Looping Discomfort: AI, Whiteness, and the Limits of Participatory Ethics

This article examines artificial intelligence (AI) as an interruptive interlocutor within a participatory arts-based inquiry. Drawing on work with adolescent mothers in Kibera, Kenya, I trace how large language model (LLM) dialogue became entangled with embroidery, reflexive writing, and posthuman theory as I struggled to make sense of my own participation in reproducing whiteness. I configured AI to question my assumptions, interrupt familiar interpretive habits, and return me to moments that resisted easy resolution. Embroidery functioned as a material counter-method, slowing the pace of interpretation and cultivating forms of attention that exceeded AI’s fluency. Across six folds, I argue that interrupting the recursive logics of whiteness depended on the ongoing entanglement of digital dialogue, material practice, situated relationships, and ethical accountability. The article contributes to emerging conversations about AI in qualitative inquiry by proposing interruption—not efficiency, fluency, or explanation—as a methodological orientation for working with LLMs.