Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 89.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2024-08-09 07:44:51+00:00
        From: Schneider, F.A. (Florian) <f.a.schneider@hum.leidenuniv.nl>
        Subject: CfP: AI Imaginaries in Asia Pacific

Call for Papers: AI Imaginaries in Asia Pacific
Asiascape: Digital Asia
<https://brill.com/view/journals/dias/dias-overview.xml> (DIAS)


The peer-reviewed academic journal Asiascape: Digital
Asia is now inviting contributions for a 2025 themed issue on 
‘AI Imaginaries in Asia Pacific’, edited by special issue editors 
Haiqing Yu 
<https://www.admscentre.org.au/haiqing-yu/> 
and Florian Schneider 
<https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/florian-schneider#tab-1>.

Technology and the human imagination are intimately linked, and this is
certainly evident from the hyperboles surrounding the newest tech boom
about artificial intelligence (AI). The ideological and discursive
underpinnings of AI within Silicon Valley’s science-fictional fantasies
and utopian counter-culture dreams are fairly well explored. Films like
Blade Runner both reflected and shaped the techno-anxieties of the
1980s, powerfully leveraging American imaginations of Asia. And today’s
tech entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg have
declared their love of science fiction luminaries like Isaac Azimov,
William Gibson, and Neal Stephenson, often treating their works as
blueprints rather than as the cautionary tales they are. Far less,
however, is known about the diverse ways in which AI is imagined in
Asian societies. Sociotechnical imaginaries of AI entail a futuristic
construction and exercise of power—mainly discursive power—in public
domains. National governments are important actors in the construction
of sociotechnical imaginaries; other actors and institutions, from key
industry players and academia to consumers and community organisations,
also express their hopes and fears concerning AI, based on their
different cultural and historical understandings of technologies in society.

With the largest population in the world and over 60% of the world’s
youth living in the region, Asia Pacific is an exciting battleground for
testing dystopian and utopian narratives associated with AI popular in
Western countries, particularly among young people who grow up with
smart devices, algorithms, drones, and other AI-powered technologies.
With its rich and diversified cultures and histories, Asia Pacific
offers an opportunity to examine the cultural and linguistic diversity
in AI imaginaries.

What cultural and philosophical touchstones shape how societies in Asia
conceptualize artificial intelligence? What perceptions of risk and
merit shape the tech discourses about AI, and what are the
psychological, social, cultural, political, and economic impacts of such
imaginings? Such questions extends earlier interests in imaginaries, be
they concerns about how communities imagine themselves into being (as
Benedict Anderson famously explored), how our imaginations reify social
practices (as in Arjun Appadurai’s work), how they create the
underpinnings of our modernities (as Charles Taylor argued), or how they
connect specifically with understandings of contemporary science and
technology (as reflected in the work of, e.g., Sheila Jasanoff and
Sang-Hyun Kim).

For this special issue, we welcome submissions from researchers from the
social sciences, computer sciences, and arts and humanities, as well as
from multi- and interdisciplinary backgrounds, who explore how actors
and communities in Asia Pacific imagine AI. What do such imaginaries
enable, what do they obscure? What realms of possibility do they open up
or foreclose, and what might the implications be for the future of AI?
We particularly invite authors who work on technology imaginaries in the
Global South to join us in this exploration of AI imaginaries in
different regions and contexts.

Possible topics for submissions include (but are emphatically not
limited to) empirical and theoretical explorations of the following
questions:

   *   How power affects the ability of different actors to create,
shape, or contest diverse AI imaginaries,
   *   How cultural and philosophical traditions become resources for
contemporary AI imaginaries,
   *   How industries and their stakeholders imagine AI and its uses,
not just in the tech sector, but also in education, bureaucracy,
transportation, logistics, law enforcement, border control, the armed
forces, and more.
   *   How different publics reflect on and debate AI,
   *   How policy and law incorporate specific AI imaginaries,
   *   How AI is rendered in popular culture and art, and the effects
this might have on AI in practice,
   *   How science-fictional imaginations, be they dystopian or utopian,
shape AI discourse and practice, for instance about autonomous vehicles,
drones, and bots,
   *   How AI imaginaries inform the actions of designers, coders, and
tech entrepreneurs and are, in turn, informed by them,
   *   How AI imaginaries draw from but also shape identities, whether
in terms of race, class, age, gender, sexuality, and more.

Interested contributors should first send their title, abstract (150
words), and short biography via email to the journal’s managing editor,
Florian Schneider <f.a.schneider@hum.leidenuniv.nl> by 19 August 2024. 
The editorial team will select contributions by September, and successful 
contributors should then prepare articles of 8,000 words, including notes 
and references, to be submitted through the journal’s editorial management
system <http://www.editorialmanager.com/dias/default.aspx> by 1 November
2024. All papers will be fully peer-reviewed, and authors will receive
the review decision by January 2025, for potential publication in the
early summer that year.

Please see the instructions for
authors
<http://www.brill.com/files/brill.nl/specific/authors_instructions/DIAS.pdf>
for further information on the in-house style requirements. For further
questions, and to submit abstracts, please contact the managing editor
at f.a.schneider@leidenuniv.nl.

________________________________

Dr. Florian Schneider (he/him)
Chair Professor Modern China
Academic Director of the Leiden Asia Centre
<http://leidenasiacentre.nl/en/> (LAC) and
Managing Editor of the academic journal Asiascape: Digital Asia
<https://brill.com/view/journals/dias/dias-overview.xml?format=PRI>



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