Artificial Intelligence and Reconstructive Biographical Narrative Research: Challenges, Limitations, and Possibilities

The rapid diffusion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies forms part of the landscape of structural transformations and uncertainties that mark our turbulent times, impacting the production, interpretation, and circulation of global sociological knowledge. Simultaneously, reconstructive biographical narrative research—anchored in social phenomenology and the understanding of the everyday life-world—plays the important role of investigating how contemporary crises are experienced and signified through the situated, contextual, and interactional character of life stories. The encounter between these developments raises critical methodological, epistemological, and ethical questions for a global sociology committed to avoiding reductionist narratives.

This session invites contributions that explore the implications of AI for interpretative and reconstructive approaches to biographical research. While AI-assisted tools offer new possibilities for transcription, encoding, pattern recognition, and large-scale data management, they also challenge key assumptions regarding hermeneutic interpretation. For example, outsourcing analytics to machine learning systems risks imposing standardized and decontextualized typing processes, straining the authentic reconstruction of intended meaning and the researcher's role in delving into the intersubjective context of biographies.