21 November 2025
Michael Kirby Building
330+331 Function Room, 17 Wally's Walk (in-person only)
Wallumattagal Campus, Macquarie University
Organiser: Dr Regina Fabry
Contact: regina.fabry@mq.edu.au
Throughout cultural history, human agents have engaged in self-narration through the conversational exchange with other agents. Self-narration, many philosophers and psychologists assume, can be conducive to agency, autonomy, and wellbeing. With the widespread availability of conversational chatbots based on Large Language Models (LLMs), including so-called AI companions, therapy bots, and deathbots, new opportunities – and risks – for our self-narrative practices are on the rise. To date, however, research on self-narration and on human-chatbot interactions has developed largely independently from each other. Recent research on self-narration has remained anthropocentric in ignoring the possibility of hybrid human-chatbot self-narration. Vice versa, work on human-chatbot interactions has systematically ignored research on self-narrative practices. The aim of this workshop is to integrate these two strands of research for the first time. Bringing together experts in research on self-narration and conversational chatbots, this workshop will explore the self-narrational dynamics of human-chatbot interactions. Furthermore, it will identify the risks of these interactions for the well-being and flourishing of human agents.
Funded by
Funded by
Macquarie Minds and Intelligences Initiative
Organised
in collaboration with the Imagined Lives Collective