Dear AoIR colleagues, Please see below for the CFP for *Globally Contested Imaginaries: Power and Tensions in the AI Era, *which may be of interest to many. The 2-day symposium is organized by the Center on Digital Culture and Society and the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication (UPENN). The submission deadline is December 3rd at 5:00 PM, and the event will take place on April 8-9, 2027, at the Annenberg School for Communication in Philadelphia. For questions, please email: *globallycontestedimaginaries@gmail.com <globallycontestedimaginaries@gmail.com>* We look forward to receiving your submissions! *Globally Contested Imaginaries: Power and Tensions in the AI Era * *April 8-9th 2027 at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania * *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. *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. -- *Adetobi Moses* Postdoctoral Fellow Center on Digital Culture and Society (CDCS) Annenberg School for Communication University of Pennsylvania