Slowness as Postdigital Positionality in the Era of Generative AI: A Conversation

Abstract

Our work explores the impact of generative AI (GenAI) on academic life through the lenses of three female scholars. It highlights how the rapid rise of AI technologies has created pressure for faster productivity, leading to feelings of disconnection and overwhelm. In response, we advocate for embracing ‘slowness’ as an act of resistance to the fast-paced, neoliberal demands of academia and allows space for reflection and care. Slowness pushes to the margins, but it also encompasses a careful exploration of such margins as drivers of identity and collective belonging. Therefore, we purport that active slowness supports the construction of a postdigital positionality. To carry out our research work, we engaged in a conversation captured as a collaborative autoethnography. We exchanged 617 messages on Signal and met 5 times online taking individual and shared fieldnotes over the 8 months. Our analysis reveals four key phases in our collective narrative: the initial confrontation with the disruptive ‘tsunami’ of GenAI, the emergence of dilemmas in academic practice, moments of critical epiphany regarding our engagement with technology, and the envisioning of future practices that privilege ethical, inclusive, and context-sensitive approaches. Therefore, our approach to slowness prioritises human understanding, emotional well-being, and collaboration, emphasising the difficulties and the joy of embracing uniqueness and diversity. We discuss to which extent our exercise of slowness captured through a conversation as political choice for a research method can lead to an authentic critical stance toward the instrumental use of AI in academic practices. We conclude that slowness and care as active practice against the dominant AI-driven narrative, should be based on recognising the creative synergies in the margins reinforcing alternative (postdigital) positionalities, rather than just expressing stress, suffering, and misalignment with the ongoing, fast-paced trends.