Stepping Through Bakhtin in My AI and Identity Paper

Stepping Through Bakhtin in My AI and Identity Paper

When I first began thinking about how to frame my autoethnographic study of AI, aging, and teacher identity, Bakhtin seemed like a natural companion. His theories of voice, dialogism, and heteroglossia promised a lens through which to understand the multi-layered interactions I was having with ChatGPT—interactions that were part reflection, part pedagogy, and part negotiation of my own identity as an aging, transnational educator.

Here’s a peek into how my thinking evolved from initial notes to final literature review and discussion sections.

Step 1: Initial Notes – Where I Started

Before writing my literature review, I jotted down Bakhtin concepts and how they might apply:

🧭 Study Frame:

  • Autoethnography: I am both subject and researcher.

  • AI as interlocutor: Dialogues with ChatGPT highlight questions of identity, epistemology, and aging.

  • Transnational, gendered, generational perspective: My experience across Korea and the US, combined with midlife reflection, provides a unique lens.

🪞 Key Bakhtinian Concepts I Wanted to Explore:

  1. Dialogism – Treating AI interaction as a multi-voiced, temporal, and spatial dialogue.

  2. Voice and Heteroglossia – Exploring layered voices: aging self, professional identity, AI, and societal discourses.

  3. Addressivity & Responsivity – How utterances are shaped by imagined addressees; how does this work with a nonhuman partner?

  4. Carnival & Resistance – Using autoethnography as a site of irreverence or subversion, particularly against neoliberal narratives of aging.

  5. Chronotope – Thinking about time and space, aging and transnational experience, in AI-mediated interaction.

At this stage, my approach was exploratory, playful even—I wanted to see which Bakhtinian ideas could provide scaffolding for a study of professional identity that included a decidedly nonhuman interlocutor.

Step 2: Incorporation into the Paper

By the time I wrote my literature review and analytical framework, some of these ideas had become central:

Bakhtinian Dialogism and Voice
I foregrounded dialogism and heteroglossia to frame the AI exchanges as multi-voiced interactions. In practice, this meant:

  • Positioning prompts to ChatGPT as utterances shaped by prior discourse, institutional norms, and ideological struggles.

  • Highlighting the intermingling of professional, personal, and algorithmic voices.

  • Emphasizing addressivity—my awareness of the AI as tool, collaborator, and potential threat, and how that shaped my responses.

  • Bringing in answerability: each prompt required me to account ethically and culturally for my choices in Korean EFL contexts.

Integration with Autoethnography
Bakhtin helped me frame my exchanges as spaces for identity negotiation. I wrote:

"These conversations are not neutral—they reflect, refract, and sometimes distort my prompts, creating a dynamic site for identity negotiation."

Discussion & Findings
Bakhtin’s ideas underpinned my discussion of AI as discursive partner:

  • AI responses participated in meaning-making rather than merely providing information.

  • Exchanges revealed heteroglossic struggles—conflicting pedagogical ideologies, cultural norms, and personal experience.

  • I could demonstrate becoming—how my professional identity shifted through dialogic interaction.

Step 3: What I Didn’t Incorporate

Some elements from my initial notes didn’t make it into the final paper. For example:

  • Carnival & Resistance: While I flirted with the idea of irreverence and subversion in writing style, I chose not to foreground it academically. The analysis stayed focused on dialogic emergence and identity construction rather than performative play.

  • Chronotope: Time-space reflections were implicit in discussions of aging and transnational identity, but I didn’t explicitly invoke the Bakhtinian chronotope concept. It felt less critical to my argument than dialogism and voice.

Reflections on the Process

Walking through these steps reminds me that theory isn’t a checklist—it’s a set of lenses that illuminate some patterns while letting others recede. Bakhtin gave me a way to:

  • Think relationally about AI and teacher identity.

  • Analyze voice as multi-layered and socially saturated.

  • Trace emergence, response, and ethical engagement in dialogue.

Not everything I initially considered made the cut, but even those “unused” ideas helped shape my thinking and pushed me to articulate why some aspects were more analytically powerful than others.

Bakhtin’s concepts continue to guide me as I reflect on AI-mediated teaching, identity, and the ethical responsibility of voice in an increasingly algorithmic world.

My Language and Identity Paper: Dialoguing with the Algorithm: An Autoethnographic Study of Midlife Voice, Uncertainty, and Teacher Identity in a ChatGPT Exchange

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