[Commlist] Globally Contested Imaginaries: Power and Tensions in the AI Era CfP

*Globally Contested Imaginaries: Power and Tensions in the AI Era *

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*April 8-9th 2027 at the Annenberg School for Communication at the 
University of Pennsylvania *

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*Organized by the Center on Digital Culture and Society and the Center 
for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the University of 
Pennsylvania *


AI does not enter the world as a stable technology with a single 
meaning. It is narrated, simultaneously and contradictorily, as 
inevitable progress, geopolitical threat, overhyped fad, development 
solution, environmental danger, creative partner, engine of extraction, 
force of displacement, or instrument of sovereignty. Its invocation 
reflects cultural specificity and global variance. Yet AI imaginaries, 
advanced by powerful actors with unequal yet unfixed power across the 
globe, aim to define what AI is and will become. However these 
projections do not travel unchanged or unchallenged; they are contested, 
appropriated, refused, and reconfigured across different geopolitical, 
cultural, linguistic, and material worlds.


This symposium begins from the premise that AI’s global significance is 
neither self-evident nor uniform. We approach AI as a global digital 
communication project that interrogates how technologies circulate and 
how their meanings are (re)assembled and contested as they move across 
different cultural and global contexts.


We aim to address the slipperiness of AI: How does the moral valence of 
AI shift depending on the answers and tasks demanded of it across 
various contexts? What is gained and lost when AI is treated as a 
coherent entity rather than a contested terrain? Where do dominant and 
alternative AI imaginaries collide most visibly—and what do those 
collisions reveal about power, culture, human agency, labor, 
development, modernity and possibility in our present moment?


We invite submissions that examine the worlds in which AI becomes 
imaginable and contestable: the differing global narratives, 
infrastructures, histories, and communicative practices that make it 
appear necessary, desirable, dangerous, or inevitable, as well as the 
counternarratives, movements, and alternative imaginaries that challenge 
such claims and propose other futures.


In this symposium, we seek a range of scholarship that takes the 
asymmetries of power seriously and explores and challenges which visions 
of AI get amplified, resourced, and institutionalized—without treating 
those asymmetries as settled outcomes. We invite submissions from 
scholars working on the intricacies of AI’s entanglements with one of 
the four panel subthemes below and are particularly open to receiving 
projects that reflect on the cultural specificity and global variances 
of these subthemes.

Panels


*Myths and Narratives *

Writing on the grand promises that encircle new technologies, Vincent 
Mosco contends, “Myths are not true or false, but living or dead.” In 
line with this provocation, this panel invites papers that explore the 
various myths and narratives that animate AI imaginaries—past, present, 
and future.

● How do people imagine AI in ways that are particular to their local 
geopolitical context?

● How do race, ethnicity, class, and geography affect how AI narratives 
cohere and how far they travel?

● How might values—political, religious, or otherwise—inform how people 
conceptualize the purpose of AI?

● What types of hopes and fears are projected upon AI? What role do 
institutions play in the formation (and challenging) of AI narratives?

● What is the historical context or ideology at play with words like 
“AGI” or “superintelligence”?


*Labor *

Following the iPhone across its life cycle, Qiu, Gregg, and Crawford 
(2014) contend that the labor of making, designing, using, and managing 
digital technologies form one connected circuit, not separate worlds, of 
work. In the spirit of their theory of the “circuits of labour,” this 
panel invites submissions that investigate the unequal, extractive, and 
interdependent labor practices and conditions of the AI era.

● How does AI interface with existing labor practices and hierarchies?

● How do workers themselves understand their relationship to AI: as 
displacement, augmentation, exploitation, or opportunity? How do they 
respond?

● How are certain forms of work sustaining AI’s apparent autonomy (e.g., 
content moderation, data annotation, model training) narrated—or 
erased—in dominant accounts? How is their role being reasserted from below?

● What forms of infrastructural labor are marshaled for the growth of AI 
systems? In what ways is this relationship economically, socially, and 
environmentally relevant?

● How does the global division of AI labor map onto, reproduce, or 
unsettle older (asymmetric) economic geographies and relations?

● What happens to professional identity and expertise when AI is 
positioned as “superintelligence” or as a creative and intellectual 
“partner”?

● What light might earlier eras of automation or displacement anxiety 
(e.g., industrialization, computerization, offshoring) shed on our 
present moment?


*Resistance *

In this panel, we seek to understand resistance through Adorno’s 
conceptualization of negative dialectics, wherein resistance functions 
neither by proposing a new, ‘positive’ alternative or by retreating to a 
naive notion of ‘authentic’ human nature. Rather, it operates precisely 
through contradiction as a critical force. We invite work that examines 
resistance to AI as a contradictory field, where forms of refusal, 
critique, and opposition reveal the limits of totalizing discourses, 
operate through the very systems they contest, and remain unsettled by 
the absence of a conclusive alternative. Submissions that address and 
expand on the following topics are welcome:

● How do practices of resistance challenge the exclusions, assumptions, 
and forms of domination in totalizing accounts of AI technological 
progress that seek to naturalize computational forms of classification, 
prediction, and control?

● How do forms of resistance to AI that expose the contradictions of 
totalizing technological discourses confront their own implication 
within these systems? In other words: How do forms of resistance to AI 
negotiate the contradiction of opposing AI systems, when the 
infrastructures, categories, and practices that enable critique may 
themselves be shaped by technological rationality?

● What does resistance to AI in various regions of the Global Majority 
at the present conjuncture reveal about the contradictions of global 
capitalism and how histories of colonialism continue to shape 
contemporary struggles over technology, sovereignty, and competing 
visions of modernity?


*Social Life *

This panel explores social life as another contested terrain of AI’s 
reach and impact. We invite papers that address how global communities 
merge their nuanced adoption and relationship to AI with the habits, 
relationships, and expectations of everyday life.

● How does AI become ordinary through practices of scrolling, posting, 
sharing, and messaging? When is its presence noticed, questioned, or 
taken for granted?

● How do memes and everyday conversations make AI appear useful, 
threatening, intimate, or irrelevant across different cultural worlds?

● How do pleasure, pain, desire, and other embodied experiences exceed 
the categories through which platforms make people knowable?

● How do people negotiate intimacy, care, and belonging through media 
platforms and what happens to expectations of trust and reciprocity when 
an interlocutor may not be human?

● How are authenticity and recognition negotiated when expressions of 
self may be generated or curated by AI? Whose languages and ways of life 
become recognizable, and whose are obscured?


All four panels welcome submissions from scholars, students, activists, 
and independent researchers working in communication and media studies, 
sociology, political economy, science and technology studies, 
information studies, cultural studies, area studies, and other related 
fields.

Submissions are open to contributors at all career stages, but we 
encourage work from early-career scholars and those whose work may sit 
outside conventional academic structures. Submissions may take the form 
of a traditional paper, both theoretical and empirical, or adopt a more 
multimedia/modal approach.


Guidelines for proposal types:

*Paper Submissions: *We invite panelists to submit an extended abstract 
of no more than 800 words, outlining how their project relates to the 
symposium, as well as their methods, findings and theoretical 
contributions. Please include your name, affiliation, a short 100-word 
biography, and the specific panel to which you are interested in applying.

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*Multimedia and Hybrid Submissions*: Please submit an abstract of 800 
words explaining how your piece relates to the symposium theme. For 
multimedia works, explain how text and other elements interact. Please 
include your name, affiliation, a short 100-word biography, and the 
specific panel to which you are interested in applying.


Please send all submission materials to 
*globallycontestedimaginaries[at]gmail[dot]com *by 5:00PM on December 
3rd, 2026.


The organizing committee will notify panelists of decisions by January 
15th, 2027. If accepted, panelists will be expected to submit a full 
paper or project by early March. Finished multimedia submission should 
include a link to the project when relevant.

After submission of the final project, panelists will present their work 
at the symposium on April 8th-9th at the Annenberg School for 
Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Partial travel funding 
may be available for invited panelists who qualify pending budget 
availability.

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