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About

Why This Series Exists

The Premise

Researchers are already working with AI. Machine Collaborators creates space to talk about it honestly.

AI is reshaping how scholars write, analyze, code, teach, and think. But the conversations about it tend to cluster at extremes — breathless enthusiasm or existential dread. Neither is especially useful for researchers trying to do their work well.

Machine Collaborators starts from a different place: curiosity about practice. What does it actually look like when a political scientist uses a language model to help with qualitative coding? When a historian asks GPT to draft an abstract? When a methods instructor redesigns a syllabus around AI-assisted analysis?

We don't pretend these tools are neutral, and we don't pretend they're going away. The interesting questions are in between: What workflows actually work? Where do these tools fail? What are the implications for authorship, evidence, pedagogy, and method?

Format

Every two weeks, we meet on Zoom for an open conversation. The format is deliberately informal:

  • A short presentation (15–20 minutes) on the session topic
  • Open discussion and Q&A (30–40 minutes)
  • No formal papers required — works in progress, demos, and honest reflections welcome

Who This Is For

Anyone in or adjacent to academic research who is thinking seriously about AI in scholarly practice:

  • Faculty and researchers across disciplines
  • Graduate students and postdocs
  • Research staff and data scientists
  • University administrators thinking about AI policy
  • Anyone curious about what happens when researchers work with AI

Convener

Charles Crabtree is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University and K-Club Professor at University College, Korea University.

Machine Collaborators grows from an observation that these tools are already embedded in scholarly practice — and that examining how, openly, is more useful than treating the subject as taboo.

Crabtree also teaches live seminars on AI topics through AI Horizons, including AI-Enabled Better Experiments and AI Agent-Driven Research Workflows.

Questions or ideas? Reach out at charles.crabtree@monash.edu.

Advisory Board

Sarah K. Dreier · Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of New Mexico

Mitchell Bosley · Postdoctoral Researcher, National Center for AI Research (CENIA)

Upcoming Speakers

These speakers are confirmed for future sessions. Dates to be announced.

Yaoyao Dai · Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh

Steven Denney · Assistant Professor, International Relations and Korean Studies, Leiden University

Jae Yeon Kim · Assistant Professor of Public Policy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill