The AI Shock in Higher Education: Exploring Digital Precarity, Pedagogical Authority, and Social Reproduction in District Hyderabad Colleges through Mixed-Methods and SEM Analysis

The present study explores the sociological consequences of the addition of artificial intelligence in Pakistan's higher education, theorizing the phenomenon as an AI shock that researches academic labor, teaching authority, and inequality within the global south. Using Bourdieu's capital theory, Kalleberg's precarity framework, and Giddens' structuration theory, this research assumes a progressive explanatory mixed method design combining quantitative descriptive and regression analysis by using SPSS, further inferential methods like correlation, heat map, regression coefficient, and SEM models analyses by using Python, as well as the qualitative thematic analysis of teacher interviews. Data were collected from 300 educators at public and private colleges in Tandojam. This indicates that while AI integration moderately enhances digital capital and pedagogical authority, it also increases job instability and institutional dependency. Regression and SEM results show that pedagogical authority (beta = 0.37) and digital capital (beta = 0.38) have substantial adverse effects. Qualitative models confirm that teachers experience AI as both an empowering tool and a source of fear, shaped by institutional pressure, gendered workload, and irregular access to training. These findings suggest that AI-driven reforms further reproduce existing orders under conditions of policy-driven digitalization, a process that resonates with Bourdieu and Passeron's 1990 social reproduction theory. The study examines these dynamics through the prism of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs 4, 8, and 10), highlighting that quality education, decent work, and reduced inequalities will require reorienting AI adoption toward equitable labor practices and ethical governance. The present study concludes by conceiving digital precarity as a defining feature within the outlines of the 21st-century academic field and calls for a human-centered digital transition that foregrounds teacher agency, institutional justice, and social sustainability.