<div dir="ltr">Dear Colleagues,<br><div><br></div><div>Beth Semel and I are organizing a session at the upcoming AAA and are looking for additional participants who take a grounded, ethnographic approach to AI technologies. The abstract and submission instructions are below. Please let us know if you have any questions! Feel free to circulate this to anyone in your networks who you think might be interested, linguistic anthropologist or not.</div><div><br></div><div><span id="gmail-docs-internal-guid-cd38f5e2-7fff-f4e7-89cc-c5c04b2b17ab"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:3pt"><span style="font-size:26pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:700;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">Ghosts in the Machines:</span><span style="font-size:26pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:700;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline"><br></span><span style="font-size:26pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:700;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">(Un-)black-boxing AI Agencies</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:16pt"><span style="font-size:15pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(102,102,102);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">Organizers: Beth Semel and Josh Babcock</span></p><h1 dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:20pt;margin-bottom:6pt"><span style="font-size:19pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">Abstract</span></h1><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">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? 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.</span></p><br><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">To indicate your interest in participating, please submit a </span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:700;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">title of no more than 15 words</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline"> and a </span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:700;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">1,500-character abstract</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline"> to Beth Semel (</span><a href="mailto:bsemel@princeton.edu" style="text-decoration-line:none"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;text-decoration-line:underline;vertical-align:baseline">bsemel@princeton.edu</span></a><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">) and Josh Babcock (</span><a href="mailto:joshua_babcock@brown.edu" style="text-decoration-line:none"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;text-decoration-line:underline;vertical-align:baseline">joshua_babcock@brown.edu</span></a><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">) by </span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:700;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">Monday, April 14, 2025</span><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline">. Please note that the word and character limits are very strict and will result in an abstract of fewer than 250 words in most instances. We encourage you to use a </span><a href="https://wordcounter.io/" style="text-decoration-line:none"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;text-decoration-line:underline;vertical-align:baseline">character counter tool</span></a><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;vertical-align:baseline"> rather than relying on word count.</span></span></div></div>