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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.