The Nonhuman Unchained

This article stages a methodological provocation. By experimentally voicing a nonhuman participant – an AI system in clinical practice – we explore what happens when nonhumans are allowed to interfere with how social scientific accounts are generated. What is at stake in this provocation is not whether machines can or should be granted a voice, but whether social scientific methods are willing to be unsettled by the nonhumans they already claim to include. The CyberKnife responds, interrupts, and irritates the account, unsettling the methodological arrangement through which it is made to speak. These contestations do not merely expose failures in technical performance; they forcibly reveal ways in which knowledge itself is stitched together from unruly encounters, failed translations and messy negotiations.