Staying-With Discomfort: AI, Whiteness, and Ethical Disorientation in Participatory Fieldwork

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 7:45 am - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Posthuman Encounters with Educational Technologies

Abstract

This paper engages a diffractive inquiry into the entangled roles of whiteness, artificial intelligence (AI), and participatory fieldwork with adolescent mothers in Kibera, Kenya. Drawing on feminist posthumanism and decolonial theory, I use AI not as an analytic tool but as a relational irritant—an unsettling interlocutor to ethical tension, narrative pressure, and institutional complicity. In response to AERA’s 2025 theme of dismantling racial injustice, I ask what it means to do participatory research in global contexts when whiteness remains mobile and communities structurally unheard. I argue that AI can act as an unlikely companion in ethical disorientation, challenging the researcher’s narrative impulses. Through fieldwork vignettes and AI dialogue, I explore how refusal might deepen, not diminish, accountability.

Author

• Sarah Cornette, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill