The AI Renaissance and the Futures of Qualitative Inquiry

Within the landscape of qualitative inquiry, generative AI is no longer peripheral to research practice; rather, it is shaping the very terrain on which inquiry rests. While many scholars argue that these presumably inevitable entanglements are promising, others have cautioned against the potential for extractive and depoliticized orientations to social inquiry. For many qualitative inquirers, the “AI Renaissance” has raised crucial questions about how the core practices and commitments of qualitative inquiry are being disrupted and radically reshaped by AI’s epistemic logics. Beginning from a position that resists the presumption of AI’s inevitability in qualitative inquiry, in this talk, I interrogate the impacts of AI on the foundational practices of qualitative inquiry and call on the qualitative research community to engage with care when envisioning the use (or not) of AI. Here, I contend that AI is not simply a neutral technological tool, but rather one that is serving to reconfigure relations between inquirer and participant, data and interpretation, and human and nonhuman. Rather than offering a roadmap to follow, I provide a series of questions that invite an acknowledgement of and reckoning with the inevitable consequences of AI in ways that center qualitative inquiry’s longstanding commitment to situated knowing and relational ethics.