Disciplining the Line: Religious Studies and Artificial Intelligence, with J. Shawn Landres

Religious studies possesses much of the epistemological infrastructure the humanities needs to govern AI-assisted scholarly production — and the discipline is losing faculty lines faster than any other humanities field. Drawing on Walter Capps's constitutive-methods claim and the online archives of the Walter H. Capps Center at UCSB, Shawn Landres argues that the insider/outsider framework provides an assessment apparatus few other disciplines have developed, and derives from that framework an operational standard — interrogability — adequate to the condition AI creates.

J. Shawn Landres (PhD, UCSB; MSt, Oxford) is a Senior Fellow at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. His research examines coordination, trust, and institutional accountability, particularly beyond formal structures. He has co-edited three books, led the Connected to Give national research series on religion and household charitable giving, and currently is working on a multi-manuscript project about practice-embedded scholarship.