Mediated selves: an autotheoretical inquiry into academic subjectivity and the ethics of writing with AI

Counts differ because each database indexes a different set of publications. We treat OpenAlex as the canonical count; Google Scholar is not shown (no API, and crawling it violates its ToS).

Through autotheoretical methodology, this paper examines how academic subjectivity is shaped within two overlapping regimes of mediation: institutional gatekeeping and algorithmic assistance. Drawing on lived experiences of scholarly validation, rejection, and the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools in writing, this study traces how academic selves negotiate authorship, creativity, and ethical accountability. The analysis engages the frameworks of Foucault’s disciplinary power, Ahmed’s affective economies, and Braidotti’s posthuman subjectivity to understand how control, vulnerability, and adaptation operate in academic labour. By situating personal experience within these theoretical terrains, this study explores how writing with AI complicates the ideas of originality, collaboration, and authority. Contributing to the current debates on academic labour and digital authorship, this paper extends autotheory beyond feminist self-writing to the ethics of AI-assisted scholarship.