the growing discomfort they felt with university spaces that were becoming increasingly commercialised, exclusionary, and disconnected from the realities they wanted to engage.

From there, the conversation traced the creation of CTDC as an attempt to bridge the gap between academia and practice. Nour and Nof spoke openly about the early years of seeking funding, working on gender and sexuality projects, managing donor expectations, and eventually realising that donor-driven project work was pulling them away from what they valued most: research, learning, teaching, critical thinking, and meaningful knowledge production.

A major theme of the event was the politics of knowledge. The discussion challenged the casual use of terms such as feminist methodology, intersectionality, decoloniality, lived realities, and knowledge production when they are detached from rigour, method, and accountability. Nour and Nof spoke about the danger of treating knowledge as opinion, the weakening of methodological integrity in some institutional spaces, and the need to defend expertise without reproducing elitism.

The launch also explored the relationship between Nour and Nof as a model of collective knowledge-making. Rather than presenting CTDC Academy as the product of one individual expert, the conversation showed how the Academy emerges from dialogue, disagreement, working through tension, and refusing easy answers. This became one of the central messages of the event: learning requires space for complexity, mistakes, discomfort, and reflection.

The discussion then turned to CTDC Academy itself. Nour and Nof explained that the Academy did not appear overnight. It grew from an idea they had nearly a decade ago: to create a feminist school or alternative learning space that could make rigorous knowledge more accessible beyond universities, NGOs, and closed professional circles. CTDC Academy now carries that ambition forward by creating courses, lectures, and future learning communities in Arabic and English.

The first course, Ethics and Foundations of AI Use, was introduced as a response to a moment of political, institutional, and technological pressure. The speakers discussed how AI is already embedded in daily life, education, work, organisational systems, and professional expectations. Rather than approaching AI through fear, rejection, hype, or tool-chasing, the course invites learners to understand how AI works, when it can be useful, where it can cause harm, and how to use it without surrendering human judgement.

The conversation placed AI within wider questions of governance, labour, data protection, safeguarding, institutional memory, Arabic language bias, accessibility, neurodiversity, and professional responsibility. Participants raised urgent questions about research ethics, organisational misuse of AI, AI literacy, Arabic language access, community knowledge, institutional governance, and the difference between using AI as a tool and relying on it as a substitute for thinking.

One of the strongest threads in the Arabic launch was language. Participants reflected on the importance of holding the launch in Arabic not as a translation of the English event, but as a different intellectual and cultural space. The conversation showed how Arabic changes the questions, the examples, the tone, and the kinds of knowledge that become possible. It also highlighted the need to take Arabic seriously in conversations about AI, learning, research, and professional development.

The event closed with a sense of shared excitement and recognition. Participants described the Academy as a needed space, asked about future courses, raised questions from their own institutions and sectors, and reflected on how learning can support communities, professionals, organisations, and people navigating rapid change with limited resources.

Overall, the Arabic launch positioned CTDC Academy as a learning space rooted in rigour, accessibility, political consciousness, and responsibility. It invited learners not only to acquire new knowledge, but to slow down, question inherited assumptions, strengthen judgement, and engage more ethically with the systems, tools, institutions, and communities they are part of.