[Commlist] Call for Contributions: ECREA Book on AI Infrastructures and Sustainability

Call for Contributions ECREA Book: AI Infrastructures and Sustainability

/*Deadline: 29.02.2024
Editors: Anne Mollen, Sigrid Kannengießer, Fieke Jansen, Julia Velkova*/

This call for contributions follows an invitation by the *ECREA Open 
Access Book Series Committee* to develop a proposal for a volume on *“AI 
Infrastructures and Sustainability”*. The Committee has invited overall 
three publications to develop full proposals – one of which will be 
selected as Open Access publication with Palgrave as part of the ECREA 
book series.

*The proposed volume*

Amidst the hype around generative AI, critical data studies as well as 
media and communication research have been exploring the “anatomy of AI” 
(Crawford & Joler, 2018), showing how technologies of automation, mostly 
labelled as Artificial Intelligence (AI), foster forms of exploitation 
in relation to natural resources and the environment, labour and working 
conditions as well as social injustice. While engineering-oriented 
fields, such as Machine Learning (ML), approach  intra- and 
intergenerational justice  under the label of “sustainability” and  
“ethics”, the proposed book acknowledges that AI infrastructures cannot 
be reduced to questions of technology and its design but need to be 
addressed as sociotechnical issues and relations (Parks et al. 2023; 
Plantin & Punathambekar, 2019). This edited volume seeks to contribute a 
comprehensive media and communication research perspective on the 
socio-ecological relations that emerge from practices of use and 
development of “AI”, and their far-reaching implications to justice, 
environments, and infrastructures. The book extends the work of scholars 
in environmental media and critical data studies that is concerned with 
the materialities and environmental relations that sustain digital media 
(Starosielski and Walker 2016; Gabrys 2011; Crawford & Joler, 2018), and 
calls for developing critical and transformative perspectives. We are 
looking for contributions that analyze the manifold social processes and 
related tensions that contribute towards manifesting AI infrastructures, 
with their underlying ideologies, power dynamics, forms of exploitation, 
extractivism, inequalities etc., developing alternative critical 
vocabularies, interventions, and approaches to “sustainability”.

*Call for Contributions*

The proposed volume assembles research in media and communications on AI 
infrastructures in relation to questions of sustainability. We invite 
critical theoretical, historical, methodological, and empirical 
reflections on the “sustainability” of technologies that go under the 
label of “AI”. Contributions could include analyses of how 
sustainability, infrastructures or other related notions can be 
conceptualized in relation to technologies of automation – to 
deconstruct how AI-related narratives, imaginaries, norms, practices 
etc. with their ensuing implications manifest in infrastructures of 
automated communication. We also welcome authors to introduce new 
concepts that contribute to create more affective, transformative, 
theoretically nuanced narratives and understandings of how to make 
liveable relations with AI. Considering the necessity for a great 
socio-ecological transformation, the proposed volume also encourages 
reflections on transformative perspectives in media and communication 
research, addressing media and communication’s role in the shaping and 
transforming of societies increasingly becoming reliant on technologies 
of automation.

*Submission details and expected time frame for publication*

We are seeking abstracts (250-300 words, excluding references) to be 
submitted until February, 29 2024 to (anne.mollen /at/ uni-muenster.de) 
<mailto:(anne.mollen /at/ uni-muenster.de)> addressing – but not limited to – 
one or more of the following topics:

  * Critical theoretical, conceptual, empirical, and methodological work
    on "AI", infrastructures and sustainability in media and
    communication research
  * Critical discussions of sustainability, sustainability narratives
    and normative frameworks in relation to AI infrastructures
  * Imaginaries of sustainability and AI (their construction as well as
    resistance to it)
  * Human rights and digital justice implications of AI
  * Extractivism and AI (labour, data, resources etc.), including
    AI-related protest and movements
  * Intersectional perspectives on AI and sustainability
  * Resource consumption and environmental impacts of AI
  * Intersections of AI with local and energy politics
  * Market concentration, political economy, geopolitical perspectives
    and global distributional (in)justices in relation to AI 
infrastructures
  * Bias and discrimination in AI infrastructures, representation, and AI
  * Transformative and transdisciplinary perspectives on AI and
    sustainability


Media and communication research can contribute with nuanced, critical, 
and normative analyses on the socio-technical relations that make and 
sustain AI infrastructures. This perspective is direly needed in the 
discussion of AI and sustainability, which needs to be acknowledged as 
more than a technical concern to which technical solutions can be found. 
A comprehensive media and communication perspective can instead assess 
the manifestations, contestations, and historical continuities in the 
emergence of AI infrastructures while reflecting on matters of 
sustainability. With the proposed volume we are calling on scholars to 
orient discussions on automation as well as human-machine-interaction 
emerging in relation to media and communications towards an 
interrogation of the infrastructures, practices, and more-than-human 
relations that constitute the operations of technologies that go under 
the label of “AI” through the lens of sustainability.

*Selection process and time frame*

The editors will choose abstracts based on their suitability and 
consistency regarding the full proposal of the edited book. Full chapter 
submissions are roughly planned for by late 2024/early 2025 and 
publication is expected in 2025. Palgrave will be choosing between this 
and two other book proposals to be selected for the open access 
publication in the ECREA Book Series Committee and will communicate 
their decision in late spring 2024. Further details will be communicated 
after the ECREA Book Series Committee’s decision. Inquiries about the 
process and the Call for Contributions can be directed at 
(anne.mollen /at/ uni-muenster.de) <mailto:(anne.mollen /at/ uni-muenster.de)>.

*Key dates*

  * Feb 29, 2024: Abstract submission
  * March 29, 2024: Notification of acceptance for book proposal
  * Estimated May 2024: Feedback by ECREA Open Access Book Series Committee
  * Estimated November/December 2024: First draft of chapters due
  * Estimated January/February 2024: Final draft of chapters due
  * Estimated publication Spring 2025

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