Call for Papers: AI Imaginaries in Asia Pacific The peer-reviewed academic journal Asiascape: Digital Asia<https://brill.com/view/journals/dias/dias-overview.xml> (DIAS) 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<mailto:f.a.schneider@hum.leidenuniv.nl?subject=DIAS%20special%20issue%20Dynamics%20of%20Digital%20Play>, 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<mailto: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> Author of China’s Digital Nationalism<https://www.amazon.com/Chinas-Digital-Nationalism-Studies-Politics-ebook/dp/B07GBBTRPS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1535551962&sr=8-1&keywords=china%27s+digital+nationalism> and Staging China<https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/22493> (open access) Chinese Department, Leiden University Institute for Area Studies Vrieshof 2, Room 104a P.O.Box 9515 2300 RA Leiden The Netherlands Web: www.PoliticsEastAsia.com<http://www.politicseastasia.com/> Twitter: @schneiderfa77<https://twitter.com/schneiderfa77>