THE DIALOGIC PARADOX: UNDERSTANDING HOW WRITING CENTRE TUTORS MAINTAIN COLLABORATIVE RELATIONSHIPS IN DIGITAL AND AI-MEDIATED TUTORING CONTEXTS

Writing centres have historically been grounded in collaborative, dialogic pedagogy premised on embodied co-presence, relational trust, and synchronous conversational exchange. The rapid expansion of digital tutoring platforms and the integration of generative artificial intelligence into higher education pose profound challenges to these commitments, raising urgent questions about whether collaborative pedagogy can be sustained under conditions of technological mediation. This qualitative case study examined the experiences of nine writing centre peer tutors at the Durban University of Technology in South Africa, employing semi-structured interviews analysed thematically through Bourdieu's conceptual framework of habitus, field, capital, and symbolic violence. Four interconnected themes emerged: tutors experienced profound disruption of their embodied pedagogical habitus in digital environments, losing access to the non-verbal communicative resources central to collaborative practice; infrastructural inequality in connectivity, devices, and data functioned as a gatekeeping form of capital, producing symbolic violence when structural disadvantage was misrecognised as individual disengagement; corporate platforms such as MS Teams actively reconfigured pedagogical authority, creating conditions more conducive to passive consumption than dialogic exchange; and tutors engaged in extensive, largely invisible compensatory affective and pedagogical labour to sustain collaborative relationships under constrained conditions. These findings carry significant implications for writing centre practice, institutional resourcing, and the politics of digital education in the Global South.