[Commlist] Call for Chapters: Ethnographic Methods and Artificial Intelligence

Call for Chapters: Edited Volume on Ethnographic Methods and Artificial 
Intelligence

We are seeking submissions of short chapters for an edited volume 
dedicated to theoretical, methodological, and practical innovations in 
ethnographic methods for AI-augmented and algorithmically mediated 
social worlds. The different sections of the volume will combine 
innovative conceptual frameworks, experimental case studies, and 
hands-on toolkits, aiming to guide researchers across disciplines and 
industries in applying and adapting ethnographic methods to the 
“synthetic situations” (Knorr Cetina, 2009) opened up by new 
computational technologies.

Editors and Publication Details:

The volume, provisionally titled /Synthetic situations: Ethnographic 
methods for post-artificial worlds/, will be published by Routledge in 
2026. The editors are Gabriele de Seta (University of Bergen), Aleksi 
Knuutila (University of Helsinki) and Matti Pohjonen (University of 
Helsinki).

The editors will organise a chapter development seminar and a workshop 
with invited contributors in September 2025 at the University of 
Helsinki (participation optional), for which a limited number of travel 
grants will be available. Unfortunately no payment for authors is available.

Submission Guidelines:

Deadline for abstracts: 15th of July 2025
Notification of acceptance: 30th of July 2025
Deadline for first draft: 31 December 2025
Submission requirements: We invite researchers, practitioners and 
artists working across the social sciences, digital humanities, computer 
science, HCI and other fields to submit an abstract (max. 250 words) for 
a 3,000–5,000-word chapter. We welcome contributions across genres, 
including:

  *
    Epistemological interrogations
  *
    Methodological frameworks
  *
    Case studies
  *
    Fieldnotes and experiment reports
  *
    Ethical reflections
  *
    Toolboxes and field devices
  *
    Multimodal outputs
  *
    Commented code
  *
    …and more


We especially encourage submissions centred on majority world contexts, 
subaltern communities, marginal epistemologies, and decolonial 
perspectives on research methods.

For further details or to submit your abstract, please contact us at: 
(_gabriele.seta /at/ uib.no) <mailto:(gabriele.seta /at/ uib.no)>_

Editorial Vision:

In recent years, a vast variety of technologies which we call 
“artificial intelligence” - from Large Language Models and synthetic 
media generators to warehouse optimization and self-driving cars - have 
seen dramatic technical advancements and wide societal adoption. For 
social scientists and ethnographers, this has been simultaneously a 
source of fear and inspiration. New predictive models and large-scale 
datasets have given social currency to particular forms of expertise and 
practices of knowledge production, such as data science and big data 
analytics. This foregrounding of quantitative methods has often been at 
the expense of more qualitative ways of knowing the co-construction of 
social worlds and technological systems.

Our edited volume foregrounds synthetic situations: sociotechnical 
arrangements in which artificial intelligence is both an ethnographic 
object of study and a qualitative research tool. We understand 
ethnography in a broad sense, as a research sensibility grounded on 
long-term presence, immersive participation, and dialogic understanding 
of otherness. This book aims to explore how computational methods and 
artificial intelligence are not merely displacing or challenging 
ethnographic practices, but also augmenting them and being augmented by 
them. Through our curated collection of chapters, the book contributors 
explore how computational technologies and ethnography co-construct 
“post-artificial worlds” - for instance, how LLMs become entangled with 
increasingly mediated fieldsites, how machine learning models 
essentialize, reproduce or erase situated knowledges, or how chatbots 
function as collaborators for participatory research.


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