Tanisha Jowsey
Tanisha is an Associate Professor of medical education and professionalism at Bond University in Queensland Australia. She is a social scientist with 25 years of experience in social science research in healthcare. Tanisha has dedicated much of this time to researching the experiences of people living with chronic conditions and of healthcare providers, identity, temporality and matters of social justice. Tanisha has >130 publications 13 ethnographic and autoethnographic films. Tanisha’s works have been cited >80 times in health policies and guidelines for improved patient quality and safety. In 2025, Tanisha was recognised by ScholarGPS as a top scholar across all fields and among the top 0.2% of scholars in chronic illness research. She holds a PhD in medical anthropology and public health. Among Tanisha’s favourite research methods are ethnographic film, art/o/graphy, phenomenology, reflexive thematic analysis and grounded theory. In recent years, Tanisha has turned her attention to artificial intelligence (AI): how AI is used to support research, the environmental and the social costs of such support, what the public thinks about AI use in healthcare, opportunities and risks of AI for higher education, and how AI informs learning and cognition.
Session
In response to the advances in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), particularly large language models (LLMs), researchers have raised our heads. Some with concern, others with hope and even excitement. Why the concern though? I argue that what this all boils down to is a matter of identity and epistemic values. LLM use challenges both the collective and individual identity of qualitative researchers engaged in reflexive inquiry. Drawing on literature concerning researcher identity, reflexivity, and computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS), I argue that constructive qualitative knowledge production is – and must continue to be – grounded in human capacities for interpretation, subjectivity, embodiment, ethical discernment, and reflexive self-awareness. Regardless of whether audience members agree with this argument, my goal in this presentation is to offer a kind and reflective space in which we can consider our own researcher identities and the epistemic values to which we hold. Then, drawing on a dizzying array of scholarship from the past four years, I will traverse various tensions and advances in research and discourse concerning how LLMs are informing research practice.