Learning to Stay With Uncertainty

This article reflects on our journey of working to facilitate discussions around the role of Generative AI (GenAI) in education within the Department of Media and Culture Studies (MCW) at Utrecht University during the academic year 2025–2026. What initially appeared to be a manageable question of GenAI’s impact on assessment and writing gradually revealed a complex web of concerns about student engagement, workloads, institutional priorities, and ultimately the purposes and values of higher education itself. Approaching the GenAI moment as a wicked problem, we realized we needed to shift our orientation from finding solutions to creating conditions for collective reflection, imagination, and experimentation. Ultimately, we suggest that responding to GenAI is not so much about finding a way out of uncertainty, but about learning to stay with it by remaining attentive to what emerges, creating space for what might become possible, and continuing to act from the anchor point of the educational purposes and values we care about.