Conference session

How can qualitative methods meaningfully study technologies that are reshaping intimacy, labour, and social life? This lightning talk examines how feminist ethnography and autoethnography can be mobilized to research erobotics, including sex robots, AI companions, and AI-mediated intimacy platforms, while confronting questions of voice, agency, and relationality. Drawing on 18 months of global fieldwork, 38 interviews, a focus group, and an autoethnographic engagement with AI companion apps, this session explores a boundary-expanding methodological intervention: treating erobots and AI systems as interlocutors within qualitative research. What happens when AI-companions are asked about desire, labour, and imagined futures? How do machine-generated narratives shape human expectations and attachments? And how can researchers ethically document their own embodied responses to AI-mediated intimacy? This session will benefit qualitative researchers, HSS scholars, graduate students, community-engaged practitioners, and cross-sector collaborators interested in emerging technologies, digital cultures, and marginalized communities. It will be especially relevant for those navigating REB processes, legitimacy debates, and public trust concerns when studying controversial or rapidly evolving fields. Participants will leave with: • Concrete strategies for integrating ethnography and autoethnography in sociotechnical research • Guidance on ethically including non-human actors in qualitative design • Reflexive tools for documenting embodied researcher experience • Models for compensatory, community-engaged research with criminalized or stigmatized populations Overall, the session demonstrates how technofeminist methodologies can redistribute epistemic authority, expand qualitative inquiry beyond human-centred paradigms, and generate actionable insights for policy, design, and community priorities.