Please Forward this Postdigital Feminist Chain-Letter on Living with AI in Higher Education

Abstract Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) enters higher education within established hierarchies of knowledge and expertise, becoming entangled with judgments about who sounds authoritative and which forms of writing carry weight. Those judgments were gendered, long before GenAI arrived. Drawing on feminist postdigital inquiry and collaborative, experimental approaches to knowledge production, this article reports a chain-letter experiment. Thirteen academics who identify as women or gender-diverse, from nine countries, write in relation to the letters preceding their own. The chain letter produces knowledge through response, so that each letter is partial and the argument accumulates between them. Read together, the letters describe a persistent need to defend expertise within a field shaped by masculine norms of authority, and the frustration and exhaustion this produces. Authors variously report work intensifying rather than easing, critique of GenAI tools being reframed as failures of individual users, and a sense that AI-assisted writing diminishes what makes teaching and research pleasurable. Their positions differ, with some refusing these tools while others work closely with them. At the same time, the exchange brings solidarity, hope and relief, and the discovery that these difficulties are structural as well as personal. The letters suggest that GenAI makes long-standing, gendered questions about expertise and working conditions more pressing, and that these remain shared and unfinished. The article closes with an open invitation to join a feminist and postdigital conversation about GenAI in research and education.