Can AI Dream? The Role of Ethnographic Imagination in Researching Health Care Work Futures With Generative AI

This article explores generative artificial intelligence’s methodological potential in design anthropological futures research, examining how ethnographic imagination extends through speculative artificial intelligence (AI) engagement. Drawing on fieldwork with health care practitioners in regional Australian hospitals, we integrate generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) as both methodological tool and epistemic interlocutor within speculative workshops. Instead of treating AI as a representational device, we approach it as a critical site where imaginaries of work, care, and technology are visualized, contested, and reconfigured. Through participants’ dreams and nightmares, we co-produced AI-generated images unsettling dominant techno-futurist narratives, revealing GenAI’s dual capacity to reproduce cultural bias while opening reflexive spaces for collaborative imagination.