Readings for teaching what AI means for people, practice, and power
AI, Society & Social Work is a collection of more than 800 research articles, news stories, policy documents, and professional guidelines, sorted for educators in social work, psychology, and behavioral health by where they would teach it and how they would use it.
AI now sits inside therapy and crisis support, child welfare and benefits decisions, hiring, policing, schools, and the relationships people bring to us. The systems behind it also run on labor, energy, water, and data, and the costs and benefits are not shared evenly.
Your students will practise in that world. Everything here is something you can assign, discuss, or argue with in class.
How to use this collection
Every item is sorted two ways, so you can go straight to what fits your course.
Where you would teach it
- Ethics and professional practice Codes, accountability, documentation, and the future of the helping professions.
- Clinical practice and mental health Chatbots, AI companions, crisis response, and the therapeutic relationship.
- Human behavior and the lifespan Children and adolescents, aging, disability, trust, and attachment.
- Diversity, oppression, and justice Algorithmic discrimination, representation, and the digital divide.
- Policy, law, and the state Welfare systems, regulation, policing, borders, and surveillance.
- Macro practice Work, corporate power, community organizing, the information environment, and climate.
How you would use it
- Research Journal articles and reports to assign as readings.
- Case for discussion News stories and commentary that open a seminar or anchor a case study.
- Policy and law Legislation, regulation, and policy briefs for analysis.
- Professional guidance Statements and guidelines from professional and regulatory bodies.
The collection opens on the items closest to practice and teaching. Add the background items to see wider studies, most of them on AI in clinical medicine.
New research and reporting are added once a month. A collection from The Politicized Practitioner®.
Four questions to bring to any reading
The filters tell you where an item fits in a course. These four questions help students read it. Use them as discussion prompts, one at a time or together.
Human
What is this doing to behavior, relationships, identity, development, health, or wellbeing?
Power
Who benefits? Who decides? Who is surveilled, excluded, exploited, displaced, or harmed?
Planet
What environmental, material, labor, and global systems make this technology possible, and who bears their costs?
Practice
What should practitioners, educators, students, organizations, and policymakers understand, question, challenge, or change?
Most items reward more than one of these questions. A study filed under clinical practice can still be a reading about power.
How the collection is built
Keeping up with this field by hand is increasingly difficult, so this collection uses AI as part of the process of tracking AI.
Once a month, saved searches in two scholarly databases bring in new peer-reviewed research on AI in social work, psychology, and behavioral health. A third search, in a news database, brings in reporting on AI in welfare, child protection, policing, immigration, schools, housing, and mental health care. AI-assisted tools screen for relevance, remove duplicates, sort each item into a teaching area, and write a short summary.
Automation helps find and organize the material. It does not decide what is true, important, or authoritative.
Items are not individually reviewed before they appear, and the sorting is sometimes wrong. Read the source before you assign it. Inclusion does not mean that The Politicized Practitioner® endorses a source, organization, argument, technology, or finding.
The collection is selective rather than exhaustive. It does not try to follow every development in artificial intelligence. It favors material that helps students understand what AI means for people, relationships, inequality, institutions, communities, and professional practice.
The question behind the collection
AI is frequently presented to students and practitioners as a question of adoption:
Should we use it, and how?
That question matters, and it is too small. It treats AI as a tool waiting on our decision, when it is already shaping the lives of the people we work with and the systems we work in.
That is the question this collection is built to help you teach.