Tag artificial intelligence

Guardians of the Lifeworld: From Brussels to What Comes Next

Dr Felicity Healey-Benson Leave a comment

There is a tradition now at hanfod.NL of bringing phenomenology to the Networked Learning Conference with a little orange accompaniment. It began with our hNL21 node event in 2021, followed by orange beanies and badges at NLC Sundsvall in 2022, where we celebrated our double symposium and the collaborators who helped make it possible. In Malta in 2024, orange socks marked the pre-launch of our Springer edited collection Phenomenology in Action for Researching Networked Learning, with Professors Cathy Adams and Nina Bonderup Dohn joining Mike and me as the hanfod.NL four. For NLC Brussels 2026, we decided metaphorical orange superpants were called for. If you are going to suggest that phenomenology might help guard the conditions of human thinking in an age of technological acceleration, you might as well dress for the occasion.

At the Fifteenth International Conference on Networked Learning in Brussels/Ixelles, our paper, Guardians of the Lifeworld: Phenomenological Dwelling and Resistance in an Age of Acceleration, brought the latest strand of hanfod.NL thinking into the NLC conversation. The work grew from our Springer edited collection, from a generative conversation with Cathy and Nina during a hanfod.NL meeting in March 2025, and from a question that neither of us could quite shake: in an era where large language models accelerate, automate and optimise, what does it mean to protect the very act of human thinking? Not thinking simply as information processing or efficient output, but thinking as a mode of dwelling.

We found some unlikely companions in the Guardians of the Galaxy. Rather than treating them as characters to decode, we dwelt with them phenomenologically. Star-Lord, Gamora, Rocket, Nebula, Groot, Mantis and Drax offered different ways into questions of memory, ethical orientation, intervention, healing and relational forms of knowing that resist easy capture. Through them, we explored what we called humanity sidelined: fragments of post-digital scholarly practice where technological intervention can get in the way of humans humanly benefiting from their own scholarly activity. Our concern is not simply technological error or hallucination. It is what might happen when uncertainty is resolved before it has been inhabited, when the difficult encounter with research material is shortened or bypassed, or when the messy grappling through which understanding develops is replaced by something already fluent, ordered and finished.

One of the striking reflections emerging from Brussels was that phenomenology seemed to be triggering something. People appeared drawn towards it while sometimes struggling to articulate quite why. That space between recognising something and not yet possessing the language for it is territory phenomenology knows rather well. Our Guardians offer no simple solution to technological acceleration, nor were they intended to. They offer persistence, responsiveness and an invitation to remain with what resists capture.

The Brussels conference was not, however, the end of this particular inquiry. We are delighted that Guardians of the Lifeworld has since been selected as one of 15 NLC2026 conference papers invited for development into a chapter for the forthcoming edited Networked Learning volume, currently working under the title Care, brokering and learning in technology-entangled times. The opportunity allows us not simply to reproduce the conference paper, but to develop the thinking further. Some of that development was already beginning in the conversations generated at NLC2026: dwelling more deeply with the Guardians, exploring what collective guardianship might mean, and addressing questions raised around metaphorical analysis.

So, the work is in progress, which seems rather fitting. For hanfod.NL, phenomenology has never been something finished that we simply apply. It asks us to stay with what is unfolding, disturb what has become taken for granted, and sometimes find language for something we sensed before we could articulate it. The conference paper is published, now the chapter is becoming.

Felicity

Healey-Benson, F., & Johnson, M. (2026). Guardians of the Lifeworld: Phenomenological Dwelling and Resistance in an Age of Acceleration. Fifteenth International Conference on Networked Learning.

State Visit from QR Royalty Discussing AI and Authentic Intelligence

Mike Johnson Leave a comment

We try and avoid hyperbole, but Dr Kyungmee’s next job seems really amazing. At the end of the month, she’s relocating from Lancaster’s CTEL, to join the Department of Education at Seoul National University, South Korea as Associate Professor in Qualitative Research Methodology. Her task: bring qualitative research to South Korea, where a very high proportion of research outputs are quantitative.

Kyungmee was keen to visit us in Wales for a number of reasons, apart from simply sharing the same time and space to discuss ideas in-person, which was a wonderful privilege. Kyungmee is contributing a chapter to our book, and I’ve known her since 2014 when I started the CTEL doctoral programme. Since then we’ve also popped up at the Networked Learning Conferences together, and hopefully we’ll meet again in Malta for NLC there next year. Hope you can join us!

Yesterday, for an hour in the Glamorgan Council Chamber, we piggy-backed onto Cardiff University School of Social Sciences’ education research seminar series for 2022-23, with a session exploring the claims/discourses around Artificial Intelligence with respect to qualitative research. Kyungmee noticed that AI does not ‘struggle’, indeed that is a selling point, where AI promises to alleviate struggle and help us achieve ‘better research findings’ in a ‘smarter’ way and outputs that we can have greater confidence in. This can be seen in marketing for recent AI enhancements to ATLAS.ti, a popular qualitative data analysis platform. But are AI shortcuts legitimate to authentically develop deep insights into human experiences, such as those featured in a recent ‘Autoethnography’ special issue of Studies in Technology Enhanced Learning, where authors are concerned with workplace bullying, discrimination, institutional racism…?? AI discourses play into dominant wider (meta-)discourses of an ‘economic-pragmatic nature, that demands fast, efficient, predictable and controllable productivity from the educational institutions.” (Hodgson et al. 2012, p300, drawing upon Levinson & Nielsen’s use of Dyson, 1999). This is at least a paradox when also considering educational trajectories that cherish students’ development towards autonomous and collaborative criticality and creativity. In our post-digital era, student and researcher already faced an existential threat from information over-production, a seemingly ever-growing barrier to enter and stay abreast of almost any field. AI solutions to the processes of literature reviewing seem benign, and even helpful. But the discourses around AI invite us to distrust humans: ‘Data has a better idea’. This runs counter to ground that qualitative researchers had presumed they occupied. As De Silva and El-Ayoubi (2023) indicate, all aspects of human science question ideation, method selection, data analysis, writing up and review, could be outsourced to software. Neoliberal higher education is sucking us dry with imperatives to do more with less: churn high-ranking impactful outputs under conditions of diminishing salaries, career uncertainty and over-work. We’re tired. Even while writing this, WordPress is suggesting that AI can make up for my humanity – how ironically demeaning.

Nevertheless, Kyungmee said, qualitative researchers contend that, “humans are political beings in unique historical contexts, with our own struggles, perspectives, experiences, and narratives that are subjective and partial.” We must continue to expose social inequalities, the lived experiences of struggle, power relationships/conflicts in people’s complex and nuanced ordinary everyday human life. In the face of Big Data and AI, autoethnography sails in the opposite direction. Indeed, the graft of writing is so bound up in autoethnography and phenomenology it is hard to see a place for AI, unless we meant Authentic Intelligence.

Dr Kyungmee Lee at the Glamorgan Building Council Chamber

References

De Silva, D. and El-Ayoubi, M. 2023. Three ways to leverage ChatGPT and other generative AI in research. Times Higher Education. 20 June. Available at: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/three-ways-leverage-chatgpt-and-other-generative-ai-research [Accessed: 6 July 2023].

Dyson, A. 1999. Inclusion and inclusions: theories and discourses in inclusive education. In: Daniels, H. and Garner, P. eds. World yearbook of education. 1999: Inclusive education. London: Kogan Page, pp. 36–53.

Hodgson, V., McConnell, D., & Dirckinck-Holmfeld, L. (2012). The Theory, Practice and Pedagogy of Networked Learning. In L. Dirckinck-Holmfeld, V. Hodgson, & D. McConnell (Eds.), Exploring the Theory, Pedagogy and Practice of Networked Learning (pp. 291–305). Springer New York.

Levinsen, K. T., & Nielsen, J. (2012). Innovating Design for Learning in the Networked Society. In L. Dirckinck-Holmfeld, V. Hodgson, & D. McConnell (Eds.), Exploring the Theory, Pedagogy and Practice of Networked Learning (pp. 237–256). Springer New York.