Preamble
After 17 years of work in the safe abortion rights movement, fueled by thousands of conversations and shifting discourses with hundreds of connections and our collective commitment to justice that goes far beyond the medical or legal narratives that often dominate, we have built this Academy for you.
It started with a question, one that many of us in the safe abortion rights movement kept asking over and over: Where is the space to learn about this work in all its complexity? Not just the laws and the medical protocols, but the politics, the power, the ethics, the emotions. The stories. The injustices. The hopes.
Where can people go who feel passionately about the issue but haven’t had access to in-depth learning? Where cross border politics does not come in the way of global solidarity, where anyone can come to reflect, unlearn, and realign not just intellectually, but emotionally and politically!
That is what this Academy stands for.
We believe that learning is a process. One that asks something of you.
Not just time or reading, but care, effort, and introspection. And it is in this process, with its discomforts and breakthroughs that true shifts happen.
That’s why we ask you not to use AI, not even to polish your sentences. And it’s not because we are anti-tech or want to keep you away from the tools. But because this isn’t about perfect language or clever responses.
It’s about what you think. What you feel. How your ideas have shifted. What your lived experience tells you.
And those things , the parts that matter cannot be outsourced to a machine.
We understand that AI is now everywhere. And we also understand the temptation to use it, especially when time is short, or language feels like a barrier. But this space is different.
What we stand for, collectively, is to evolve beyond the race to finish into a community that respects and even thrives on values that demand integrity, reflection, and struggle.
If we accept AI-polished answers in place of genuine thought, we betray our commitment to these principles.
AI cannot reflect your journey. It can only imitate what it gathers from others and reshapes.
There is also an ethical position here. Ai is sitting right at the crossroads of the climate crisis with its massive carbon footprint, uber capitalism that is exploiting creative labour and a shift to a world which is waiting for us to lose capacity for critical thinking and effort!
So we cannot be neutral about it.
Ai is built on the unpaid, uncredited labor of countless people.
It mimics without acknowledgment and it also hallucinates. It flattens a deeply personal and political learning space into something passive and devoid of lived experience.
What makes us human is not just how we think but how we feel. Many of us come to this work with a sense of injustice, with rage, hope, and love. That is what we want to hear from you. Not a perfect essay, but an honest one. We understand that English can be a barrier but we are more than happy to overlook grammatical errors because your answers mean more than a writing piece.
Refusal to use Ai is an act of resistance.
Let this be a space where you hold on to your own imagination, your own ethics, your own capacity to think, feel, and grow.
This Academy is built on care, on commitment, and on a deep belief in human agency. That includes yours.
In summary, these are the concerns under which the ASAP Academy discourages any and all use of Ai in Academy work:
- It compromises academic integrity by bypassing the personal, effortful process that is at the heart of meaningful learning.
- It feeds into the extractive systems behind AI – where data is harvested without consent, and control lies with opaque, corporate forces.
- It weakens the learning journey, preventing the deep engagement, discomfort, and realignment that this Academy is designed to foster.
- It reflects and reproduces bias, while often fabricating information and offering surface-level answers that lack ethical grounding or context.
- It erases your voice, replacing your lived experience and evolving thought with something generic, detached, and artificial.
- Not submitting to the all pervasive AI is also resistance. In a neo-cepitalist post colonial world where we are still held to validation only through productivity and running behind time unlearning, relearning