Douglas FOSTER

Abstract: AI is reshaping international higher education: how professors deliver content, how students contend with second language learning and assignments, and how institutions anticipate the employment landscape. Many educators already see AI as having a homogenizing effect, by flattening critical thinking and creativity. This panel will examine the ways in which Asia-based displaced youth seeking international university opportunities are an ideal case study for understanding the promise and peril of AI in higher education. Because such students face severe constraints on mobility, documentation and connectivity– and often live within the closed economies of refugee camps – they make visible that which is easy to disregard: the degree to which education must urgently build adaptive human capacity, not simply deliver information. Displaced youth have a deep understanding of the importance of digital fluency as a pathway to both knowledge and self-reliance, AI is both a potential lifeline and a trap for them. This duality makes refugees one of the most instructive sites from which to examine the conference theme: how to keep humanity at the core of international education in the AI age. With decades of combined experience in refugee higher education access, panellists will demonstrate how their programmes address this necessity. Learning objectives: - How can universities and other international education actors understand their pedagogical and social responsibilities when providing digital education and scholarships in humanitarian contexts? - What can mainstream international education in Asia learn from how high-touch, critical-thinking-centred operate in refugee contexts? - What does a responsible framework for AI implementation look like in Asia-Pacific contexts where displacement, statelessness, and digital exclusion intersect? - Can AI serve as a genuine equaliser for displaced learners, or does it reproduce existing hierarchies of access and belonging? Target audience: International recruiters, Computer Scientists/other academics interested in learning from the impact of AI-powered solutions in untraditional settings, admissions officers, those with an interest in the SDGs.