Exploring undiscovered country: AI-empowered collective and collaborative epistemic reflexivity (i-CCER)

This paper introduces AI-empowered Collaborative and Collective Epistemic Reflexivity (i-CCER), a novel approach to knowledge production developed through sustained engagement with generative AI as an epistemic partner. Moving beyond human-centric approaches, i-CCER positions reflexivity as a distributed, posthuman practice emerging through co-creative human-AI collaboration. We demonstrate how AI actively shapes knowledge by surfacing hidden meanings, synthesising complex team reflections, iterating emerging insights, and engaging in meta-awareness through its own reflexive capabilities. Drawing on literature addressing collective reflexivity, epistemic justice, and posthuman ethics, we address critiques of proceduralism, epistemic reduction, and the illusion of AI fluency. We present i-CCER as both a methodological innovation and a feminist, decolonial intervention challenging dominant knowledge production practices. While AI can catalyse new inquiries, it cannot replace ethical, situated, accountable reflexive practice. This paper is both a demonstration and a provocation: a case study of i-CCER and a call for a more pluralist, participatory meta-epistemology.