Paper short abstract

Drawing on two years of building AI tools for anthropological research, this paper examines a paradox: when anthropological knowledge is successfully infrastructured into computational systems, it becomes invisible. If expertise is no longer legible as labor, what becomes of the knowledge worker?

Paper long abstract

Debates about AI and the future of work often frame the question as replacement or resistance. This presentation argues for a third position: that large language models enable anthropologists to execute creative and analytical work previously constrained by time, technical skill, or resource limitations. This latent creativity becomes actionable through multi-agent ethnography (Artz 2026), an approach that positions AI agents as configurable collaborators within distributed human-AI research networks.

MAE extends anthropology's tradition of methodological innovation, from multi-sited to multi-species to multi-scalar ethnography, by incorporating AI agents as research partners coordinated through conversational interaction. Drawing on two years of developing purpose-built AI tools for anthropological research, I demonstrate how disciplinary reasoning can be partially encoded into computational infrastructure while preserving human interpretive authority.

Yet this raises a critical question for post-work futures: if anthropological knowledge can be infrastructured (Scott 1998; Hughes 1989, 1983) into AI systems, what remains as distinctly human labor? The answer is uncertain, complicated by a paradox: when expertise is successfully encoded, it becomes invisible (Bowker et al. 2010; Star and Ruhleder 1994), potentially undermining the conditions that make expertise legible as labor. If this happens, the question becomes not what work remains, but what becomes of the worker when their expertise no longer requires them.

Paper short abstract

The paper reflects on the audiovisual domestication of Doubao AI in everyday life. Ethnographic research finds various sensory interaction ways and mutually constructed intelligent affective atmospheres. I argue that we should co-design the trans-spatial atmosphere for a potential post-work society.

Paper long abstract

This paper discusses the domestication of AI through audiovisual approaches in everyday life. It explores the emergence of “Intelligent Affective Atmospheres”, dynamic environments sensed and imagined across the real and virtual worlds towards a potential post-work society. Drawing on digital ethnography and sensory autoethnography, I examined the audio/video call and sound clone functions of Doubao, China’s most popular AI application with over 100 million daily active users as of 2026.

Drawing on Ingold’s “Making”, I argue that the domestication of Doubao is a mutual co-fabrication of work-life worlds. My two-year use experience and analysis of viral social media videos reveal the rapid evolution and users’ highly creative practices. The audiovisual interaction occurs in diverse contexts, including job interviews, language training, consultation, companionship, object identification, clothes matching and entertainment. Notably, the 5-second sound clone makes designed sonic experience accessible and malleable for everyone. Doubao acts as a digital-material presence that reshapes the sensory texture of daily life. Through these practices, AI is transformed from a tool into a partner for exploring the prospective lifestyles.

As an intelligent technology embedded in personal devices, Doubao “shakes” both online and offline spaces. Based on the theory of affective atmosphere, I analyze the trans-spatial atmosphere influenced by the interplay between online collective resonance (social media trends) and offline private usage. The sharing of sensory experience creates a loop between digital interfaces and human beings.

My research calls for anthropologists to co-design these intelligent atmospheres to help navigate future work-life configurations in an automated world.

Paper short abstract

Based on early ethnographic fieldwork in a university writing center, this paper explores how generative AI reshapes academic writing as a site of meaning, responsibility, and purpose, complicating emerging imaginaries of post-work futures in knowledge-based professions.

Paper long abstract

This paper presents a work-in-progress ethnographic doctoral project on academic writing practices in times of generative AI. Rather than focusing on automation or job loss, it examines how AI reshapes academic writing as a central site of meaning, responsibility, and professional identity formation.

Based on initial field engagements in a university writing center, the paper approaches academic writing not merely as preparation for scientific careers, but as a formative practice through which students learn how to position themselves as competent, responsible, and legitimate knowledge workers across a wide range of professional futures. Writing assignments, feedback situations, and writing consultations function as moments where ideas of authorship, effort, autonomy, and “good work” are negotiated and are now increasingly shaped in relation to and by AI systems.

Early fieldnotes suggest that generative AI does not simply reduce the relevance of writing, but reconfigures its role in shaping subjectivities. While some tasks become delegable, questions of responsibility, credibility, and purpose intensify. Writing thus remains a key arena in which students and educators grapple with what meaningful work, contribution, and professional selfhood might look like in a future where work is transformed rather than abolished.

By focusing on writing as a practice that links education, work, and identity, this paper contributes an anthropological perspective to debates on post-work societies. It argues for understanding post-work futures not only through disappearing jobs, but through shifting modes of becoming a professional subject in AI-mediated worlds.

Paper short abstract

In this paper we discuss the idea of non-work futures through the prism of the side-gig, a long established mode of economic activity which we propose is reconfiguring as "work" itself reconfigures based on our recent research undertaken across Australia focused on current and future home life.

Paper long abstract

In this paper we discuss the idea of non-work futures through the prism of the side-gig, a long established mode of economic activity which we propose is reconfiguring as "work" itself reconfigures. While the "gig economy" has figured strongly in recent research about labour, and the side-gig is historically embedded, here we take a specific focus, on the recent evolution of the side-gig as a mode of no-work from home. Drawing from recent research undertaken across Australia, focused on current and future home life, we discuss how people employ diverse strategies to derive incomes from combinations of "side-gigs", including, for example doing work for friends, undertaking online product reviews and on-selling products, participating as professional research participants, doing online surveys, and more.

Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research in European offices, this paper argues that the office remains a key social infrastructure. As flexible work expands, offices may become social destinations, while focused work shifts elsewhere – or potentially disappears.

Paper long abstract

Contemporary discussions on the transformation of work frequently characterize the decline of office-based employment as a technical or economic shift, primarily driven by digitalization and the rise of remote work. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in state-of-the-art office environments in Belgium and Slovenia, this paper conceptualizes the office as a central site of everyday life and examines the implications for social life as work becomes increasingly detached from shared physical spaces.

The research presents a perspective on how the office continues to be the one of the few remaining social infrastructures in which employees meet regularly for informal social interaction without scheduled appointments or explicit arrangements. Informal social interactions that occur during coffee and lunch breaks, as well as through casual conversations, are practices through which workers produce, develop, and experience togetherness, a sense of belonging, and a perception of the value they attribute to their daily life in the office. In this way, informal social interactions contribute to the formation of supportive networks among employees.

Based on these observations, we suggest that a future may emerge in which the office becomes a social destination rather than merely a place of task execution. As flexible working arrangements become increasingly widespread, employees may come to the “post-work office” primarily to socialize with colleagues, while performing focused work elsewhere. This points to a future in which socializing becomes a major reason to visit the office – unless offices disappear altogether in post-work futures.

Paper short abstract

Based on author's consultancy practice, the paper examines emerging anthropologists’ roles beyond academia and how their insights help organisations navigate changing workplaces and human‑capital challenges, addressing concerns about belonging, purpose and inclusion while shaping new futures of work

Paper long abstract

Across sectors, organisations are undergoing profound shifts driven by evolving business models, demographic change, new employment forms, digitalisation, sustainability pressures and shifting employee expectations. These transformations reshape workplaces, where staff navigate changing roles, new technologies, AI, hybrid arrangements and more fluid but sometimes fragmented career paths. For many, these changes raise concerns not only about employment stability but also about meaning, recognition and belonging as established narratives of work become less certain.

This paper examines the anthropologist as consultant, focusing on how anthropological practice supports organisational responses to workforce transformation and emerging inclusion challenges. It draws on the author’s corporate anthropology and workforce‑consulting experience, using anonymised insights from DEI assessments, employee workshops and advisory projects in multinational and local companies, with particular attention to the Baltic context.

The paper addresses three core questions. First, how employees and managers articulate meaning, purpose and future careers in environments where roles evolve in response to technological, organisational and demographic pressures. Second, how diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging concerns emerge around these pressures. Third, how anthropologists navigate between academic, ethnographic insights and corporate pragmatism, translating sensitive findings into recommendations organisations can act on in changing employment landscape.

Methodologically, the paper reflects on adapting ethnographic tools to consultancy settings. It argues that anthropologists, positioned as mediators and interpreters, add distinctive value to future‑of‑work debates by documenting lived experiences of change, making inclusion dynamics visible and co‑creating alternative visions of meaningful work with organisational actors.