Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) is increasingly integrated into higher education, raising methodological and ethical questions for qualitative research instruction. This article examines how we, three experienced qualitative research instructors, integrated GAI tools into our graduate-level research methods courses. Our pedagogical approach to integrating GAI tools is situated within the broader literature on GAI in higher education and qualitative research instruction, emphasizing active learning and technological reflexivity. Our work is also guided by Ethan Mollick’s artificial intelligence (AI) principles from Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. Using reflective narrative case examples, we demonstrate how Mollick’s principles guided ethical and methodologically responsive integration of GAI, challenged assumptions about rigor and trustworthiness, and reconfigured instructor–student relationships. We conclude by highlighting tensions between efficiency, inclusion, and epistemic responsibility and implications for qualitative research education.
Gaining access to elite participants in institutionally protected settings is one of qualitative criminology’s most persistent and least documented methodological challenges. This article draws on doctoral fieldwork with senior health care executives in the U.K. private hospital sector to develop and extend Collett’s concept of the hustle into a digitally mediated, institutionally defended research context. Engaging closely with Collett’s four dimensions, the article identifies new manifestations of each that her original framework, developed in the technology industry, does not address: tech platform-gatekeeping and infrastructural barriers (access); design dictated by regulatory database availability (research design); referral distortion in snowball-recruited interviews (data); and persona alteration and linguistic labour in intersectionally disadvantaged fieldwork (dynamics). Together, these constitute what this article terms the infrastructural hustle: the specific configuration of the hustle in digitally mediated, institutionally defended settings. The article also updates James’s technique of inferential email construction for a post-GDPR environment, examines the ethical governance gaps this generates, and contributes to qualitative criminology, elite interviewing methodology, and the sociology of knowledge production.
Abolitionist debates about carceral reform have focused primarily on the consequences of reform, with less attention to how research methods may shape possibilities for organizational change. Drawing on a feminist participatory action research project in community corrections, we argue that method can function as one form of organizational intervention. We show how participatory practices—relationality, shared interpretation, strategic language, and sustained presence—contributed to shaping how knowledge circulated and authority operated, and to the conditions under which “imaginable reforms”—harm-reducing, non-expansive changes aligned with an abolitionist ethic—became possible. By foregrounding method as epistemic and organizational infrastructure, this study contributes to methodological debates by suggesting how qualitative inquiry can become one consequential part of institutional change within constrained settings.
The persona joins the conversation framed by the epigraph, rebutting the reduction of anthropology to stenography. This sonnet sequence is a love letter to ethnography. Field notes are good for thinking, and resulting theorizing is often accomplished through storytelling, of which poetry is an ancient genre. The persona considers the aesthetics of interpretation, emphasizing the materiality and embodiment of writing. Writing is described as a way of knowing. Challenges to imagination promoting creative dwelling, notably narrative transportation, are unpacked. Difference is acknowledged as a wellspring of insight. Finally, the practical relevance of anthropological theorizing/storytelling to social institutions is addressed.
