Abstract:

The rapid development of artificial intelligence is triggering a paradigmatic crisis in educational research. Through a critical inheritance of the “narrative turn” in the 1980s educational research, this study proposes the theory of the “second turn” in narrative inquiry for the AI era, constructing a new paradigm of “resisting data alienation” and “reconstructing humanistic narratives.” Centered on technological critique, the “second turn” achieves methodological breakthroughs via threefold paradigmatic innovation. Ontologically, it reveals how AI deconstructs and reconstructs educational experience, shifting narrative ontology from “human-centered experience” to a hybrid intentional existence of “human-technology-experience.” Epistemologically, guided by Feenberg’s secondary instrumentalization, it integrates techno-hermeneutics with Actor-Network Theory (ANT), redefining narrative production as a dynamic negotiation network between humans and technologies. Axiologically, it establishes a dynamic ethical review mechanism by embedding algorithm transparency audits and participatory negotiation procedures into research workflows, safeguarding the emancipatory potential of educational narratives. The practical pathways include transparent human-AI collaborative narrative collection, critically symbiotic human-machine decoding, technology-mediated narrative recreation, and dynamically negotiated ethical evaluation. Ultimately, the “second turn” fulfills dual missions: reconstructing narrative existential depth by resisting data alienation and building narrative resilience, while revolutionizing educational research’s humanistic character through constructing a techno-critical narrative community.

Key words: narrative inquiry, narrative turn, artificial intelligence era, educational research, technological criticism