Cognitive Scaffolds, Not Caves: Neurodivergent Use of Generative AI in an Accelerated Academy

This article explores the situated use of generative AI—specifically ChatGPT—in the academic life of a neurodivergent early-career scholar based in the Global South. Drawing from reflexive thematic analysis and autoethnographic vignette writing, it traces how generative AI can function not as a replacement for cognition, but as a dialogic and affective scaffold that supports scholarly thinking in contexts shaped by executive dysfunction, structural exclusion, and institutional acceleration. Four interwoven themes—dialogic subjectivity, emotionally situated inquiry, adaptive reappropriation, and nonlinear praxis—reveal how generative AI mediates scholarly labor in ways that are partial, ambivalent, and at times reparative. Rather than echoing dominant framings of AI as either a threat to academic integrity or a tool for enhanced productivity, the article offers a situated, reflexive account of AI use grounded in lived experience. It argues that neurodivergent engagements with AI unsettle normative ideals of academic performance, coherence, and output, and open space for more inclusive and embodied modes of thinking, writing, and belonging. In doing so, the article calls for a reimagining of scholarly life that affirms cognitive diversity not as an exception to be accommodated, but as a generative standpoint for rethinking academic norms.