“We Are All Chimeras”: A Queer Cyborg Manifesto on Artificial Intelligence in Qualitative Research

• In Event: Complicated and Complicating Questions About the Role of AI in Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

“We specifically forbid the use of any generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools at all stages of the work process” (Bayraktar, 2024, para 4).
“College students want their money back after professor caught using ChatGPT” (Burman, 2025, para. 1).

A social media group of higher education faculty features dozens of threads opining the end of students’ critical thinking due to the influences and effects of artificial intelligence (AI), and the inevitable downfall of ethical human-participant research (e.g., Barshay, 2025). Meanwhile, students complain about faculty’s reliance on AI for teaching, assessment, and research (e.g., Nolan, 2025), and scholars worldwide stand aghast at published work being ‘fed’ to AI, threatening researchers’ future obsolescence (Warner, 2025).
Scholarship specifically focused on AI in qualitative research predominately considers how reliably that research-related tedium might be offloaded to AI, such as outsourcing data coding to ChatGPT (Morgan, 2023), tasking AI to read “large chunk[s] of uninteresting text” for researchers (Anis & French, 2023, p. 1), refining AI prompts to improve AI-generated data findings (Zhang et al., 2025), and generally relying on AI to make “traditionally time-consuming analysis tasks more efficient and less burdensome” (Hitch, 2023, p. 595).

My concern, as someone who conducts and teaches qualitative research with a queer feminist theoretical lens, is that across these different concerns and discussions is an overarching assumption that humans and AI operate discretely and distinctly from one another. There is presumably a clear demarcation between human and machine: AI is a tool for humans to use; AI is a replacement for human work; human contributions are superseded by (or superior/inferior to) AI. However, as Nordstrom noted a decade ago, technology and humans have always been intertwined in qualitative research (2015), and human work has long been inextricably and undeniably in collaboration with/connection to technology, ranging from notebooks and pens, to tape recorders and cassettes, to digital recorders, to virtual meeting apps, to AI.

Drawing on my experiences in teaching and researching with/through/alongside AI as a qualitative methodologist, I draw inspiration from Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1985) and Barad’s “Trans-materialities” (2015) to critique the artificial and “deepened dualisms” that higher education and, specifically, the field of qualitative research seem to assume by drawing bold demarcations between human and AI (1985, p. 14). Instead, I argue that researchers are and have always/already been “all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism—in short, cyborgs” (1985, p. 14). Recognizing that we are amalgamations/partners of/with AI, rather than victims or controllers, I provide examples from my research and teaching that offer new forms of agency and possibility, in both teaching and engaging in research methods, where we might take “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries” between human and machine (p. 7), rather than fear them. Synthesizing Barad’s queer theorizing of technology/science/human chimeras with Haraway’s, I consider how this “would-be monstrosity” of cyborgian-human-AI-hybrid offers “self-affirmation, theoretical inventiveness, political action, and energizing vitality” to qualitative researchers and methods (2015, p. 392).

Author

• Stephanie Anne Shelton, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill