SUBJECTIVITY IN THE ALGORITHMIC ERA

AI is now part of the everyday environment in which qualitative research happens. It appears in search engines, transcription platforms, writing tools, institutional software, and the background systems that shape how researchers encounter, organize, and represent knowledge. This article asks what reflexivity means when research is mediated by technologies that are often difficult to see, understand, or refuse.

​

I develop algorithmic reflexivity as a way of tracing how researchers and AI systems become entangled in the production of knowledge. The framework extends reflexive practice beyond the individual researcher to the wider assemblages that shape what can be asked, interpreted, remembered, and made visible. AI is treated as an active force in research practice, one that can influence interpretation, method, feeling, positionality, and whose knowledge is recognized or erased.

​

The article responds to concerns that AI makes reflexivity impossible by arguing that AI intensifies problems qualitative researchers have always had to confront. It shifts the central reflexive question from “Who am I in this research?” to “What systems am I working through, and how do they shape what becomes knowable?”