Absent Partners – Artificial Allies: Conceptualizing genAI as Collaborative Actor in Educational Design Research

Collaboration between researchers and practitioners is central to Educational Design Research (EDR). However, epistemic-temporal misalignments as well as power-dependency relations frequently impede such collaboration, particularly in projects addressing technology-rich educational contexts. This paper examines these collaboration challenges as a constitutive part of EDR rather than as contingent implementation problems. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the paper reconceptualises collaboration as an emergent effect of socio-material networks where technologies are not treated as neutral tools but as actors. Against this backdrop, it explores how generative artificial intelligence (genAI) might strengthen research-practice interactions by assuming specific collaborative functions in situations where human participation is constrained or unevenly resourced. Through two constructed scenarios situated in school contexts, the paper illustrates how genAI could formalise tacit knowledge or provisionally represent absent stakeholders within EDR networks. Rather than positioning genAI as a substitute for human collaboration, the paper argues that genAI-enhanced collaboration may contribute to the stabilisation and extension of collaborative relations within EDR networks. In doing so, it advances a theoretically grounded and methodologically transferable perspective on AI integration in EDR – one that treats the design of human-AI collaboration as a scholarly decision worthy of explicit documentation and critical scrutiny, rather than an ad hoc response to resource constraints.