2025 Theses Doctoral

Cyborg Composing: Feeling Specters in the Web of AI Intra-Actions

Barber, Chelsey Ann

This research explores the intricate entanglements of writing, thinking, and technology in the age of AI, through a post-intentional phenomenological approach. Grounded in a semester-long college composition class, this work invites both predictive and generative AI into the writing process.

Anchored by the metaphor of a spider weaving its web, this work delves into the theoretical and practical implications of using AI in academic writing and classroom practices, specifically at the early college level. By integrating Derrida’s hauntology, Massumi’s affect theory, and Haraway’s cyborg theory, this work explores the ways that algorithmic identities function as a haunting presence. This work frames these algorithmic identities as ‘phantom limbs’ which haunt our offline lives, inspire embodied and affective responses, and blur the boundaries between humans and machines.

Through closely reading six classroom intra-actions, I begin to explore the ways in which Artificial Intelligence highlights key hauntological tensions between expansion and contraction, where AI serves to both expand perspectives while simultaneously contracting it as a result of the ghosts of previous online intra-action. Similarly, affective tensions arise out of moving between the internal and external, resulting from the ways that internal reflection reveals external cultural narratives while turning outward to digital tools can help illuminate some internal value systems.

Finally, in moving between these hauntological and affective spaces a cyborg self emerges, one which blends our digital selves with embodied responses, where it is unclear where the embodied self stops and the digital self begins.