ATProto Browser

{
  "text": "CFP from Josh Babcock and me for AAA 2025. we're looking for participants who take a grounded, ethnographic approach to explore computational technologies (broadly construed) and questions of agency. please share / send your abstract to either of us by April 14",
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        "alt": "(1/2) Ghosts in the Machines: (Un-)black-boxing AI Agencies\nAAA 2025 New Orleans, Organizers: Beth Semel and Josh Babcock\nAbstract: The collection of technologies routinely thrown into the “AI” kitchen sink has become as ubiquitous as the value-laden narratives about them. While contemporary computational systems present genuinely new techno-scientific, machinic affordances, many of their supposed novelties are anything but—nor are the narratives, values, or interpretations assigned to them by individuals, groups, and institutionalized personae across both expert-technical and nonexpert domains. This panel explores how regimes of value, narratives, and implicit-to-explicit understandings of personhood and/or agency, reflexively framed as belonging to prior social spacetimes, continue to haunt AI in the present, not despite, but because of diverse narratives asserting its radical novelty (Choi and Babcock 2024). We ask: what enfleshed, immaterialized, or absented agencies trail behind or snake through AI? How do epistemic and systemic violences—racism, sexism, anti-Blackness, white supremacy, ableism, and other intersectionally compounding oppressive structures (Wilf 2023; Seaver 2022; Semel 2021; Benjamin 2019; Noble 2018)—linger, become ghosted from, and interpenetrate with the functioning and uses of, as well as narratives about, AI? And how does the functioning of AI get rendered inscrutable in some contexts—made “invisible by its own success” (Latour and Woolgar 1979)—while in others, it is opened wide to explanations with varying degrees of “truth,” “facticity,” or legitimization? ",
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      {
        "alt": "(2/2) This panel contributes to ethnographic explorations of AI by synergistically bringing together grounded-theoretical approaches to technological (un-)black-boxing from scholars across fields and (sub)subfields of anthropology (with a particular focus on linguistic and semiotic anthropology; Wortham and Reyes 2015), along with diverse (inter)disciplinary approaches to techno-scientific and material agencies, from STS and HCI to interactional sociology, sociolinguistics, the history of technology, and beyond.\"",
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  "langs": [
    "en"
  ],
  "createdAt": "2025-04-07T18:28:03.674Z"
}