Jessica Nina Lester

Jessica Nina Lester (she/her) is a Professor of Qualitative Methodology in the Qualitative & Quantitative Methodology Program in the School of Education at IUB. Having been trained in cultural studies and qualitative research methodologies, she takes an interdisciplinary approach to much of her work, including both the methodological and substantive foci in her research program. In Jessica’s methodological work, she publishes in areas related to critical approaches to qualitative method/ology, with a particular focus on discourse and conversation analysis methods, digital tools/spaces in qualitative research, and disability in critical qualitative inquiry. In her substantive research, Jessica has sought to examine and illustrate how everyday and institutional language use makes visible what and who becomes positioned as normal and abnormal in relation to the oft taken-for-granted normality-abnormality binary. Most recently, she co-authored the book, Doing Qualitative Research in a Digital World(Sage, 2022), and co-edited the volume, Centering Diverse Bodyminds in Critical Qualitative Inquiry (Routledge, 2021). She teaches qualitative method/ology courses and mentors graduate students in qualitative inquiry from a range of disciplines.

Keynote Title: 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.