From excitement to refusal: affective entanglements with Generative AI in academic research

Abstract

This paper examines how academic researchers engage with Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) from within specific affective, institutional and geopolitical conditions. Drawing on an autoethnographic dialogue between two scholars based in the United Kingdom and Brazil, we trace an affective trajectory from techno-solutionist excitement, through disillusionment, to practices of refusal. We argue that this trajectory reflects the conditions of academic labour and the colonial matrix of power shaping GenAI. To analyse these dynamics, we combine three theoretical perspectives. First, affect is used to examine how emotional intensities reveal the systems within which AI is encountered. Second, decolonial theory shows how GenAI reproduces epistemic hierarchies by privileging Global North data, dominant languages and Eurocentric frameworks, with uneven effects across contexts. Third, neo-material assemblage thinking and the concept of cruel optimism explain how AI functions as an object of promise that simultaneously reproduces the performative pressures it appears to alleviate. Our analysis draws on six vignettes from everyday research practice to illustrate these dynamics. We conclude by proposing five conceptual tools for researchers, affect, assemblage thinking, cruel optimism, coloniality and refusal, which reframe AI policy enactment as an affective, situated and power-laden process.