This autoethnographic study explores the intersection of neurodivergent cognition and artificial intelligence through an emergent, musically informed methodology. Written from the lived perspective of a neurodivergent scholar, the narrative unfolds as a series of recursive vignettes, dialogic exchanges, and epiphanic moments, composed in collaboration with ChatGPT. Rather than positioning AI as a neutral tool, the study embraces it as a divergent interlocutor whose patterns of hyperfocus, recursion, and layered processing mirror neurodivergent ways of thinking. Through personal stories of insomnia, sensory overwhelm, musical intuition, and professional dissonance, a theory begins to emerge: one that listens vertically and horizontally, hears complexity, and holds dissonance as generative. ChatGPT acts as mirror and as amplifier, helping reframe memory into meaning and chaos into coherence. Together, human and AI cocompose a living theory that values reflexivity, narrative depth, and cognitive multiplicity. This work contributes to evolving conversations around AI-augmented qualitative inquiry, neurodiversity in academia, and inclusive epistemologies. It offers a model of coauthored knowledge production rooted in rhythm, resonance, and ethical attunement.
Although AI is most often framed as a cognitive tool, its social and psychological effects are arguably much more profound. AI has far-reaching implications for human experience on an emotive, embodied level; it is not simply another technical innovation, since its rapid evolution will likely change our deepest, most cherished beliefs about what it means to be human and how we see ourselves, collectively and individually. It raises unique challenges for those who are invested in forms of creative expression, especially deeply personal, intimate, and introspective writing. Accordingly, this essay describes an autoethnographic experiment in which three authors used AI to mimic their writing voices and to compare their unassisted responses to a research question about the nature and meaning of autoethnographic writing. Results revealed startling insights about the nature of writing identity and the human search for meaning in the age of AI, causing the authors to question just what makes us quintessentially human anyway.
This essay frames the Journal of Autoethnography’s special issue on generative artificial intelligence (AI). The authors synthesize three ways contributors conceptualize the role of AI, specifically large language models (LLMs), in autoethnographic practice: collaborator, interlocutor, and tool. Each configuration surfaces distinct possibilities and risks, which are detailed. The authors conclude by critically examining how LLMs reduce the uncertainty and friction of narrative writing and by arguing that autoethnography’s survival may depend on reintroducing friction and engaging it deliberately and transparently.
An autoethnographic exploration is presented in this paper, focusing on a group of students identified as the Urban Elite Cohort (UEC). Characterized by a backdrop of White flight and shifting student demographics, this research sheds light on the understated effects of language-based discrimination, revealing the influence of institutionalized linguicism and entrenched racial biases prevalent during my formative K–12 years. Through personal narratives, the exploration of student identity formation illuminates the intricacies of language-based stigmatization, social hierarchies, and internalized ideologies within the UEC. The narratives examine the UEC’s navigation of dominant ideologies, their compliance with school norms, and the impact on student identities. This study advocates innovative practices, particularly in liminal spaces such as Nepantla, to promote equity and solidarity among students, thereby fostering a more just and reflective educational environment. Reflections from this autoethnographic study illustrate the complexities of linguistic identity within educational spaces, calling for introspection and advocacy for educational justice.
This article uses autoethnography to reflect on the author’s evolving commitment to vegetarianism as an anthropologist. The study is situated within the context of ethnographic research in South Korea, which the author began as an omnivore in 2012. A key challenge during this research was grappling with the status of Korean dogs as both elusive commodities and cultural symbols, existing on a spectrum between commodification and singularization. This tension prompted the author to reconsider the ways in which animals are categorized in European contexts and beyond. This struggle also led to a deeper understanding of the violence inherent in concealing animal slaughter and in designating certain animals as “companions” while others are excluded from this status. Drawing on the philosophical works of Jacques Derrida and Simone Weil, the article explores how this ethnographic experience became an “ecstatic” encounter that pushed the author “outside of themselves,” ultimately fostering an awareness of the “embodied vulnerability” shared with other animals.
This essay explores the intersections of autoethnography, creativity, and artificial intelligence through a series of reflective vignettes grounded in both embodied practice and technological engagement. Drawing from work in a high-tech makerspace, teaching, and artistic practice, the author examines the tensions between slow, tangible modes of inquiry, such as handwriting, glasswork, and maker-centered processes and the rapid, adaptive, and sometimes unsettling affordances of AI. The essay introduces the concept of critical intimacy, a reflective posture for engaging with technology that emphasizes awareness, ethical discernment, and personal agency. Through examples ranging from adaptive AI in virtual reality and video games to generative text systems, it interrogates how AI reshapes authorship, narrative authority, and the processes of creative and scholarly labor. The essay invites readers to consider AI not as a neutral tool or a substitute for human experience, but as a complex collaborator whose engagement requires mindfulness, reflection, and intentionality. Ultimately, it argues that preserving the embodied, deliberative, and human dimensions of writing, particularly in autoethnography, is essential for maintaining authorship, selfhood, and the relational trust between writer and reader.
This autoethnography showcases the difficulty of trying to live in and eventually having to leave a rural community due to the destructive forces the Trump era has brought to these once “our children” communities. When we arrived in Atown in the early 2000s, the community was a welcoming if isolated place where Republicans and Democrats both served on the county board. By the time we left, as did many others who did not fit the community’s Trumpified ethos or lack thereof, the village no longer accepted those who were not adherents to the MAGA way of life. Over the years we watched, though not from afar as we were engaged with the state Democratic Party, as intolerance for outsiders and others grew. Our own safety was no longer assured when we hosted Democratic Party booths at local festivals. By 2022, it was clear we no longer belonged; we were no longer safe in our home. The struggles of living in this culture of grievance demanded we leave.
This autoethnographic essay explores the possibilities and limitations of narrating with AI technologies. The stories presented complexify how human beings may engage with the intersections of AI and autoethnography, including theorizing the analytical possibilities of autoethnography and deepfakes to locate the forces of transformative power in the hopes of liberation for the storied body. As two critical intercultural feminist scholars and pedagogues, the stories herein reveal how weaving and braiding through AI-generated stories are neither partial nor incomplete storied fragments and how it is critical to consider the ethical possibilities for autoethnography. Finally, through the distinctness of an anti-human technology, this essay examines the ethics of doing and using autoethnography and AI technologies as they are interwoven into human experiences.
This article investigates the intersection of generative AI—particularly large language models (LLMs)—with autoethnographic scholarship, informed by new materialist thought and a framework of reenchantment. It posits that the use of LLMs acts as a form of “sorcery,” enabling seemingly supernatural effects via specific more-than-human interactional practices, and that this circumstance is reflected in popular understandings of these technologies. By examining the broadened rubric of agency in a posthumanist context, the author argues that LLMs complicate the familiar “self/other” dualism in autoethnography and force a recognition of humans as part of naturecultural assemblages of diverse actors. In efforts to recognize and write this reality, the figure of the “materialist magician”—drawn from the work of C. S. Lewis—may serve as a guiding figure for posthumanist autoethnographers, representing those who find wonder and meaning in the material world without the need for traditional religious belief. Ultimately, the paper explores the potential costs of such sorcerous practices, weighs the societal and individual risks of increasing reliance on AI, speculates about the possibility of an identification with AI that has precedents in other historical delusions, and considers how LLMs will reshape autoethnography’s focus on documenting social conditions and the evolving sense of self.
This essay introduces constitutive artificial intelligence identity theory (CAIIT), a conceptual framework for understanding how generative artificial intelligence (AI) participates in the constitutive processes of identity formation. Through layered autoethnographic storytelling interwoven with interdisciplinary social theory, the essay explores three relational modes through which AI shapes identity: cybernetic (supportive and regulatory), cyborg (hybrid and performative), and cylon (simulative and destabilizing). These frames capture the complexity of how AI functions not merely as a communication tool but as a co-performer in the creation, regulation, and projection of selfhood. Grounded in the communication theory of identity (CTI), communication as constitutive of relationships (CCR) theorizing, affect theory, cyborg theory, and situated epistemology, the essay proposes that identity in the age of generative AI is increasingly distributed, relational, and algorithmically entangled. Through this lens, AI emerges not only as an assistant but as an identity partner—supporting cognitive and emotional regulation, enhancing relational expression, and at times unsettling notions of authorship and authenticity. CAIIT is offered as a theory in progress—an open, reflexive, and interdisciplinary attempt to articulate how humans are becoming with machines. The essay ends by calling for new ethical, methodological, and institutional paradigms that respond to the evolving role of AI in shaping not just how people communicate, but who they are becoming when they do.
This paper investigates a Chinese New Zealander, immigrant, and arts-based researcher’s evolving sense of belonging through autoethnography and arts-based inquiry. Building on insights from the author’s previous critical autoethnographic studies of identity transformation, this work seeks to communicate complex experiences in new, resonant ways, turning to AI-assisted songwriting as a means to delve deeper into the question of belonging. AI-assisted songwriting enables the researcher to confront the traditional boundaries of authorship and explore how identity can be expressed and interpreted through collaboration with a non-human entity. This partnership allows the author to take on multiple roles, as composer, performer, and listener, mirroring the complexity of an evolving sense of self and challenging conventional notions of ownership in creative work. Rather than replacing the embodied engagement of autoethnography, this study invites a rethinking of practice in the AI age. This creative collaboration provokes reflection on key questions: Can AI authentically reflect the deeply personal experiences central to the narrative of belonging? What ethical implications arise when AI technology is used in critical self-inquiry? This paper contributes to the growing discourse on generative AI and autoethnography by offering insights into how AI can be both a tool for creative expression and a catalyst for deeper self-reflection. By embracing both the possibilities and challenges that AI presents, this paper intends to expand the boundaries of critical autoethnography and invites others to consider how AI technology can be integrated into their own research practices with care, intentions, and reflexivity.
In this autoethnography of aesthetic moments between myself and my father, I highlight bonds between family and fandom, between comics and community, and how these loves survive looming losses of various importance. Throughout my entire life, my dad has shared his love for comic books and their many worlds through everything from comics and graphic novels, to movies and shows (with quality ranging from questionable to quintessential), to comic book stores and conventions close and far. These experiences have been vital to the crafting of bonds between us, creating a firm foundation that may be impacted by suffering and loss but never truly fails. Throughout the telling of these stories, I establish an aesthetics of alignment as a form of visual performativity, demonstrating one means by which autoethnography can demonstrate aesthetic merit.
A mundane trip to the laundromat became the site of a profound economic and existential revelation. Through autoethnography, this paper explores the moment the author engaged a generative AI chatbot to analyze his finances and discovered that his part-time landscaping job was effectively driving him deeper into debt each hour he worked. He frames this experience as a modern “Edenic fall,” where the AI’s data-driven analysis acted as the forbidden fruit of knowledge, shattering his ignorance and revealing the naked truth of his precarity. In doing so, the author illustrates how generative AI can serve as a powerful, if ethically complex, methodological partner in autoethnographic inquiry. Through narrative and analysis, he explores themes of wage theft, the embodied and reproductive costs of precarious labor, and the dual role of technology as both a tool for critical consciousness and an instrument of surveillance capitalism. This essay ultimately illustrates how contemporary labor systems obscure their true costs from workers, and how self-inquiry—mediated by an artificial intelligence—can become an act of resistance and empowerment, while simultaneously raising critical questions about authorship, data, and the future of autoethnographic practice in the age of AI.
This autoethnographic essay chronicles the author’s experiences toilet training his daughter, while also exploring his understandings of masculinity, vulnerability, and fatherhood. In transparently grappling with his growth in each construct, the author considers the current discourse on masculinity and fatherhood. Society often frames fatherhood as a binary with fathers labeled as either an absent provider or a “super dad” who largely eschews dominant gender norms. This essay interrogates these polar images by examining how fathers are navigating changing gender roles and the cultural and structural forces that define them. Through the lens of his own journey, the author critiques parenting resources that reinforce traditional gender roles, examines challenging thinking within himself and his familial network, and emphasizes the significance of shared responsibility between parents. The essay also explores vulnerability and aims to underscore the importance of creating supportive communities of fathers where emotional expression is valued.
This essay contributes to contemporary debates on artificial intelligence and qualitative inquiry by reflecting on what I argue are originary and epistemological limitations of AI. It interrogates these limits through a comparative engagement of AI-generated narratives and researcher-authored autoethnographic vignettes. While algorithms can reproduce structure and stylistic form, they remain devoid of our ordinary, specific realities, not archived on the internet, our lived memory and reflexive consciousness, which are the foundations of authentic autoethnographic practice. Grounded in embodied experiences of memory, materiality, and cultural belonging, the study demonstrates how autoethnography resists algorithmic generalization by foregrounding specificity, and situated truth. Through a comparative analysis of epistemic parameters (agency, data, methods, tools, techniques, results, origination, and growth), it delineates the ontological gulf separating computational synthesis from human meaning-making. Pedagogical experiments in a writing classroom further illustrate how students discern the irreplaceable value of specific lived knowledge when confronted with AI’s simulations. Ultimately, the work argues that autoethnography functions not merely as a qualitative method but as a phenomenological mode of being and knowing that safeguards the primacy of anthropic subjectivity against machinic imitation. In an age when digital systems increasingly simulate human expression, the findings affirm autoethnography as an epistemological site of resistance: reflexive and irreducibly human.
This autoethnographic nonfictional fiction narrates a Chinese father’s guilt, shame, and fear for hiding his illegitimate daughter for twenty years. Through storytelling, the author crosses temporal space and finds herself speaking in her father’s voice, acting as he would have, and fearing what he feared. Storytelling has built a relational/emotional bridge and serves as a rhetorical strategy for the author. On the one hand, autoethnography connects life and death, blurring the boundaries between the author and her father. For the first time in her life, through storytelling, she is able to walk into understanding her father and engage in a dialogue that had never been possible while her father was alive. On the other hand, her storytelling serves as a powerful critique of an unjust system in which sanity and humanity are tested and contested. The author also reflects on the privileges she enjoys as an autoethnographer, the ethical conundrums in her portrayal of her characters, and her publishing concerns. With such considerations, the characters, places, and timelines in this autoethnography are modified to prevent literal interpretations of this fictional nonfiction, or nonfictional fiction.
In this autoethnography, the author explores the connections between food memories, family relationships, and grief as she recalls how food became a marker of significant moments during her grandmother’s illness and death. For many Italian Americans, like the author and her family, food memories are tied to familial traditions and what Luce Giard calls the doing-cooking: cooking practices that reveal women’s work of teaching, nurturing, and caretaking. The author investigates the function of food memory, how acts of doing-cooking shape familial relationships, and how memories associated with these practices impact and are altered by the grieving process.
Caring for my mother who was in a deep coma after a stroke was meaningful for me. It was not just a duty enacted out of the filial piety of traditional Chinese culture, but also a way to alleviate my guilt for failing to spend enough time with her during my twelve years of study and work overseas. This act of caring was also about my self-identity, as I felt that I would lose my identity as a son when Mom was no longer in this world. This autoethnographic article draws upon my personal experiences to provide insights into healthcare, family, identity, and inequality in Chinese society. Writing in this way helps me to relieve grief and move forward with loss. This article is not only about and for my mother and myself, but also for others and their mothers who have experienced or will experience caregiving and aging.
Drawing on Laurel Richardson’s writing as a method of inquiry and bell hooks’s assertion that love is an action, this autoethnographic piece explores the challenges and possibilities of love in audiology education. Working in an allied health discipline where positivism remains the dominant voice and emotions are traditionally left at the door, the author attempts to confront the biases and influences that have shaped her teaching practices as an audiology academic. In doing so, she considers the benefits and consequences that might arise from choosing to foreground love in the education of audiology students.
