Seminar | AI and community-based research: ethics and interculturality

In this joint talk we will discuss challenges and affordances of AI tools (e.g., conversational agents, chatbots) in diverse community contexts including refugee support groups and participatory arts and health programmes (Bradley & Pöyhönen, 2025; Ganassin et al., 2025). We draw on our extensive experience of carrying out qualitative research with vulnerable and often marginalised people to offer some insights into how AI is rapidly changing these environments and shaping how we do research.

We explore two main areas which we define as follows. First, the increasing presence of AI tools in people's everyday postdigital lives, for example AI translation tools being used to support interactions, memes and imagery being shared among friends and AI-based apps. Acknowledging that AI is more and more a part of people's day to day means that as researchers we must also think about how our lenses expand to incorporate and explore this. Second, the evolving research environment and adoption of tools for aspects of research that include data collection and analysis, and even research dissemination.

This requires us as researchers to critically educate ourselves widening our lenses as we navigate this new and evolving landscape. We will offer research-informed perspectives which foreground ethical and intercultural approaches, centring participants’ lives and voices whilst maintaining human agency.

References

Bradley, J. & Pöyhönen, S. (2025) Walking with: understandings and negotiations of the mundane in research. Applied Linguistics Review, 16(1), 345–367. doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2024-0069

Ganassin, S., Georgiou, A., & Brohi, H. (2025). ‘It would be better if you had a UK degree’: exploring the experiences of highly-skilled refugee women in the UK. Language and Intercultural Communication, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2025.2519905