For me, the entire inquiry stands or falls on moving past the simplistic and frankly dangerous metaphor of AI as just a “tool.” A tool is something you can pick up and put down. It has clear boundaries. But AI, because of its profound pervasion into every corner of our lives, isn’t like that at all. It’s in the air we breathe. You can’t put it down, because even if you do, your students, your colleagues, and the entire information ecosystem are still using it. Its logic is seeping into the world.
This is why I argue that the central figuration for understanding our relationship with AI must be the cyborg. A cyborg is a cybernetic organism—a hybrid entity whose boundaries have been breached and reconfigured. AI is not a tool I hold in my hand; it is a prosthesis that I am becoming entangled with, and that is becoming entangled with me.
And this leads to the crucial process of cyborgification. This isn’t a clean, smooth upgrade like installing new software. It’s a messy, ongoing, and often difficult process. It’s fricative, abrasive. It’s an incision. There’s a kind of violation in how this prosthesis compounds and modifies my body as a teacher, as a writer, as a thinker. It augments certain capacities but also replaces others, and the interface is never seamless. It’s a constant, dynamic negotiation.
In my research, that abrasive interface is language itself. It’s semiosis. We as a species are already largely unaware of how profoundly language shapes us, how it seeds our thoughts and builds our realities. Now, we are plugging a machine directly into that intimate process—a machine that assembles language in a way that is completely alien to human cognition and embodied experience. It mimics our output without any of our internal meaning-making. This creates a profound site of tension, confusion, and potential that we cannot ignore.
And this is precisely why my methodology cannot be traditionally qualitative. It must be post-qualitative, posthumanist, and new materialist.
First, because cyborgification is a messy, ongoing process, I have to focus on movement, not static snapshots. A traditional interview would only tell me what an instructor thinks on a Tuesday. My methods, with the diaries and evolving artifacts, are designed to trace how their practices, their boundaries, and their feelings shift from week to week as they live through this messy entanglement.
Second, because the interface is fricative and often violating, I have to focus on affect. The experience of this entanglement is felt in the body—as a tension in the chest, a moment of relief, a jolt of frustration, a wave of uncanny awe—long before it’s ever articulated as a rational thought. A traditional approach would reduce this to a simple emotion like “anxiety.” My post-qualitative approach seeks to preserve the nameless, visceral texture of that lived experience, to understand what that affect does in shaping pedagogical choices.
And finally, because the boundaries between me, my students, and the AI are constantly shifting, I have to study the entanglement itself. This is the new materialist move. I can’t treat the “instructor” as a separate, pre-existing unit of analysis who then “uses” a tool. I have to look at the whole apparatus—the human, the non-human, the syllabus, the algorithm, the institutional policy—and see how they are all acting together to co-produce the pedagogical reality of the classroom.
So for me, the cyborg is not just a clever metaphor from science fiction. It’s the most accurate and honest description of the condition we are now in. It’s a figuration that carries an ethical weight and demands a methodology that is responsive to complexity, movement, and the messy, difficult, and sometimes beautiful reality of becoming-with these powerful new entities.
At its heart, this study makes the claim that the figure of the ‘instructor using a tool’ is no longer a useful model for understanding our reality. Instead, I argue that the cyborg—a hybrid of human and machine—is the most accurate description of the contemporary educator.
“Once we accept this, the entire research approach has to change. The cyborg is not a static object; it’s a being in a constant process of becoming, of cyborgification. This is why my study is fundamentally about movement, not static themes, which necessitates a post-qualitative approach like longitudinal diaries.
“Furthermore, this process of becoming is not clean or abstract; it’s a messy, embodied, and deeply affective experience. My method is designed to be sensitive to these affective forces, which is a core commitment of new materialism.
“Finally, because the cyborg’s boundaries are inherently unstable, its primary work is boundary-drawing. My study focuses on these ‘agential cuts’—the lines drawn in syllabi and assignments that momentarily define the human-machine relationship.
“So, every part of my methodology—from tracing movement, to attending to affect, to analyzing material artifacts—is a direct and necessary consequence of taking the figure of the cyborg seriously. It is the central theoretical commitment that drives the entire inquiry.”