Abstract
What does internationalization become once the era of mobility and rankings has passed? This panel argues that a defining feature of the post-internationalization age is a human turn inward and back: as the outward-facing model recedes, students and scholars increasingly seek to understand themselves, their roots, and the knowledge of their ancestors. AI makes this turn urgent rather than nostalgic.
As machine-generated knowledge converges toward sameness and automates synthesis and translation, the humanities and the ancestral, oral, relational knowledge they carry become the irreplaceable human core of education. Humanities scholars are needed as co-creators of AI governance and as guardians of what remains essential to human flourishing.
We explore this through Kazakh nomadic epistemologies, i.e. the dialogic aitys tradition, Tengrist non-anthropocentric cosmology, biy relational reasoning, treated as living curriculum rather than heritage, and set them alongside broader Asia-Pacific traditions that emphasize moral cultivation, relationality, stewardship, and dialogue as foundations of knowledge. Almaty Management University’s Tolyq Adam (“holistic person”) program winning at THE Awards Asia 2026 grounds the discussion as a practical case.
Participants will leave understanding why, in the AI age, returning to roots is a forward-looking strategy for the humanities and for international education.
Learning objectives:
- Articulate the post-internationalization shift: why, as mobility- and ranking-driven models recede, students and scholars increasingly turn toward self, roots, and ancestral knowledge, and what this means for international education.
- Explain why AI’s homogenizing effects make the humanities and ancestral, oral, relational knowledge more central to education
- Position humanities as the irreplaceable human core in the AI age
- Identify practical ways to embed ancestral and local knowledge as living curriculum (two-way pedagogy) rather than as an add-on elective or cultural showcase
- Evaluate how humanities scholars can act as co-creators of AI governance and as guardians of what AI cannot replicate, drawing on relational and non-anthropocentric frameworks beyond dominant Western models.
- Apply lessons from a real foundation-program case (i.e. Tolyq Adam), including its challenges and limits, to participants’ own institutional and regional contexts.
Target audience
Curriculum designers, academic leaders, faculty in the humanities and across disciplines; educators working on internationalization, AI in teaching and learning, and student formation; and anyone interested in ancestral knowledge, decolonizing the curriculum, and identity-centered models of international education